To play the Knowledge Adventure Challenge, choose a level of difficulty from the buttons to the right. A question will be displayed in this window. Then begin searching for the screen that answers the question. Every time you use the globe, the timeline, or any other method of interaction with Knowledge Adventure, your score will increase.
It will keep increasing until you get to the screen that answers the question. Try to keep your score as low as possible.
If you need help, return to this screen and select the Hint button. This will cost you some points, though!
When you land on the right screen, Knowledge Adventure will let you know!ªUsing Knowledge Adventure
If you need help using Knowledge Adventure, read the following informaton. When necessary, click on the down button at the bottom of this text box to continue reading. KEYBOARD USERS: move the cursor to the down button using the arrow keys, then press Enter.
The Picture Window
By clicking on elements in the picture window, you can travel to a time and place somehow related to the object you click on. If nothing happens, try clicking elsewhere in the picture.
The Text Window
You are now using the text window. Move forward or backward in the window by using the up and down arrow buttons below.
By clicking on words in the text window, you can access the index to find other references to that word in other screens.
The Timeline
The timeline below the picture window changes to reflect the date of the current screen. To travel to a specific time in history, click anywhere on the timeline. To move forward or backward one screen at a time, click once on the right or left arrowheads at either end of the timeline. You can also pick up the slider by holding down the mouse button and dragging it to any other time in history.
The Globe Window
The globe window reflects the current location of the screen you are viewing. Click on any point in the globe window to travel to the nearest point geographically. Move closer to or further from the earth using the slider bar. You can click anywhere on the slider or on the arrowheads at either end of the slider. You can also pick up the slider by holding down the mouse button and dragging it. KEYBOARD USERS: Press PgDn to move closer to the earth and PgUp to move further from the earth.
When the earth is pictured by itself in the globe window, you can rotate it using the four arrow buttons below the window. Or, you can rotate it by holding down the mouse button at any point on the globe. When you let go of the mouse button, the screen will change to reflect your current location. KEYBOARD USERS: Hold down Shift and press the up, down, left, or right arrow keys.
The Category Buttons
The six buttons at the upper left of the screen are category buttons. From the left, they are: Art, Science, Literature, Architecture, Music and Nature.
You can move sequentially through the history of a category by clicking repeatedly on a category button with the left mouse button. Or, you can select categories (or unselect them) by clicking on them with the right mouse button. When a category is selected, a red box appears around the button and your travels using the globe and timeline will be limited to those categories.
The Operations Buttons
Retrace takes you to the previous screen.
Library takes you to the library. (More below.)
When active, Sound plays a sound associated with the picture.
Print prints the contents of the text window.
Stop ends your Knowledge Adventure session.
The Library
Using the library you can access the help system (as you are now) by clicking on the librarian or the Help sign, look up a topic alphabetically by clicking on a drawer in the card catalog, or play a game by clicking on the game board.
To find a topic, click on a drawer and move through the catalog to a topic that interests you. (You can move more quickly through the catalog list by clicking on the down or up arrow button using the right mouse button.) When you click on the topic you will travel to the screen in which it is discussed.
To play a game, click on the game board and select a level of play from the buttons that appear in the picture window. A clue will appear. Try to travel to the screen that answers it using as few clicks as possible. For a hint, return to the game screen and click on the Hint button. But remember, it will cost you points!X Exit - Salida - Sortie
If you really want to quit your current adventure press Quit, otherwise press Cancel.
Hank's Homers
1974 AD
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
A lot of people thought nobody could swat a baseball like the great Babe Ruth. But Hank Aaron kept at it, and on May 8, 1974, in front of 53,000 fans at Atlanta Stadium, Aaron hit his 715th home run, breaking Ruth's lifetime home run record.
Aaron had come far. He was born in 1934 in Mobile, Alabama, and began playing baseball at age 15 with the semi-pro Mobile Black Bears.
Later he joined the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro National League, then attracted the attention of the Boston Braves, which assigned him to its Class C team in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and later to its Class A team in Jacksonville, Florida. As a black, he was booed when he first appeared on the field, but as people watched they were impressed, and some even cheered.
In 1954, when left fielder Bobby Thomson broke his ankle, Aaron was selected to play with the Milwaukee Braves. Then, in 1972 -- with the Braves now in Atlanta -- Aaron was given $200,000 a year, making him the highest paid player in baseball history at that point.
The Atom at War
Aug. 6, 1945
HIROSHIMA, JAPAN
In the early evening of July 16, 1945 in the desolate, sandy Alamogordo region of southern New Mexico, a tower stood against the stormy sky. On its top sat an awful new weapon.
At 5:30 p.m. this first atomic bomb exploded. The flash from the blast lit up mountain peaks ten miles away. It was followed by a huge roar and hurricane winds. Then a boiling, multicolored cloud rose 40,000 feet into the air. When the heat and dust dispersed, the scientists could see that where there once was a tower, there was nothing but a huge crater.
The atomic bomb, under development since 1940 at a cost of $2 billion, had performed exactly as planned.
Less than a month later it was introduced to the world. On August 6, a B-29 Superfortress named the "Enola Gay" dropped one of the new bombs on Hiroshima, Japan.
The entire business district was vaporized except for the skeletons of three concrete buildings. The Japanese government estimates 240,000 died as a result of the blast.
Three days later, the bomber "Great Artiste" dropped a more advanced bomb on Nagasaki. About 35,000 were killed there, a lesser number because it was a smaller city.
Seeing the hopelessness of fighting against such weapons, Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, ending the Second World War.═The Rock In the Bay
1934-1963 AD
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
We may never know for sure if anybody has ever escaped from the 12-acre island penitentiary of Alcatraz. While most of those who attempted to do so were shot, or drowned in the San Francisco Bay, Frank Lee Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin successfully made their way to the edge of the water on June 11, 1962, then disappeared. Maybe they drowned and were swept out to sea -- or maybe not.
The barren island came to be called "The Rock," though the word "alcatraces" is Spanish for "cormorant." The birds on the island reminded early Spanish explorers of the cormorants in Spain.
The island was used as a fort and prison during the US Civil War, then as a military prison for those serving long sentences.
On July 1, 1934 it became a US penitentiary, and housed only the most violent criminals, such as the notorious Al Capone and "Machine Gun" Kelly.
Alcatraz Penitentiary was closed in 1963 when it became too expensive to maintain.åAlexander's Invasion
356 323 BC
MACEDONIA
Alexander the Great is one of the very few generals in history who never lost. His unbroken success is all the more amazing because the circumstances he faced varied widely and he often exposed himself recklessly in battle.
Alexander won his first victory when he was just 16 against hill tribes on the borders of Macedonia. When he ascended the throne of Macedonia, located just north of Greece, the hill tribes and the Greek city of Thebes rebelled against his rule. He defeated them both and destroyed Thebes.
Then, in 334 BC, he turned against the Persian Empire, crossing the Hellespont waterway with 30,000 to 40,000 men into what is now Turkey. He encountered the Persians at the Granicus River.
Though the Persians and their Greek mercenaries were in a strong position, Alexander waded across the river with his men, climbed the slippery bank on the far side, defeated the best of the Persian cavalry and destroyed the Greek mercenaries.
In two more battles, Issus and Arbela, Alexander defeated the much larger armies of Persian King Darius. He also destroyed the fortified island city of Tyre on the Mediterranean Sea, founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt, conquered hill tribes the Persians had never been able to subdue, and defeated a well-trained Indian army equipped with elephants.
After defeating Porus, an Indian ruler, he wanted to continue his conquests into India, but his weary, homesick army refused. Reluctantly, Alexander turned around and led his army back to Babylon, where, just 33 years old, he died of a sickness (or perhaps by poison) after a wild party.
Numerous stories are told of Alexander, many of them no doubt fictional. But one of them is interesting for the lesson it teaches:
A pirate was captured and brought before Alexander, who asked him what he meant by infesting the sea. The bold pirate responded, "And what do you mean by warring against the whole world?"╩Alhambra: Sun and Shade
1248 AD
GRANADA, SPAIN
In the hilltop palace-fortress of Alhambra in southern Spain, Moorish architects used one of the area's most abundant resources to create a subtle and beautiful work of architecture.
The Alhambra, in the city of Granada, features the sun. The palace's numerous and intimate courtyards are lit and warmed by the sun and shaded by plants and flowing water. Offsetting the bright courtyards are cool, dark hallways decorated with intricate plasterwork.
In Arabic, "Alhambra" means red, which suggests the palace is named after the color of its exterior brickwork, though others suggest the name comes from the color of the torches that lit the palace during the night as it was being built.
The Alhambra, one of the most famous examples of Muslim architecture, was built between 1248 and 1354 during the reign of Muhammed Ibn Al Ahmar and his successors.
With its grottoes and gardens, the building seems to reflect the love of pleasure that marked the mellower Moorish rulers that succeeded their warlike ancestors who invaded the land.
These Muslim rulers had a love for poetry, science and medicine, and were generally tolerant of non-Muslims, such as the Christians and Jews, though at times they were capable of great cruelty.
When the Moors were finally expelled from Spain, the Alhambra fared badly for many years. Vandalism, neglect and earthquakes contributed to its decline. It was not until the 1800s that the palace began to be restored.
One of the most famous of the Alhambra's courtyards is the Court of the Lions, which you can see here. It is 116 feet long by 66 feet across. The courtyard is paved with colored tiles and at the center is an alabaster basin supported by 12 lions made of white marble.éIt Wasn't Always the Amazon
1500 AD
BRAZIL
If you've never heard of the great Santa Maria de la Mar Dulce River, don't blame Vicente Yañez Pinzón, he did his best.
Pinzón, a Spanish explorer, sailed up the South American river in 1500 and took the honor of naming it. But maybe the name Pinzón chose was just too long. For whatever reason, it didn't stick.
The name that did stick was given by Francisco de Orellana, another Spaniard, who sailed down the river in 1541 from its source in the Andes. On the way he reportedly encountered a tribe of fighting women. Reminded of the Greek legend of the fighting all-woman tribe called the Amazons, he called the river the "Amazonas."
While the Nile is the longest river in the world, the Amazon River is the second in length, but carries more water than the Nile, Mississippi and Yangtze rivers combined. The river is fed by about 200 tributaries and drains 2.7 million square miles of South America.
Currently, the Amazon basin is a source of deep concern to environmentalists, who fear that widespread forest clearing will lead to the extinction of many types of plants and animals, as well as destroy the lives of tribes in the area.
┤ Entertainment Tonight-Or Else
1704 AD
SAMARKAND, CENTRAL ASIA
Many years ago, in the far-away land of Samarkand, there lived a king who happened to catch his wife in the arms of a slave. In a fury he cut both their heads off, then ordered that each night a new bride be brought for him. And so that he would never again be betrayed, each morning he had her killed.
Soon the king's wazir couldn't find any more young women. They had all fled or lost their heads, so the wazir's own daughter, Scheherazade, volunteered to marry the king.
That night Scheherazade told the king a wonderful story, but instead of finishing it, she cleverly left the king wondering what would happen next.
So the king decided not to kill his wife that morning. Then, each night, for a thousand and one nights, Scheherazade told stories. She told of Sindbad the Sailor, of Aladdin's Lamp, of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, and many other wonderful tales. And each morning the king delayed killing her.
At the end of the 1001 nights, the grateful king decided never to kill Scheherazade. And thus did Scheherazade save the women of the kingdom.
This is the story of the "Thousand and One Nights" (also called "Arabian Nights") and it may be just as fictional as the other fantastic stories of caves filled with thieves' gold, flying wooden horses, genies in bottles and other marvels.
The stories first began appearing in Europe in 1704 through a translation from Arabic by the French scholar Antoine Galland. Galland was a natural storyteller himself, and modified the tales somewhat to make them more appealing to European readers. The first story to appear was Sindbad the Sailor, which was a tremendous success. It was only later that Gallard discovered that Sindbad was just one of a large collection of stories, many of which he later translated.
Interestingly, while "Arabian Nights" was a great success in Europe, the stories were considered uncultivated, and even a bit depraved, by orthodox Islamic society, where Galland obtained them. Therefore, there was no "official" Arabic edition of "Arabian Nights." The stories varied from storyteller to storyteller and from collection to collection.
In his encyclopedia "The Golden Meadows," Arabian historian Mas`udi says the stories -- which he thought worthless -- originally came from the Persians, Indians and Greeks.
Whatever their origin, the "Arabian Nights" have delighted children and adults for hundreds of years, and are likely to continue doing so for many years to come.ÄAristotle's Logic
335 BC
ATHENS, GREECE
Human beings are mortal. Aristotle was a human being. Therefore Aristotle was mortal.
The rules for this kind of reasoning were first described by the Greek philosopher Aristotle more than two thousand years ago, and they still remain an invaluable basis for logical thinking.
Aristotle was not only a logician, but also a philosopher, psychologist, moralist, political thinker and biologist.
He was the son of a doctor and for 20 years a disciple of Plato. He spent seven years in Macedonia teaching prince Alexander (soon to be Alexander the Great) then returned to Athens when Alexander took the throne.
In Athens he set up a school nicknamed the Peripatetic ("walking about") School because students walked around the gardens while listening to the teacher. This nickname suited his philosophy, which emphasized change. Nature, Aristotle said, aims at a particular end. Oak seeds, for example, have an internal principle that makes them try to grow into oak trees.
His ethical teachings are contained in "Nicomachean Ethics" (335 to 322 BC), one of the world's great books. It teaches people to aim at the "mean." The mean is a point between two extremes. For example, courage is midway between cowardice and foolhardiness.
Aristotle also wrote about plants and animals and astronomy. Many of his ideas in these areas have been discarded today. For example, his notion that the earth is the center of the universe was proven wrong by Copernicus and Galileo.
Aristotle's works came to Europe by a roundabout way. Though lost in the West, his works had been preserved in Syria. When the Muslim Arabs conquered Syria, they found Aristotle's works and took them to Spain after conquering it.
From there Aristotle became known throughout Europe. Medieval scholars -- particularly the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas -- used Aristotle's ideas in defense of their religions.δ Augustine Reads-And Writes
397-401 AD
NORTH AFRICA
After years of searching for God, Augustine lay crying under a fig tree in his yard. Suddenly he heard a child-like voice repeating, "Take it and read." He thought children were playing next door, but he couldn't remember any such phrase in a child's game.
Finally he decided God was speaking to him, so he picked up a Bible, opened it at random and read Romans 13:13-14. It seemed to speak so directly to him that "my heart was filled with the light of confidence and all the shadows of my doubt were swept away."
This climactic description of Augustine's conversion is in the story of his life, "The Confessions of St. Augustine" (397-401 AD).
From this and other sources we know Augustine was born in 354 AD in Tagaste, a small town in what is now Tunisia, apparently of Berber parents. He was educated in classical literature and public speaking and joined a sect called the Manicheans. But he left it, disappointed, and went to Milan, Italy, where he became a teacher.
After his conversion, Augustine became a leader in the church and by 396 AD was bishop of Hippo (a city in North Africa). During his lifetime wrote 118 works, including "Confessions" and "City of God" (413-426 AD), a defense against the accusation that Christians were causing the collapse of the Roman Empire by teaching people to "turn the other cheek."
Though Augustine is one of the most influential Christian theologians, respected in both Roman Catholic and Protestant circles, he was not always very systematic in his writings. The philosophy in "Confessions," for example, is mixed in with the story of his life and "City of God" often goes off on long tangents. Nevertheless, Augustine's thoughts are interesting and poetically expressed. Here is a sampling:
On evil: "As the beauty of a picture is not dimmed by the dark colors, in their proper place, so the beauty of the universe of creatures is not marred by sins, even though sin itself is an ugly blotch."
On beauty: "Shave off one eyebrow and the loss to the mere mass of the body is insignificant. But what a blow to beauty! For beauty is not a matter of bulk but of symmetry and proportion of the members."
On self-existence: "I know that I am (and) if (the skeptics) say; `What if you are mistaken?' -- well, if I am mistaken, I am. For, if one does not exist, he can by no means be mistaken." (This may be the source of Descartes' similar proof of self-existence.)
On people: "Men are a race very inquisitive about other people's lives, very lazy in improving their own."τShady Ayers Rock
650 million BC
AUSTRALIA
At sunset it is a particularly dramatic sight. Glowing brick-red in the twilight, this huge sandstone monolith stands alone, two-and-a-quarter miles long and towering 1,143 feet above the sandy plains of Australia like a gigantic beached whale.
Ayers Rock, or Uluru (an aboriginal word meaning "Shady Place"), is the symbol of Australia's outback. It is located about 200 miles southwest of the little town of Alice Springs, in the center of the continent.
The rock, which scientists believe was thrust out of the earth about 650 million years ago, attracts as many as 250,000 visitors a year, many of them in the heat of summer when temperatures climb over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The aborigines call these tourists "minga rama," meaning crazy ants.
Ayers Rock is a sacred spot for many aboriginal peoples, who believe mysterious supernatural beings created it and inhabit its nooks and crevices. Caves along the base of the rock have been used for male and female initiation rites.
æBabe Ruth: An Unlikely Slugger
1895-1948 AD
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
With his big stomach and spindly legs, Babe Ruth didn't much look like a great baseball player -- but, man, could he hit a ball!
As a boy, Ruth roamed the streets of Baltimore, chewed tobacco by age seven and drank whiskey by age 10. Worried about him, his parents sent Ruth to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, where Brother Matthias befriended him, teaching him not only academics and good behavior, but also baseball.
Ruth was later selected for the Baltimore Orioles, but soon caught the attention of the Boston Red Sox, who bought his contract. Later the Sox sold him to the New York Yankees, where in 1920 he hit an unheard of 54 home runs.
Revelations that Chicago White Sox players had taken money from gamblers had damaged baseball's reputation, but during this dark hour Ruth's hitting helped keep up public interest in the game.
The Yanks let 40-year-old Ruth go at the end of the 1934 season, and he signed with the Boston Braves. In May, 1935, shortly after hitting home runs 712, 713 and 714, he announced his retirement. Ruth's home run record stood until 1974, when Hank Aaron hit his 715th ball over the fence in Atlanta.
Bach: The Musical Craftsman
1685-1750 AD
ARNSTADT, GERMANY
Lutheran church-goers in Arnstadt, Germany, were not pleased when their organist took a leave of absence in 1704.
Young Johann Sebastian Bach stayed away four times longer than expected, failed to rehearse the church choir, and on his return, the congregation noticed he was adding strange variations to familiar hymns.
Bach, who had been studying with master organist Dietrich Buxtehude, eventually resigned, but it was hardly the end of his career.
Born into the fifth of seven generations of musical Bachs, Johann became one of the world's greatest musical geniuses, defining the German baroque musical period. His output was so huge that it would take a lifetime merely to copy everything he wrote.
His masterpieces, among them the "B minor Mass" and the "St. Matthew Passion," are performed regularly more than 200 years after his death. "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," is still one of the most familiar of all choral works.
Bach was the sixth child of J. Ambrosius Bach, born in 1685 at Eisenach, Germany, in the shadow of the castle where Martin Luther had been held prisoner. He took violin and viola lessons from his father at an early age and when his parents died he went to live with his brother, who introduced him to the organ.
In 1707 Bach married his cousin, Maria Bach. They had seven children of whom Wilhelm and Carl also became famous musicians.
During his career, Bach served as court organist at Weimar, Germany, chamber musician and concertmaster to the Grand Duke Wilhelm Ernst, chapel master to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen and cantor of St. Thomas' Church. He thought of himself as an artisan, making music much as a tailor makes clothing or a cobbler turns out shoes.
Music and religion were synonymous to Bach. "Music," he said, "should have no other aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul."
Bach also had a sense of humor, which occasionally comes through some of his musical compositions, including the "Coffee Cantata," which satirized the then-new European fashion for coffee drinking.
Bach died in 1750 with his greatest works unpublished. During his lifetime he was known as an organ virtuoso but was more celebrated as the father of illustrious musicians than as a master in his own right.
His compositions might have been undervalued were it not for a handful of biographers and admirers who kept his work before the eyes of the musical world. Composer Felix Mendelssohn, who studied Bach's scores, produced the "St. Matthew Passion" in Berlin in 1829, reigniting interest in his work.jBalloons: Lighter Than Air
1783 AD
ANNONAY, FRANCE
For thousands of years, people longed to fly. In ancient Greek, for example, there was the legend of Icarus and his father, who escaped from an island prison on wings made of wax and feathers.
But it was a long time after the ancient Greeks before the dream was fulfilled. The Montgolfier brothers finally made it happen when they invented the hot-air balloon.
One story has it that the inspiration for the balloon came when Jacques Montgolfier's wife saw one of her petticoats billowing as it hung next to the fire to dry.
Believing the smoke was lifting the petticoat, Jacques and his brother Joseph designed a large bag that they inflated with the air from a fire beneath. As they expected, the bag rose into the air, though it was the hot air, not the smoke, that caused it to rise.
Following that success, they designed a large balloon and held a public demonstration on June 5, 1783 at Annonay, France. The balloon jumped about 200 yards into the air.
They repeated the performance in Paris, and again for King Louis XVII at Versailles.
Later, chemist Jean François Pilâtre de Rozier volunteered to go up in one of the Montgolfiers' balloons. On Oct. 15, 1783 he took a tethered flight, then on Nov. 21, 1783 made a free flight.
It was the start of a great adventure that would eventually take men to the moon. And perhaps some day it will take us beyond.A Singular Big Bang
15 billion BC
Most scientists believe the universe began from a "singularity," an impossible-to-imagine point so small that it had no size at all. Then that point, which they think contained everything that there is in the universe -- matter, energy, and even time and space -- exploded with an enormous rush.
Scientists don't know what caused this point to explode in a "Big Bang" about 15 billion years ago, and they don't know what -- if anything -- existed before the bang occurred, or even if there was a "before" before it happened.
So-called "black holes" are believed to be similar to this singularity except that they contain far less of the universe. Black holes are believed to be collapsed stars of such density and gravitational strength that once caught, nothing -- not even light -- can escape their pull.
Scientists believe that as the Big Bang, which started the universe, exploded outward in a blaze of energy, the universe was blown up like a child blows up a balloon.
But as it expanded -- and continues to expand -- the universe rapidly cooled and some of the energy condensed into tiny particles. Then an unexplained phenomenon called electromagnetic force began pulling these tiny particles together into hydrogen atoms.
Gravity, another mysterious force, caused more and more atoms to gather together. The larger these clouds of atoms, the stronger the gravitational force became, until the gravity squeezed the atoms so hard that it sparked a nuclear reaction and the clouds became huge balls of fire -- the first stars.
These stars burned at tremendously high temperatures as their hydrogen atoms joined to form helium atoms in a process called fusion. Small stars can burn like this for billions of years, until they run out of hydrogen. Then they cool down and collapse, becoming white dwarfs. But the largest stars burn up much more quickly, then collapse inward, fusing their atoms together into heavier elements. Finally they explode into supernovas, scattering new atoms of copper, gold, uranium and many other elements into the surrounding galaxy.ëThe Great American Game
1839 AD
COOPERSTOWN, NEW YORK
It might seem dull to watch a game in which players never hit the ball, but any baseball fan will tell you that a pitcher who prevents any of the other team's players from getting a hit makes for an exciting day at the ballpark.
Though it isn't certain, this favorite American game may have been invented in 1839 by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York, though there were similar games with bases played earlier, such as prison ball in France and rounders in England.
While the exact origin of baseball is unknown, it was Alexander J. Cartwright who set down many of the rules for the game in 1845, including the distance between bases, foul lines, team sizes, etc.
In addition, Cartwright started the New York Knickerbockers, the first baseball team.
Baseball became popular among Civil War soldiers, and when the war was over, they spread the game throughout the country.HCrazy Ivan's Cathedral
1555 AD
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
To celebrate his victory over the Tartars in 1555, Ivan the Terrible of Russia ordered the construction of a cathedral in Moscow. When it was finished in about 1560, he heartily congratulated the two architects who designed the building -- then had their eyes gouged out. He wanted to make sure they would never again design anything so beautiful.
Though it is uncertain if this story is true, it would be just the sort of thing Ivan might have done during one of his periods of insanity. Though a capable and fair ruler when he was sane, his periods of cruel insanity became increasingly common as his reign progressed.
Ivan's cathedral, called the Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed, is an odd building located in Red Square in Moscow. It is made up of nine onion-domed and interconnected chapels, the larger dome representing Jesus and the nine smaller domes representing nine of Ivan's victories. The whole complex is painted a fruit-salad display of bright colors.
Since Russian Christianity comes from the Eastern Orthodoxy of Byzantium (Constantinople), Russia's church architecture also has its origins there.
Like Byzantine churches, Russian churches feature domes, but while the Byzantine churches had only a few domes (often five, with one large one symbolizing Jesus Christ and four smaller domes representing the writers of the four biographies of Jesus in the New Testament), some early Russian churches had as many as 13 domes (the main dome representing Jesus and the other 12 representing his 12 apostles).
Also, while the Byzantine churches featured round-topped domes, the Russians built churches with pointed domes on tall towers, along with sharply-sloped roofs and narrow windows, perhaps to shed snow and minimize heat loss during the cold winters.
The asymetric design of St. Basil's Cathedral, along with its wide variety of patterns and colors (red, orange yellow, green, blue, violet, gold and silver) once led people to consider it a barbaric and ridiculous piece of architecture. But today, it is generally considered a stunning example of Russian church architecture.∞Old Hat to a Bat
CARLSBAD, NEW MEXICO
Radar was an amazing technological breakthrough when it was developed during World War II, but for bats, it was old stuff.
The only basic difference between man's radar and bats' "echolocation" is that radar locates objects by sending out a radio signal and listening for an echo, while bats send out sound waves.
Bats are the only mammals to fly and are enormously widespread and varied. There are 900-plus species of bats -- from the five-foot-wingspan flying fox, to the little bumble bee size "Kitti's hog-nosed bat" of Thailand.
Most bats eat flying insects, some eat fruit, a few fish, and others eat other bats, frogs and rodents. And despite its fearsome name, the vampire bat bites livestock, almost never people.#Beethoven's Finale
1824 AD
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
It was 1824 in Vienna, Austria, and Ludwig van Beethoven stood facing the orchestra. He had just finished conducting the opening of his Ninth Symphony, but he couldn't hear a sound from the audience. Finally, his assistant tugged at his suit and Beethoven turned to find the audience on its feet cheering. His symphony was a tremendous success! The only one who couldn't fully enjoy it was the composer himself; he had been completely deaf for 20 years.
Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, and learned music from his father, a court musician. On a visit to Vienna in 1787, Mozart heard him play the piano and predicted: "He will give the world something worth listening to."
And indeed he did, though Beethoven didn't always realize how brightly his own star would shine. For example, on an early morning walk through Vienna one summer in 1799, Beethoven overheard an outdoor orchestra playing one of his favorite pieces, Mozart's Piano Concerto in C Minor.
"I shall never be able to do anything like that," he sighed, then went home to finish his own magnificent concerto in C Minor, possibly the finest of his five piano concertos.
Beethoven also wrote what is probably the most famous symphony of all time, his Fifth Symphony, as well as his famous Moonlight Sonata, and many other pieces.l"Mr. Watson, Come Here"
1875 AD
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, always had an interest in sound. His father taught deaf mutes to speak and Alexander himself taught music and speech.
After moving with his family to North America from Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, Bell opened a school in Boston for teachers of the deaf.
Because of his interest in sound, Bell performed experiments in electrically transmitting sound over distances, and at age 27 he had worked out the basic principles and obtained a patent. Then, in the summer of 1875, Bell communicated to his assistant Thomas Watson the first intelligible message over an electrical wire: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!"
The story is told that later in his life, Bell continued performing scientific experiments, but much to his annoyance he was often disturbed -- by his own invention, the telephone.µThe Island Of Berlin
1945-1989 AD
BERLIN, GERMANY
An observer looking at a map of Europe during the past decades might be struck by an oddity; deep within Communist East Germany was an island of freedom, the city of Berlin.
This curiosity occurred at the end of World War II, when the four victors (the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union) divided both Germany and Berlin into sections.
But West Berlin (the area controlled by the Americans, British and French) was deep in that part of Germany controlled by the Soviet Union, and this annoyed the Soviets considerably.
In 1948, they blocked the rail, water and highway routes into Berlin and set up their own mayor for the east part of the city. In 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded Western troops withdraw from Berlin. The West rejected the demand and refugees poured into the west zone. On Aug. 13, 1961, the East German police began building a wall between the two Berlins, thus sealing the border.
This wall cut the city in two until November 1989. Then, faced with huge demonstrations, the East German government opened its border. Revelers stood on top of the wall and celebrated their freedom. Soon the East German government collapsed and in 1990 Germany -- and Berlin -- were reunified.7Did Betsy Make the Flag?
1777 AD
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Was the first American flag bearing stars and stripes designed and sewn by Betsy Griscom Ross of Philadelphia?
The legend says George Washington and two others called at the little upholstery shop and asked Mrs. Ross to make a flag. Well, she had never made a flag, she replied, but would give it a try. Betsy examined a rough drawing the men produced and suggested five-pointed stars instead of the six-pointed stars on the drawing. They agreed, and Betsy made the flag.
Aside from the testimony of Ross's descendents, there is no evidence to support this popular story, but we do know that the United States Government gave Ross the contract to make its flags after the first national emblem was adopted on June 14, 1777. She and her family continued in the flag-making business until 1857.▒Little Old Trees
1500 AD
TOKYO, JAPAN
Japan has always been crowded and there has never been much space for landscaping, but the Japanese love nature.
The answer to this dilemma was to miniaturize. Hundreds of years before Japan became noted for small cars and little radios and other compact devices, the Japanese were creating miniature gardens, and even miniature trees.
These trees -- some of them as old as 500 years -- are called "bonsai," meaning "plant in a tray." They look just like big trees, but are often less than a foot tall and are usually planted in a porcelain pot or tray. Gardeners carefully bend and trim their branches into beautiful shapes.
Apparently the first of these trees were obtained from the wild. Wealthy Japanese would pay a high price for stunted trees which grew where there was little soil, or poor soil, such as in a crack of a large rock. Later, when the natural trees disappeared, the Japanese grew their own miniature trees.
Brahms: The Street Musician
1868 AD
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
No one in the poverty-stricken districts of Hamburg would have believed that little "Hannes" would grow up to be a famous composer.
The youngster, whose father was an itinerant musician and whose mother took in boarders to make ends meet, earned his keep by playing German folksongs on the piano in waterfront dives and dance halls.
But despite a childhood in sordid surroundings, Johannes Brahms became one of Europe's most celebrated musicians and one of the best-known composers of the Romantic movement.
Brahms wrote for piano, chamber orchestra and chorale, contributing to every branch of music except opera. His four symphonies place him beside Ludwig van Beethoven in importance, and his two piano concertos and one violin concerto are among the greatest of their kind.
Though he had written 67 pieces of music by the time he was 43, Brahms was so in awe of Beethoven's great Ninth Symphony that he had to muster up the courage to pen his first symphony, fearing it would never live up to the work of his idol. By the time he wrote his fourth and last symphony -- which has been called equal to what Beethoven's 10th Symphony might have been had he survived another 20 or 30 years -- Brahms was dying of liver cancer and lived only long enough to hear it performed in Vienna on March 7, 1897. His audience, seeing the beloved composer had only a few weeks to live, gave him a standing ovation between each movement. He died three weeks later.
Although Brahms always felt inferior to Beethoven, he actually excelled Beethoven in writing music for voices. His lifelong love of German folksongs, acquired during his early exposure to them in Hamburg's beer gardens, is evident in his smaller choral works.
He wrote songs throughout his life, beginning with "Liebestreu," True Love, which he wrote at age 21. He also wrote 14 folksongs for children and six books of German folksongs.
Brahms first learned music from his father, who soon realized the talented boy needed a professional instructor. Brahms' first piano teacher, Otto Cossel, found Hannes gifted and lovable, but lamented that his bright young pupil wasted so much time with his "everlasting composing."
In 1857, Brahms took a post at the Court of Lippe-Detmold, where he gave piano lessons to the royal children, directed the court choir and performed at concerts. He also composed the "Concerto No. 1 in D Minor for Piano, Op. 15" there and played it for the first time at Hanover in 1859. "It was a brilliant and decided failure," Brahms commented after the debut.
Though born in Germany, Brahms spent most of his adult life in Vienna, Austria. He remained a bachelor all his life and though he had a large circle of friends, he had a reputation for being disagreeable, gruff and ill-tempered at times.
One of his most famous works, "A German Requiem, Op. 45" (1868), was written in memory of his friend and fellow musician Robert Alexander Schumann. It was based on Biblical excerpts through which Brahms presented the ideas of sorrow consoled, doubt overcome and death vanquished.+Brancusi's Streamlined Bird
1919 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
It doesn't look like a bird. There is no head, no feathers, no wings, no tail and no feet. Nevertheless, Constantin Brancusi's streamlined sculpture, "Bird in Space" (1919) does give a feeling of flight.
Brancusi, a Romanian, was one of the first sculptors to make really non-realistic works. During his early life in Paris he was no doubt influenced by Rodin, who himself experimented with semi-realistic sculpture, but he went a step further than Rodin. He became less and less concerned with representing physical world in his art.
His works show a passion for simplicity. He attempted to reduce his subjects to their most elementary forms and then used a variety of finishes for different effects. Many of his works, like the well-known "Bird in Space," are highly polished, while others are very roughly hewn.
Just as his work became increasingly disconnected from the world around him, so did Brancusi himself. In 1925 he began to live like a hermit, refusing to show his works at Paris displays and ignoring the honors that were awarded him.The Bernstein Surprise
1943 AD
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The audience groaned.
The disappointed people had come that day in 1943 to hear guest conductor Bruno Walter lead the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a nationally broadcast performance -- but Walter was sick. Furthermore, Artur Rodzinski, the regular conductor, was on vacation. The only available conductor was Rodzinski's assistant, Leonard Bernstein.
Bernstein stood up, a bit nervous at first, but as the music began to flow, he forgot the audience and delivered a spectacular performance. When he finished, the surprised and delighted audience gave him a standing ovation. Bernstein became famous overnight!
Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, grew up in Boston, then graduated from Harvard in 1939. In 1958, he became Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, the first American-born and trained musician to hold that important position.
During his lifetime he conducted more than 400 recorded performances and won nine Emmy Awards and 13 Grammy Awards. He was also acclaimed for his Young People's Concerts, which introduced many children to the wonders and beauty of music. His most famous composition is the American musical classic, West Side Story, which he wrote in 1957.
Shortly after the Berlin Wall in Germany was torn down in 1989, Bernstein was invited to perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Christmas time on both sides of the Wall. He used choral singers and orchestral musicians from all the countries allied against Germany in the Second World War. It may have been the mightiest performance ever of Beethoven's famous symphony.
For Bernstein, music was more than a job, or even a love, it was his life. Bernstein once said, "I can't live one day without hearing music, without playing it, studying it, or thinking about it!"
╔ The Brontes' Books
1847 AD
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND
Have you ever heard of the Great Glass Town Confederacy (also known as Verdopolis), the Kingdom of Angria, or the Kingdom of Gondol? You would need a very special map to find them!
These are dream-worlds created by Charlotte Brontë, her brother Branwell, and sisters Emily and Anne. All of the politics, war, and romance that occurred there was written down by the Brontë children, mostly in tiny hand-printing on folded sheets of paper about 2 inches by 1-1/2 inches.
The Brontë children, aged six to 10 when they began to invent these imaginary worlds, had quite a few hard times in their young lives. Their mother had died of cancer and two older sisters had died of illnesses that were probably due to the poor treatment they received at a boarding school. Their father, a minister, brought Charlotte and Emily home from the Clergy Daughters' School after the two older girls fell ill. At their home in Yorkshire, England, the children roamed the moors, kept pets, nursed ailing animals, and had only each other for playmates.
When they wrote about real life as adults, they were already experienced at developing characters and handling plots. After working as a governesses, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne set about writing and submitting their work to publishers under the names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. They chose these pen names partly to conceal that they were women, because critics in those days (the mid-1800s) frowned upon women writers. At first, even their publishers did not know whether they were male or female, or even if they were three people or just one.
Charlotte, the eldest, based her most famous novel, "Jane Eyre" (1847) on the difficult experiences at the boarding school, and on her experiences as a governess. Jane, the heroine of the novel, is a poor, proud, plain governess who falls in love with her sophisticated, rich and powerful employer -- then discovers his dark secret. Girls in every age have loved this book and felt a warm sympathy with Jane.
Emily, reserved and stubborn, dreamed and wrote about life on the moors in her novel, "Wuthering Heights" (1847). This wildly passionate book is the story of the fierce love of Heathcliff for Catherine, the daughter of the family who took him in as an abandoned gypsy child. When Cathy marries another man, Heathcliff vows revenge. "Wuthering Heights" was not as well received as "Jane Eyre," but today is considered a dramatic triumph with some of the most vivid landscape descriptions ever written.
Anne, gentle and pious, also drew from her life experiences in writing "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1848), which is about the gradual decay of an alcoholic and how it affects those around him. Anne's experience with drunkenness came from her brother Branwell.
Branwell, the most talkative and showy of the Brontë children, couldn't make a success of anything. He failed as a portrait painter, tutor, and railway clerk. Then he returned home, where he drank too much and spent too much and died.ñBrachiosaurus: Giant of Giants
150 million BC
NORTH AMERICA
One of the largest of the dinosaur family was the huge brachiosaurus, which roamed what is now North America and East Africa.
These huge reptiles grew to as much as 40 feet tall and 100 feet long. They weighed about 66 tons and had a long, snake-like neck which let them eat from the tops of trees, and a long tail they could use as a weapon against meat-eating enemies.
Because of its enormous size, a full-grown healthy brachiosaurus was more than a match for any meat-eating dinosaur.
Interestingly, brachiosaurus had its nostrils in a crest on the top of its head. Some scientists have speculated that this enabled it to breath while underwater, but this seems unlikely since with its neck fully extended, the water pressure against its lungs would have been too strong for it to breathe. More likely, this crest contained a hollow cavity that allowed the dinosaur to communicate with other brachiosauruses by making whistling or tooting noises.
Though brachiosaurus was huge, a skeleton recently uncovered in New Mexico is even larger. This "seismosaurus," or "earthquake reptile," is estimated to have been longer than 110 feet and weigh more than 80,000 pounds.QBuddha Under a Bo Tree
560 BC to 483 BC
NORTHERN INDIA
Prince Siddhartha Gautama had been raised in luxury, shielded from pain and suffering. Then, according to one legend, he encountered a sick man, an old man and a corpse. Shocked, he fled the palace and began practicing a very strict form of Hinduism, but he failed to find peace.
Then one day, as he sat meditating under a bo tree in Northern India, he was struck by the thought that people have pain because they desire. Therefore, he reasoned, freedom from pain comes by not desiring. Achieving "Nirvana" (nothingness), he thought, would also free a person from a continual cycle of reincarnations.
To reach Nirvana, Gautama -- better known as Buddha (enlightened one) -- taught an eightfold path of: understanding the problem; detaching oneself from material possessions, desires, family and friends; refraining from lies and slander; not killing, stealing, lying, being unchaste or drinking alcohol; living a monastic life if possible; striving to succeed on this path; pondering one's behavior; and meditation on the truth.
After his death, a more popular branch of Buddhism arose called Mahayana. Mahayana made Buddha the greatest of gods, the ultimate reality, while continuing to maintain that ultimate reality is nothingness.
Today, with approximately 311 million Buddhists worldwide, Buddhism is the fourth largest world religion.[Bullfighting: Riches and Horns
1700 AD
MADRID, SPAIN
"Bullfighting," said one matador, "is a pile of riches guarded by a pair of very sharp horns."
Wealth is one of the main reasons nimble-footed matadors enter a ring to fight specially-trained bulls weighing up to 1000 pounds.
Top matadors, who are judged by their skill and the danger to which they expose themselves, can earn tens of thousands of dollars in an afternoon.
The sport is popular in Spain, where it was invented, and in Portugal and Latin America. But because it involves baiting and injuring the bull before it is killed, many people object that it is cruel, so it is illegal in the United States.
Modern bullfighting dates from the 1700s, when the first permanent ring was built in Spain and the major fighting breeds were developed. Now there are more than 400 bullrings in Spain.
The fight begins as the bull enters the ring. The matador's assistants wave a cape and observe how he reacts. Then two picadors enter on horses and stab the bull in the back of the neck with lances. Then banderillos enter and each put three barbed darts in the back of the bull's neck. These stabs weaken the bull's neck muscles and force its head down so it can be killed in the proper fashion.
Finally, the matador, carrying a red cape and sword, enters the ring dressed in his twinkling "suit of lights."
After making several dangerous passes with the bull, he finally kills the bull by a single thrust of his sword through the shoulder blades. If he does it right the bull dies instantly.
If the matador does a good job, the crowd yells "Olé" and the judges award him one of the bull's ears. If he does an excellent job he is given two ears, and on very rare occasions, he is awarded two ears and a tail.
As may be imagined, bullfighting is dangerous not only for the bull. Of 125 major matadors since the 1700s, more than 40 have been killed in the ring.
<The Death of Caesar
44 BC
ROME, ITALY
On the Ides of March (March 15) of 44 BC Julius Caesar lay dying in the Roman Senate from stab wounds inflicted by Gaius Cassius and Marcus Brutus, a man he thought was his friend.
"Et tu, Brute!" (You too, Brutus!) he exclaimed.
That cry, immortalized in Shakespeare's play, "Julius Caesar," marked both the death of Caesar and the death of the Roman Republic.
Caesar was an aspiring politician who rose to join two others, Pompey and Crassus, in controlling the Roman Empire. He added to his power by his conquests of Spain, Gaul (France) and Britain.
When Crassus died, Pompey persuaded the Senate to order Caesar's army to lay down its arms. Instead, Caesar attacked and defeated Pompey, then returned to rule Rome.
Then, because they feared the loss of the republic, or because they had their own ambitions, Cassius and Brutus assassinated him.
But Caesar's nephew, Octavianus (later Augustus Caesar), raised an army and defeated Brutus and Cassius. Though he returned some power to the Senate, his power and that of his successors grew until it was absolute.YKoran Calligraphy Wows World
c820 AD
MECCA, ARABIA
Though Muslims are prohibited from showing animal or human forms in their artwork, their faith has no prohibition against beautiful writing.
So, with other artistic avenues closed to faithful Muslims, many Muslim artists have focused their energies on beautiful calligraphy, particularly to highlight passages from the Islamic holy book, the Koran.
The Koran is accepted as the word of God by Muslims. The content of the Koran was given by Islam's founder, Muhammed, but it was first fully written down by Caliph Uthman in about 681 AD, approximately 48 years after Muhammed's death.6Where the Laws are Made
1793 AD
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The domed structure you see before you is the seat of the United States government. The House of Representatives and the Senate meet in opposite wings of this structure.
Dr. William Thornton, an amateur architect, originally designed the Capitol building in 1793. His plan won him $500 and a lot in Washington D.C.
President George Washington laid the cornerstone of the North Wing of the Capitol on Sept. 18, 1793 on what was then called Jenkins Hill (now Capitol Hill). The South Wing was completed in 1807, under the direction of Benjamin Latrobe.
During the War of 1812, between the United States and Great Britain, the British invaded Washington D.C. and burned the Capitol. The Speaker's platform and mahogany desks were piled together for kindling and the entire building was soon engulfed in flames.
The cast-iron dome that now covers the Capitol Building is 135 feet and five inches at its widest point and is topped by a bronze Statue of Freedom around whose base are the words, "E Pluribus Unim," which means, "Out of many, one."
At the center of the building is the Capitol Rotunda, a round room over 180 feet tall and almost 100 feet across. It is decorated with oil paintings and statuary of U.S. history.
On either side of the Rotunda are the two wings in which the two houses of Congress meet. Marcus Invents the Car
1865 AD
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
Late one night in 1865, Siegfried Marcus of Austria started his automobile and climbed aboard while a husky accomplice held the spinning rear wheels off the ground.
With Marcus at the controls of his loud, smoke-belching vehicle, the attendant let the wheels down and Marcus took off on a slow sixth-of-a-mile drive, at which point his "Kraftwagen" conked out.
It was the first recorded trip of an internal combustion engine vehicle.
While few of Marcus' automobiles were built, Karl Benz -- the next to build an internal combustion vehicle -- was more fortunate, though at first the outlook for his invention wasn't very good.
In 1888, two years after receiving a patent for his three-wheel "Motorwagen" from the German patent office, Benz had not received a single order for a car. At that point, his wife got tired of waiting, and without telling him, loaded their two sons in one of Benz's vehicles and drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back, convincing skeptics that the vehicle was safe and dependable.╦Carriers: Towns Afloat
1910 AD
ATLANTIC OCEAN
Imagine a town of 6,000 people floating in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean and you will have a feeling for the size of a modern nuclear aircraft carrier.
One carrier captain compared sailing one of these ships to steering New York's Central Park from the top of the Empire State Building.
The new Nimitz class ships, named after United States Admiral Chester Nimitz, of World War II fame, are three football fields long, have a crew of 6,000, two nuclear reactors, provisions for 90 days, 100 airplanes and a range of 800,000 miles -- that's about 13 years without refueling.
The first carrier was not nearly so grand. It was the USS Birmingham, a cruiser to which Ely Chambers, the officer in charge of the US Navy's naval aviation, had added a short flight deck. The first plane took off from the cruiser on November 14, 1910.
The first nuclear aircraft carrier was the USS Enterprise, with eight reactors. For a time, it was the largest ship afloat.vCarver Saves the South
1896 AD
TUSKEGEE, ALABAMA
The North had won the Civil War and the slaves of the South had been freed -- but only to live in poverty.
George Washington Carver wanted very much to help them. He was the son of a slave with a hunger for education. He spent 20 years working and studying so he could attend college, eventually studying agriculture at Iowa State University. Then, because his heart was with the former slaves, he accepted a job at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a school founded by blacks and devoted to improving their lives.
As he traveled through the South to Tuskegee in 1896 he saw the poverty, much of it caused by its one-crop economy. Cotton ruled, but it ruined the soil and was often destroyed by insects called boll weevils.
So Carver ran a demonstration farm at Tuskegee, showing farmers how to enrich the soil and persuading them to plant peanuts and sweet potatoes.
Carver was enthusiastic about peanuts. They are nourishing and improve the soil, but unfortunately there wasn't much of a market for them. So, because he was a religious man, Carver prayed, and asked God, "Why did you make the peanut?"
Then he set to work in his lab. He came up with peanut cheese, milk, coffee, flour, ink, dyes, soap, wood stains, chili sauce, drinks, salve, bleach, rubbing oil, shampoo, shaving cream, axle grease, metal polish, linoleum, paper, plastics, wood filler, synthetic rubber, wallboard, Worcestershire sauce, face cream, fruit punch, insulating board and on and on. In all, he invented 300 uses for the peanut and 118 for the sweet potato.
Carver was frequently asked to speak, and though he often endured many indignities during his travels because of his race, he kept at it, promoting peanuts and sweet potatoes and nudging the South away from its dependence on cotton.
Carver was frequently offered jobs in industry, but he turned them all down and never accepted money from the many people he helped.
In 1916 British scientists elected him a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and in 1939 he was given the Roosevelt medal. In 1940 he donated his life savings of $33,000 to Tuskegee Institute to carry on his research. He died in 1943.OCats and Cat People
1860 AD
MIDWEST NORTH AMERICA
You either love them or hate and fear them. Those seem to be the two feelings people have about cats.
Take the great conqueror, Napoleon, for instance.
Bullets? No problem for him.
Cannon fire? Yawn.
A cuddly little kitten? Take it away! Quick!
On the other hand, Queen Victoria and King Edward VII of England loved cats and Winston Churchill's cat Nelson had a place set for him at the family dining table.
Feelings toward cats have varied not only among people, but also through the ages. They were worshipped by the ancient Egyptians, but were associated with witches in Europe during the Middle Ages. In North America during the westward migration, they were considered invaluable. With their sharp hearing, good night vision and sharp claws they were excellent mousers and no pioneer family would be without one.¿
Chaucer: The Best Story Wins
1386-1400 AD
GREENWICH, ENGLAND
Geoffrey Chaucer's home in Greenwich, England, was not far from the road that pilgrims traveled to visit the shrine of St. Thomas à Beckett in Canterbury. These pilgrims had a reputation for telling tales, and the sights and sounds of the motley travelers are probably what gave Chaucer the idea for his most famous poem, "Canterbury Tales," written between 1386 and 1400 AD.
In it, a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine -- including Chaucer, who wrote himself into the story -- take turns telling tales to pass the time. The one who tells the best story will be treated to dinner at the end of the journey. However, the pilgrims never make it to Canterbury, and never decide whose story is best, because Chaucer never finished the poem.
Though the story has no ending, 22 of the tales were finished and are still entertaining more than 600 years later. Chaucer was a master at describing his characters and in letting them express their personalities and opinions. In fact, his characters are so realistic it almost seems he met them along the road to Canterbury and took down everything they said in rhyming verse!
Chaucer probably did know people very much like the characters in "Canterbury Tales." Public records show that he was a very busy man who knew many people. Among the jobs he held were: page, soldier, valet, agent, diplomat, controller of the customs and subsidies on wool for the port of London, justice of the peace, knight of the shire, clerk of the King's Works, and deputy forester.
It's a wonder Chaucer had time to write at all! Yet, in addition to the "Canterbury Tales," he wrote "Book of the Duchess," "House of Fame," "Parliament of Fowls," and "Legend of Good Women," a collection of poetry about famous faithful women. Some people think he wrote the "Legend" to make up for his poem, "Troilus and Criseide," in which the heroine, Criseide, was unfaithful to her husband. In any case, the "Troilus and Criseide" storyline wasn't even Chaucer's idea. He got it from an Italian writer named Boccaccio. The "Book of the Lion" is the only one of Chaucer's works we know of which was not preserved.
Though Chaucer is considered the first great English poet, you might not recognize his brand of English. The English of the Middle Ages, known as "Middle English," looks and sounds very different. Here is an example from "Canterbury Tales: "A good Wif was ther of biside Bathe/But she was somdeel deef, and that was scathe."
Theodore Morrison translates this: "A worthy woman there was from near the city/ Of Bath, but somewhat deaf, and more's the pity."
As you can see, understanding Chaucer's Middle English is a challenge, but many have found it worth the trouble.DChurchill's Many Lives
1940 AD
LONDON, ENGLAND
Few people have lived as widely varied a life as Winston Churchill.
He rode in one of the last successful cavalry charges, escaped from prison, commanded a great navy, won the Nobel Prize for literature, and led his country to victory in a terrible war.
He was born of an English father and American mother in 1874. As a young man he saw war service in India, fought in a cavalry battle in the Sudan, and escaped after being captured during the Boer War in South Africa. The books he wrote about these adventures launched him on a career of writing.
In 1900, Churchill won a seat in Parliament and in 1911 was placed in charge of the Admiralty, with orders to make the navy ready for war. When World War I came, the navy was ready.
Years later, when Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany, Churchill urged Britain to rearm. But Britain was sick of war and didn't want to hear his warnings.
But they came true. Great Britain and Germany went to war. After several British defeats, the prime minister resigned and Churchill was unanimously elected to take his place.
With Britain besieged and alone, Churchill stood firm. He promised Britain would "go on to the end, whatever the cost may be." His courage helped England hold out until the United States entered the war.
Then, with the allies victorious, came a bitter blow. "All our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so," Churchill wrote, "I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs."
In the 1945 election the Conservatives lost control of Parliament, so Churchill lost his position as prime minister. In 1950 he lost his seat in Parliament, but returned to office in 1951. In 1953 Churchill won the Nobel Prize for literature. He remained prime minister until his retirement in 1955. He died in 1965.
8The Problem With Sundials
1280-1290 AD
EUROPE
For telling time, sundials are okay as long as you have the sun shining down upon you, but what do you do at night?
That was the problem faced by the Benedictine monks, who had prayers at specific hours throughout the day and night. It was this problem that led to the creation of the first mechanical clocks.
The earliest time-keeping mechanisms were gnomons, which originated in China, Mesopotamia or Egypt. A gnomon is essentially a pole stuck in the ground. Unfortunately, it was not accurate from season to season.
Then someone thought of placing the pole parallel to the earth's axis, thus creating the sundial. This solved much of the accuracy problem, but it did nothing for telling time at night.
There were other experiments, such as the water clock, which told time by dripping water at a constant rate. But water clocks tended to freeze in the winter.
The first mechanical clocks probably appeared around 1280 to 1290 AD in Europe, and were based on a revolutionary device called the "verge and foliot." This device slowed the turns of a toothed wheel by alternately catching and releasing each tooth, allowing it to advance just one tooth each time the wheel was released. Because the wheel turned at a constant, slow speed, all it needed was a dial to make an excellent clock.
While some of the clocks got the monks out of bed, they quickly became more widespread, appearing in church towers and town hall towers throughout the continent.
While life probably became less relaxed when clocks started keeping track of every moment, modern commerce and navigation would be impossible without them. Clocks enabled meetings and schedules to be established with precision and the chronometer (a special clock for navigators) enabled sailing ships to determine their longitude (east-west position) with much greater accuracy.╥Government by Design
1782 AD
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
After winning a war for independence, Great Britain's 13 former colonies were about to lose the peace. The Articles of Confederation, the agreement under which the new American states operated, was failing badly, so the Continental Congress called a convention to revise them.
But after the convention opened in Philadelphia on May 14, 1782, delegates simply scrapped the Articles. Drawing from state constitutions and England's Magna Carta, they wrote a constitution outlining a government of three branches; executive (the President), legislative (the House of Representatives and Senate), and judicial (the Supreme Court).
One problem was that states with large populations wanted representation according to population while less-populated states wanted states to have an equal voice. A compromise created the House of Representatives, based on population, and a Senate, in which each state has two votes.
To go into effect, the Constitution had to be ratified by two thirds (nine) of the 13 states. On June 21, 1788 New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify, and the United States government declared the Constitution of the United States would be the law of the land beginning March 4, 1789.Coal And Dead Fish
c2000 BC
LONDON, ENGLAND
Sometimes we think of the smog over our cities as a modern problem, but it isn't. In fact, at the end of the 17th Century the burning of coal was so widespread that a thick, black cloud hung over the city of London.
The world's coal was formed when ancient plants were compressed under the great weight of tons of earth and stone. The harder they were compressed, the better the coal, ranging from the soft brownish lignite to the better bituminous coal, to the top-grade, hard, black anthracite.
Mining coal in the early days was a dangerous enterprise. Miners sometimes used candles, but the flame could cause the mine gases to explode, so they began using dead fish, which glow in the dark. But the light wasn't very bright and, as you might guess, the miners didn't much care for the odor.
Mine safety greatly improved in 1815 when the Englishman Sir Humphrey Davy invented the safety lamp.
Though coal is still used as an energy source throughout the world, oil has replaced it in many cases because it is easier to use.
ÅA Stage for Brutality
80 AD
ROME, ITALY
Rome rumbled with the discontent of the unemployed, who sometimes numbered up to 150,000. These people were interested in only two things, some Roman commentators complained, bread and circuses.
And that was the purpose of the large amphitheater called the Colosseum. To divert the people from rebellion, the Imperial Roman government staged brutal spectacles in the Colosseum, in which up to 50,000 people watched gladiators fight each other and wild beasts.
The Roman historian Seutonius said these spectacles drew so many people that they sometimes had to camp in tents along the roads. The number of people was so great, he said, that people were often crushed to death.
The Colosseum was begun by the Emperor Vespasian and was inaugurated by Emperor Titus in 80 AD. The stadium, which took 10 years to build, was originally constructed of wood, but was rebuilt in stone. It had four levels of seats, stairways, ramps, and elevators to bring up animals, gladiators and scenery from the vaulted enclosures below.
The elliptical stadium was 160 feet tall, 620 feet long and 513 feet wide, with many entrances and exits. The arena was 281 long by 177 wide. Many modern amphitheaters follow its design.
Part of the Colosseum fell during earthquakes in the Middle Ages and the ruins were used for other purposes.
The Colosseum shows the extensive use to which the Romans put the arch. While the principle of the arch was known to the Egyptians, Assyrians and Etruscans, the Romans used it not only for bridges and gateways, but also for building construction, including vaulted and domed ceilings.
The main advantage of the arch is that it permitted wider ceilings, so buildings did not need as many vertical columns to support the ceiling.
The Romans combined this discovery with another -- concrete. They mixed sand, small stones and a cement made of volcanic earth and lime to build strong walls inexpensively.
7Columbus Sails the Ocean Blue
1492 AD
ATLANTIC OCEAN
While it seems unlikely that Chris\to\pher Columbus was the first European to discover the New World, his trip is significant because it led to European expansion into the Western Hemisphere.
After many disheartening attempts to find a sponsor for his proposed shortcut to India, Columbus persuaded Queen Isabella of Spain to finance his adventure.
She gave him three ships, the Niña, Pinta, and the Santa María, and Columbus set sail in 1492. It was not long before the crew became discontent and rebellious, fearing the lack of water and strange fluctuations of the compass. But Columbus continued, and the discovery of a branch with berries on it heartened the crew. Clearly there was land nearby.
And there was. Columbus first landed on a Caribbean island that he named San Salvador. On his subsequent three voyages he visited other Caribbean islands and discovered the mainland of South America.
Though Columbus was Portuguese, he sailed under the Spanish flag, so interestingly, he does not appear among the explorers honored by this Portuguese statue.╟Compass: Which Way is North?
c2634 BC
CHINA
If you need to go east through the woods, but there are no signs telling you the way, a compass can sure come in handy.
A compass is a magnetized needle pivoted in the middle so it can swing freely in a case. Since the earth has a magnetic field, the small compass magnet swings around to point toward the earth's magnetic north.
So, if you want to go east, move the compass so North on the case aligns with the north end of the needle, then look at the case and see which way is east.
Actually, it's not quite that simple, since magnetic north isn't always true north. But for compass navigation buffs, there are maps that tell how to correct for the error.
The first people to use magnetic compasses were probably Chinese sailors, who may have floated magnetized needles on pads of straw or cork.
Magnetic compasses were once used on wooden ships, but the metal of modern ships interferes with the earth's magnetism, so they use gyroscopic compasses.
Gyroscopic compasses are based on the tendency of a spinning wheel to resist changes of direction. A wheel, or "gyroscope," is mounted so it can swivel in all directions, so no matter which way the ship turns, the gyroscope continues to point the same way.]Computing: Just 0 and 1
c450 BC
PEKING, CHINA
Though the computer you are now using is a modern development, computers have actually been around for a long time.
The abacus, a simple, hand-operated calculator, is one of the earliest computers. The Greek historian Herodotus (c450 BC) mentioned that the Egyptians had a form of abacus. The abacus is still widely used in China and other parts of East Asia.
In 1834 British mathematician Charles Babbage designed a mechanical calculator, and later electronic computers were made possible by the vacuum tube. But vacuum tubes are large, so the computers of the 1940s were as big as a house.
With the invention of transistors and integrated circuits, the calculating part of the computer was reduced to a chip about an inch square, so computers can now fit on a desk, or even a lap.
Though you see much more, computers really only use two numbers, zero and one. By combining zero and one in different ways, modern computers can express not only numbers, but also letters and symbols. This enables them to do mathematical calculations, writing, art work, planning, education, games and other tasks.Flying Straight Up and Down
1907 AD
DOUAI, FRANCE
A climber lies bleeding high in the mountains. He could be dead if he must wait for a regular rescue team, and there is no place for an airplane to land.
It is in difficult situations like this that the helicopter shines. It can fly over difficult terrain, pick up a victim and take him to a hospital in minutes.
While the idea for the helicopter is an old one (Leonardo da Vinci sketched one in 1483), building one was far more difficult.
In the 1800s inventors in the United States and Europe made successful model helicopters, but steam and gasoline engines were too heavy or weak for a full-sized model.
Then in 1907, Louis Breguet, a Frenchman, built a four-rotor helicopter that lifted an assistant two feet off the ground during a test-flight in Douai, France. In 1919 Igor Sikorsky, a Russian immigrant to the United States, built the first practical helicopter.
Since the Korean War, helicopters have been more and more widely used for medical evacuations, agricultural spraying and military missions.
╢ In the Beginning...
4,004 BC
MESOPOTAMIA
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This first verse of the Bible explains the origin of the universe held to by the three major monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
On the first day, according to the Bible, God said, "Let there be light" and so made night and day. On the second, God created Heaven (or the sky); the third, the seas, land, and trees; the fourth, the sun and moon; the fifth, fish and birds; the sixth, animals of the land, including humans. On the seventh day God rested.
Scientists say the earth is far older than the 6,000 years often proposed for creation. Most also hold to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which says higher species developed from lower species over millions of years by gradual chance adaptations.
Creation defenders say the fossils don't show the gradual changes predicted by Darwin. Others say the "days" in the Bible are long ages and the creation of the sun was actually on the first day, but could only be seen clearly on the fourth "day" as an opaque atmosphere cleared. Yet others say God created a mature world with evidence of a past that never was, so brand new trees, for example, would have many annual rings.
A big problem for creation defenders is one of their own -- Anglican Archbishop James Usher.
Usher was a divinity professor at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, in the early 16th Century. He was a fine scholar but will probably only be remembered for saying the world was created in 4004 BC.
Usher tried to determine the earth's age by adding the ages of the men listed in the Bible. By taking the age of the first man, Adam, until the birth of his son, then adding the son's age until the birth of his son, and so forth, he concluded that God created the earth in 4004 BC.
English clergyman, John Lightfoot, tried to be even more precise. He figured the world began at 9 a.m. on October 26, 4004 BC!
Usher's dating might have been forgotten if someone hadn't placed it in the marginal notes of the King James Bible, thereby lending it an authority it would not otherwise have had.
In light of modern dating, 4004 BC has been abandoned, not only by geologists, who estimate the earth's age at about 4.6 billion years, but also by many biblical scholars, who say the biblical chronology is probably partial, that the terms "father" and "son" in the Bible can also mean "ancestor" and "descendent," and that the six "days" of creation in the Bible could be long ages.
Leaving disputes about dates, the Bible says that the first two humans, Adam and Eve, had it good. All they had to do was take care of a beautiful garden God had made.
Eat from any tree in the garden, God said, but just one thing: "Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."
So -- of course -- that's what they did.
The Bible says that a serpent (generally considered to be the Devil) tricked Eve into tasting the fruit. Then she gave it to her husband, who also took a bite.
For their disobedience God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden and promised them toil and hardship. And though their bodies did not die that day, many theologians would say their spirits did.aSunset for the Knight
1346 AD
NORTHERN FRANCE
A few miles north of the village of Crécy-\en-\Ponthieu, France, in the year 1346, the sun began to set on the proud and seemingly invincible armored knight, who had ruled European battlefields in the Middle Ages. The English longbow ended his reign.
To prepare for the French attack, Edward III of England placed his infantry in the middle of his line, and his longbowmen on either side, angled forward to form a funnel leading toward his infantry.
The French army of about 60,000, three times the size of Edward's army, suddenly stumbled upon the English. But as each unit of knights approached it charged impetuously down the funnel toward the infantry. From either side came clouds of English arrows. Fifteen or 16 waves of the finest French knights were slaughtered. Between 10,000 and 20,000 French were killed. The English lost about 200.╪Cro-Magnon the Artiste
c20,000 BC
FRANCE
The race of humans called Cro-Magnon man were the first to inhabit Europe following the last ice age. They were tall, with long, narrow faces, high foreheads, and long, narrow noses. Essentially, they were the people of today.
The Cro-Magnon people lived in caves and used pigments to decorate the walls with drawings. Though it must have been difficult painting by firelight, the drawings are very lifelike, though they varied in size and often overlapped. Large game animals like bison were the favorite subject of these paintings. Relatively few drawings of humans have been found, and these are almost always of women.
The Cro-Magnon people seem to have been capable of more abstract thinking than any previous species as their art included symbolic as well as figurative elements. They also possessed the throwing stick, harpoon, and excellent bone tools. Their spoken language was probably quite advanced. However, they still did not grow their food or raise animals.jThe Battle for Jerusalem
1095-1291 AD
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL
All Emperor Alexius Comnenus had wanted from the West were soldiers to help him fight off the Turks, who had chopped his Byzantine Empire down to little more than the city of Constantinople.
But Alexius' appeal gave Pope Urban II a different idea -- to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims.
Thus began a disorganized series of crusades motivated by everything from religion to territorial ambition to trade with the east.
After Urban's appeal for a crusade in 1095, an unruly mob of soldiers set off across Europe, through Constantinople (where they behaved badly), and on to Jerusalem, which they captured in 1099 with great slaughter, primarily because the Muslims were even more disorganized than themselves.
They established the Latin Kingdom, and despite their bickering, Jerusalem remained in Crusader hands until 1187, when Saladin retook it. The Crusaders were finally driven from the Holy Land in 1291.
The West undertook eight crusades, including one made up of children. They were aimed not only at Jerusalem, but also against Egypt and even against Christian Constantinople, which they ransacked._ Marie Curie Discovers Radium
1896 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
Marie Curie thought the experiment must have gone wrong. She had been studying radioactive materials in her damp little Paris laboratory and had found only two elements that were radioactive -- uranium and thorium. But while the pitchblende in front of her contained uranium, the radioactivity was far higher than she expected.
After trying the experiment again and again, she decided the pitchblende must contain a new, unknown element. Pierre, her husband, was so excited he quit his own studies to join her.
Together, they broke the pitchblende into simpler and simpler parts, testing each compound for radioactivity.
Eventually, they found there were two new elements. They called one "polonium," after Marie's home country of Poland, and the other "radium."
They decided to get a pure sample of radium. Since it was such a small part of the pitchblende they needed tons of the material, but fortunately the Academy of Science in Vienna persuaded the Austrian government to give the Curies the pitchblende residue from uranium mines.
Marie cooked the pitchblende in large pots, trying to avoid the poisonous fumes and sometimes stirring until she was ready to collapse.
In 1896, after four years of labor and tons of pitchblende, she obtained enough radium to fill the tip of a teaspoon.
The radiation from this pure radium was so intense it burned her fingers, so she and Pierre thought it might be able to destroy cancerous cells in the body, allowing healthy cells to grow back. They were right, and the new process was called "Curietherapy" (now known as radiation therapy).
In 1903 Marie and Pierre received one of England's highest scientific awards, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. That same year they and Henri Becquerel (for his experiments with uranium) shared the Nobel Prize for physics.
When Pierre was killed in a traffic accident in 1906, Marie took his place as professor at the Sorbonne University. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, the first time a Nobel Prize had been awarded to the same person twice.
Finally, in May, 1934 a strange illness overtook her. The radium she had worked with for so long had been poisoning her. She died on July 4, 1934.
The Curies' work revolutionized scientific thought. It led to the discovery that radioactive elements eventually change into other elements, proving the elements are not unchanging.ùWater Where We Want It
c2700 BC
SOUTHERN NEVADA
Dams have made life easier for people since the beginning of recorded history. They have been used for diverting and storing water, and more recently for power, flood protection and recreation.
The oldest dam is probably the Sadd el-Kafara on the Nile, a masonry dam built about 2,700 BC. The Mesopotamians and Chinese also built dams, and later the Romans constructed dams in Italy and northern Africa.
Ancient dams used earth, rock, or masonry. But in the 1800s and 1900s, engineers developed hollow, reinforced concrete dams. This led to the construction of large dams for power and recreation, such as Hoover Dam on the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada. Hoover Dam was the tallest dam in the world when it was built in the middle of the 20th Century.
Currently, the highest dam in the world is the hydroelectric Rogun Dam in the Soviet Union. It towers 335 feet above the valley floor.?Charles Darwin's Revolution
1859 AD
GALAPAGOS ISLANDS
Charles Darwin was a little unsure. Was he ready to publish his findings? Twenty-two years earlier, in 1836, he had returned to England with the germ of a radical new idea about the origin of life.
On the Galapagos Islands near South America, Darwin had seen animals that were related -- but different. Perhaps, he thought, the mechanism that caused these slight variations could also cause major changes in plant and animal life. He theorized that in the battle to live, plants and animals most adapted to their environment would survive and pass on the survival traits to their offspring. Eons of little adaptations, he thought, could result in completely different species.
His evidence clearly showed that small evolutionary changes do occur, but his evidence for big changes was more speculative. But on the other hand, Darwin knew other biologists were working on the same idea, so he finally sat down and wrote "The Origin of Species."
It came out in 1859 and caused a furor since most people believed God created the plants and animals. Critics challenged him on the "infinitude of connecting links" he had predicted must exist. "Where are these links?" they asked.
The uproar died down as most scientists eventually accepted Darwin's theory, but even today there are some who ask where the "missing links" are.UDavid the Giant
1504 AD
FLORENCE, ITALY
The huge block of marble was flawed. Agostino di Duccio had begun to chip away at it, but realized he could do nothing with the block. So it lay gathering dust for 40 years.
But 26-year-old Michelangelo saw something in the marble. In 1501, after winning the right to carve it in a competition sponsored by the Florentine Republic -- triumphing even over Leonardo da Vinci -- he began working.
First, he studied the block for days, from all different angles. Then for three years he carved his 13.5-foot-tall "David," sometimes called "The Giant" because of its size.
Unlike other sculptors, who had shown the young Israelite warrior in his moment of triumph over the giant Goliath, Michelangelo chose a more subtle moment, the time just before the battle. Out of the block of marble Michelangelo combined both his faith and his love for classical Greek sculpture in a powerful, athletic David who gazes into the distance -- as if at the giant -- with his sling at the ready on his shoulder.
When the statue was unveiled, it stunned the Florentines with its power.
Well, not everybody.
One city leader, Piero Soderini, thought the nose was too long.
So Michelangelo climbed up and pretended to carve it, letting a little marble dust drop, then came back down.
"That is much better," Soderini said, "Now you have really brought it to life."∙Edgar Degas: Painting Motion
1860 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
Capturing a moment on canvas was not enough for impressionist painter Edgar Degas. He wanted that moment to have action.
Initially Degas painted historical scenes, such as Spartan youths exercising, or a Medieval war scene, but soon he began painting contemporary action scenes, such as horseracing. These sporting scenes began to appear in his works in 1860, and scenes from the theater in 1868.
Degas eventually became known for his dancers, but actually he wasn't interested in the dancers for themselves. What people didn't realize, he said, was "that for me the dancer has been a pretext for painting fabrics and representing movement."
He liked nothing better than catching an ordinary woman in an ordinary action, such as yawning or stretching or scratching her back. But he liked nothing less than landscapes. "If I were the government," he said, "I would keep a company of policemen watching out for anyone who painted landscapes from nature."
Degas also differed from fellow impressionists by preferring indoor to outdoor lighting. Nor did he think much of spontaneity. "No art was ever less spontaneous than mine," he said. "What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters. Of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing."
Later in life, Degas became a hermit and began to hate newspaper people, especially the critics. He lost his sight in one eye and saw imperfectly from the other. Possibly because of his failing eyesight, he began to use brighter, pure colors.
fThe Abbot Reaches for the Sky
1140-1144 AD
ST. DENIS, FRANCE
If you have ever been to a cathedral you probably remember spending a lot of time looking up toward the ceiling, stained glass windows and spires. If you did that, it was just what Abbot Sugar wanted you to do -- look up toward heaven.
In 1140 AD, Abbot Sugar of St. Denis was the most influential churchman in France, and he longed to create a church that would rival the legendary Hagia Sophia Church in Constantinople.
And he was successful. Sugar and an unknown architect created not only the Abbey Church of St. Denis, near Paris, but also the model for a new, vertical style of architecture that spread quickly throughout Europe -- a style called "Gothic."
One major development that helped create the Gothic style was the discovery that stone could carry far greater weight than had previously been imagined.
Working with that knowledge, Gothic architects broke away from the low, Romanesque style to design cathedrals of dazzling height, but displaying a graceful lightness of construction that put the weight on a few pillars and left the intervening space for colorful stained glass windows.
╥Descartes: I Think, Therefore...
1641 AD
NETHERLANDS
In his investigation of reality, the mathematician-philosopher René Descartes decided his first step would be to discover some fact that was indisputable. And in this he almost certainly succeeded.
In his classic "Meditations on First Philosophy" (1641) he says that in thinking about the problem, he realized that there was one thing he never doubted -- that he existed. "I think," he wrote, "therefore I am."
It didn't matter to Descartes whether this thinking was part of a dream or a hallucination or even if he was crazy. The fact that thought was going on proved that he existed because there had to be a thinker, though that thinker might be a disembodied intelligence.
Having established that he existed, Descartes advanced his arguments for the existence of God.
The first of these was that he had the idea of a Perfect Being in his imperfect mind. But he reasoned that an imperfect mind couldn't come up with the idea of a Perfect Being, so there must actually be a Perfect Being (God) who gave him the idea.
The second argument was this: If God is perfect -- as we imagine Him to be -- then He must exist because if he didn't exist He wouldn't be perfect. (If this argument strikes you as a bit strange, you are not alone. Most philosophers regard it as more of a play on words than as a philosophical proof.)
From his conclusion that a perfect God exists, Descartes argues that God would not deceive his created beings, so the things we experience around us must also be real.
While other philosophers had argued that God exists by saying the universe must have a first cause, a creator, Descartes took the argument the other way. The world must exist, he argued, because God exists.
While few people doubt Descartes proof of self-existence, the rest of his argument is disputed. Descartes argued in favor of the existence of God on the basis of ideas in his mind, but many philosophers don't see that having ideas about God is the same thing as God actually existing.╧Dinosaurs: Terrible Lizards
243 to 65 million BC
NORTH AMERICA
With their little brains, they were not very smart, but nevertheless, the huge reptiles we call dinosaurs ruled the earth for more than 100 million years. Then suddenly, almost instantly, they disappeared.
All we know about dinosaurs comes from studying fossils. Scientists have categorized them into two basic types: the saurischians, which had hips like lizards, and the ornithischians, which had hips like birds. Many dinosaurs were plant-eaters, but some were meat-eaters. They ranged from the turkey-sized Compsognathus to the 90-foot-long Diplodocus and the 50-ton Brachiosaurus.
No one knows what caused the extinction of these "terrible lizards." One theory is that the earth's climate became cooler and the cold-blooded dinosaurs became too sluggish to hunt for food. (Cold-blooded animals need warm weather to survive.)
But that theory does not explain the almost instant disappearance of dinosaur bones from the fossil record.
Recent evidence supports another theory, that a large meteor or asteroid may have struck the earth and caused a huge dust cloud that blocked so much sunlight that almost all of the plants that fed the dinosaurs died. And when the plants they ate died, so did the dinosaurs.,The Dipper and Tail
Often in the night sky, people in the Northern Hemisphere can see the Big Dipper, a set of seven stars that have been used for centuries for navigation and testing eyesight.
Dubhe and Merak, the two stars on the front edge of the cup are important to navigators because they point directly at the North Star. Mizar, the dim star at the bend in the dipper's handle, was once used to test people's eyesight. If you could see it, your eyesight was okay.
The Big Dipper is not a constellation, it is an "asterism," which just means it is part of a constellation. Its constellation is Ursa Major, also called the Great Bear. The cup of the dipper is supposed to be the hindquarters of the bear and the handle of the dipper is its tail, though some people have commented that it is an awfully long tail for a bear.The Doge's Fine Palace
1422 AD
VENICE, ITALY
Knowing how strong the temptation was to build a grander building to house the seat of its government, the conservative Venetian Senate passed a law that not only prohibited the Doge's Palace from being rebuilt, but forbade anybody to even discuss the possibility -- on penalty of a stiff fine.
But in 1422, three years after a fire damaged the building, Doge (Duke) Tomaso Mocenigo carted 1000 ducats into the Senate Chamber to pay the penalty, then proposed the palace be rebuilt. And it was.
The palace was originally built by Doge Agnello Participazio in 813 AD when the seat of the Venetian government was first established on Rialto Island. Initially it was built in the Byzantine style, but at the beginning of the 14th Century it was completely rebuilt in Gothic style, and finally was given Renaissance additions.
The palace, in the shape of a hollow square, has a facing of Gothic-style arches supported by columns featuring various secular and sacred themes at their tops, or capitals.
At three corners of the building are Biblical scenes depicting man's sins and strengths. At one corner is a sculptural representation of the Fall of Man, at another is a depiction of Noah drunk with wine, and at the third is King Solomon wisely settling a dispute between two women.
z The Holiest Spot on Earth
685-691 AD
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL
The Dome of the Rock, built between 685, and 691 by Caliph `Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan was originally built as a shrine for pilgrims. It is situated on the spot where Moslem tradition says the prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. When it was built however, it seems that the building's purpose was to commemorate the great prophets -- Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed -- and their connections to the Moslem faith. Whatever the case, it is undeniably the place where a great religious drama has been played out.
It is thought by many that this hill is the spot where the Jewish patriarch Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac around 1900 BC. In 1026 BC Israelite King Solomon completed a magnificent temple dedicated to the worship of Yahweh, or Jehovah. The Temple was destroyed in 607 BC by the Babylonians.
By permission of the Persian monarch Cyrus, Jewish governor Zerubbabel rebuilt the Temple in 515 BC, though on a much smaller scale. This temple lasted nearly 500 years. In 35 BC, King Herod began yet another temple for the Jews. In about 30 AD Jesus and his disciples came to this temple, and, according to the Bible, Jesus said it too would be destroyed, so that, "By no means will a stone be left here upon a stone."
A few decades later, the Jews revolted against Rome. In 70 AD, only six years after the Temple's completion, Roman general Titus breached its walls, and against his wishes, the Temple was set ablaze. Interestingly, it was greed, not fire, that brought the Temple down. A band of solid gold encircled the top of Herod's Temple. In order to salvage the gold, which had melted in the fire, Roman soldiers had to pull down each stone. In 135 AD, after a second Jewish revolt, the Romans forbade any Jew to visit the site on pain of death.
During this time, the Temple Mount became a landfill for Jerusalem, which at that time was called Aelia Capitolina. The beautiful stones, columns and capitols were covered with rubbish, human waste, and dead animals. Later, when the Roman Empire became officially Catholic, the area was renovated to honor the place where Jesus walked and worshipped.
After removing the rubbish, the Romans thanked God for the wonderful building materials that were once Herod's Temple. It was from these that they created an immense Byzantine church. Only 100 years later, the Moslems invaded Jerusalem and destroyed the church. They too thanked God for the building materials they salvaged from the church. It was primarily from those materials that the Dome of the Rock was built.
The architect who designed the Dome of the Rock was a Byzantine Christian. The design he chose was typical for Byzantine churches of the time. The result is an octagonal building, each side representing one of the "happinesses" spoken of by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. Since Jesus spoke of nine ways to happiness, one could say that the Dome of the Rock is short by one side.
3Peter Walks on Water
1424 AD
FLORENCE, ITALY
In this close-up picture of one door panel of Ghiberti's famous Baptistry doors, you can see the New Testament story of how Peter tried to walk on the water.
In the passage illustrated here, Jesus has given Peter permission to walk on the water, so Peter got out of the boat and began walking toward Jesus.
But then he noticed the wind and the waves and his faith began to waver. And as he wavered, he began to sink and cried out to Jesus to save him.
Just after this scene, Jesus pulls Peter from the water and they both return to the boat.
∞
Doyle vs. Holmes
1893 AD
THE ALPS, SWITZERLAND
Sherlock Holmes stood on the slippery edge of Reichenbach Falls locked in a deadly embrace with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty. But it was not just Moriarty who sought his death.
When the news came out that the great detective had plunged to his death the public was furious -- but not at Moriarty.
At whom, then? At Holmes creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.
In 1893 Doyle wrote the story of Holmes's tragic end in "The Final Problem" hoping to free himself from the constant demands for more and more Sherlock Holmes stories. He wanted time for more "serious" writing projects, and for his wife, who was dying of tuberculosis. However, the fictional detective seemed to have taken on a life of his own, and an immortal one at that.
At the public's insistence, Doyle resumed his tales of Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson with the famous 1902 thriller, "The Hound of the Baskervilles." This story supposedly took place before Holmes's last battle with Moriarty. A year later Holmes appeared in a new series of stories after revealing to Watson that he had escaped death at the falls in Switzerland.
Doyle based Holmes on one of his medical professors at Edinburgh University. Dr. Joseph Bell fascinated students by deducing a patient's occupation and other facts about him just by observing him. For example, he would look at the worn places on a man's clothes and the calluses on his hands and conclude that he was a cobbler. Doyle also described Holmes as tall, dark and thin like Dr. Bell. Dr. Watson was based on Major Wood, Doyle's faithful secretary for many years.
When Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in 1887, detectives were typically uneducated men who relied on their knowledge of underworld characters and criminal practices to do their jobs. The readers of Doyle's day had a great reverence for science, however, so Holmes's scientific methods of detection were often copied by real investigators. Sherlock Holmes's cases became required reading in a number of European and Asian police forces.
Probably the best evidence that Holmes's methods worked came from Doyle himself. He used them to prove that several men accused of crimes were innocent. Doyle and Holmes pioneered many detective techniques commonly used today.
However, Doyle had mixed feelings about Holmes's tremendous popularity. He admitted that Holmes had been "a good friend to me in many ways," but found it hard to accept that he might be remembered primarily as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Doyle wrote many other short stories, historical novels, poems, histories, his autobiography, and books about spiritualism, and pursued causes he believed in. For his good works as a citizen of Great Britain, he was made a knight in 1902, becoming Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.5Il Duomo: Two Domes in One
1419 AD
FLORENCE, ITALY
The city fathers of Florence almost bit off more than they could chew in 1296 when they commissioned a cathedral so grand that it would be "impossible to make it either better or more beautiful with the industry and power of man."
The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (commonly called "Il Duomo"), was originally designed by architect Arnolfo di Cambio, but the design was continually changed by various committees over the years.
Finally, in 1417, the church was ready for its roof. The only problem was that nobody had the faintest idea how to create a dome big enough to cover the huge, octagonal center of the building.
Fortunately, Florence had architect Filippo Brunelleschi. Though his proposal was initially considered as crackpot as some of the other ideas for topping the church, his plan finally prevailed, and in 1419 he was given the job.
To cover the church, Brunelleschi designed a dome within a dome. The interior dome helped support the exterior dome with a series of braces. The tall, exterior dome features eight graceful rock ribs curving up to the tip.
The stately dome was completed in 1436, but the facade of the church was not finished until 1883.
Brunelleschi's innovative dome design made possible other great cathedral domes, including the dome of the Church of St. Peter in Rome.╪Amelia's Last Flight
1937 AD
PACIFIC OCEAN
There was nothing special about flying around the world, George Putnam told his wife Amelia. People had already done it.
Yes, Amelia replied, but nobody had ever done it at the equator, where the distance around the earth is the greatest.
So Amelia Earhart set off on an epic flight. She was already the world's premier female aviator. She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger, and later became the first woman to fly across on her own. Other women had attempted the flight, but none had been successful and three had died.
Amelia was first inspired to take flying lessons after attending an air show in California. She became fascinated by the fun of flight and later wrote books about flying and taught about it at Purdue University, where she became known as the "Flying Professor."
But the round-the-equator flight was to be her grand adventure. She flew her Lockheed Electra to South America with navigator Fred Noonan, then took off towards Africa. She and Noonan flew across the Atlantic Ocean to Africa; then stopped at Karachi (then part of India); Rangoon, Burma; Singapore; Surabaya, Indonesia; Port Darwin, Australia; and then to Lea, New Guinea.
The next stop was Howland Island, a flyspeck of land that would be their refueling stop on the way to the Hawaiian Islands. It was 2,556 miles away from Lea and surrounded by nothing but ocean.
The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was at the island to keep in radio contact, and at first everything seemed to go well. Amelia radioed she was making good progress and was within about 100 miles of the island. Later she radioed: "We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Our gas is running low."
After several more messages, she gave what she believed to be her position, then the radio went dead. The cutter Itasca, a battleship, an aircraft carrier with all its planes, and four destroyers searched for 16 days, they never found a trace of the missing Lockheed Electra or its brave pilot and navigator.&Earth: Home Sweet Home
4.5 Billion BC
THIRD PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM
You may have heard that Earth is a mere speck near the edge of our galaxy, and that is true. But don't underestimate Earth, it is actually an amazing -- but delicate -- little planet.
As many environmental\ists have pointed out, Earth's atmosphere has just the right amount of ozone and carbon dioxide. If there was much more or less of either, Earth's surface would be too hot or cold.
Or, suppose Earth was a bit closer to the sun. The added heat would prevent the clouds from raining. But move it a little further away and too little water would evaporate from the oceans, so clouds would not form.
If you painted the earth's surface a darker color, it would absorb too much heat. But paint it a lighter color and the surface would reflect too much heat and become too cold.
While Earth is small, it's distance from the sun and tilt and rotation and gravity and many other factors make it ideal for life.
This wonderful planet is a slightly flattened ball measuring about 24,860 miles around at the equator. It is covered with a 5- to 40-mile thick crust divided into plates that slide slowly around on the mantle, a mass of hot, gooey rock surrounding a core of molten metal.
Because Earth is slightly tilted in relation to the sun, either its north or south end is closer to the sun at any time. Sunlight strikes the closer end more directly and intensely, causing summer, and strikes the further end at a greater angle and less intensely, causing winter.
Today, many scientists are encouraging us to change our lifestyles so we don't upset the delicate balance that makes Earth a wonderful place to live. They are concerned that some human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and releasing man-made chemicals into the atmosphere, may upset the planet's environment.ßEdison Lights the Night
1879 AD
MENLO PARK, NEW JERSEY
After two years, Thomas Edison finally saw the light.
In 1877 he had begun studying how to make an electric lamp and within a year had performed 1,200 experiments. In 1879, after spending $40,000, he made a bulb using a carbonized cotton thread for a filament. It burned for two days in the vacuum bulb. Later he used carbonized cardboard and finally carbonized bamboo.
The bamboo model was the first economically feasible incandescent light bulb.
His bulbs were first installed on the steamship "Columbia" and later in a New York City factory.
Edison was a prolific inventor, with 1,033 patents at the time of his death in 1931. Two others of his many inventions were the phonograph and the movie projector.XEiffel's Revolutionary Tower
1889 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was not a popular man when he started building a huge steel-frame tower that would overlook Paris. The structure was just too different and the critics didn't like it at all.
In 1887, the leading artists of Paris signed a petition to have what they regarded as a monstrosity torn down immediately.
Fortunately for Paris, their call was ignored. And though Parisians didn't like it at first, they began to grow fond of the structure they initially called a "cyclops" and a "skeleton."
The Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889, just in time to show off for the World's Fair, being held that year in Paris.
The tower was also a sign of things to come. Eiffel was taking full advantage of a new building material -- structural steel. With it he took the first step in creating what would become the modern skyscraper.£An Eiffel Eyesore?!
1889 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
In 1909 the view that you now see from the Eiffel tower was almost destroyed. Jealous architects and short-sighted government officials wanted to tear the tower down after the rights to use the land for the International Exposition of 1889 expired. The only reason this durable and graceful symbol of Paris was saved was because it proved its value for another new technology -- radio. The tower became a 984 ft. radio antenna. Later, a television antenna added 56 feet to Eiffel's height.
From up here, you can see 50 miles in any direction. Several major Parisian landmarks are within reach here, such as the Louvre, and the Cathedral of Notre Dame.8Like A Bridge on End
1889 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
Oddly enough, the construction of the Eiffel tower, with its dizzying latticework of interwoven steel beams, was made possible by earlier experiments in iron bridge construction in the late 1700s.
Prior to the use of these metals in construction, brick was the major building material. With its triangular truss construction, and four semicircular arches, you could say that the tower takes bridge-building technology and stands it on its head.
If you look at the picture of the tower, you will notice the extensive use of triangles in the construction. It has been known since the time of the ancient Greeks that the triangle is the strongest, lightest, and most rigid form in geometry.
Unfortunately, brick and masonry materials cannot easily be formed into free-standing triangles. In the 1860's, the Bessemer furnace made it possible to quickly and economically roll long steel beams called girders.
Because steel can be rolled into these long and slender beams, they were used to create triangular forms in the Eiffel Tower. These primary advantages, light weight relative to brick construction, and the triangular form, gave birth to this tower, and in fact, every sky-piercing skyscraper you see. The Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world until New York's Chrysler building was finished in 1930.√ Einstein: Universe Explorer
1905 AD
BERN, SWITZERLAND
Though Albert Einstein's theories have completely changed our view of the universe, his teachers weren't always impressed. Though he got good grades in school, some of them thought he was stupid because he seemed uninterested in their teaching -- which he often was.
Einstein was born in Ulm, Würtemberg, Germany. As a boy he was fascinated by the compass needle, how it always pointed north. He felt that "something deeply hidden had to be behind things."
He studied mathematics and physics in Zurich, Switzerland, then from 1902 to 1909 he worked in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.
In 1905, at age 26, Einstein contributed four papers to the German scientific publication, Annals of Physics. Any one of them would have been enough to secure him an important place in the history of science.
In one article he said light could sometimes be described as particles, or "quanta." This explained some puzzling experimental results, such as the photoelectric effect, and it became the starting point of quantum physics.
In the second and most famous paper, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," he outlined his special theory of relativity, which says that the speed of light is the same, regardless of how the observer moves. This means, he said, that the time between two events depends on the speed of the observer measuring it. Time, in other words, is "relative." In a follow-up paper later that year he showed another aspect of special relativity, that energy and matter are equivalent. This is expressed in his famous formula: E=mc² (Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared).
In a fourth paper, he explained Brownian motion, the irregular movements of particles in water. He showed that random collisions of water molecules would exactly produce the motion. This is considered one of the first proofs of the existence of atoms.
In 1915 Einstein completed his general theory of relativity, which greatly expanded on special relativity. In fact, it explained the universe in a radically different way. Einstein's theory of gravitation is based on the "curvature" of space and time, which explains phenomena that Newton's theory could not. It also predicts totally new phenomena, such as black holes and the expansion of the universe.
However, Einstein was bothered because it failed to explain electromagnetism. He spent the remaining 25 years of his life unsuccessfully trying to develop a Unified Field Theory that would explain all natural forces. He was concerned that if he couldn't find the answer, nobody would.
Beginning in 1909 Einstein accepted various teaching positions in Europe. Then, in 1933, Nazi Germany took away his citizenship, property and positions because he was Jewish. He moved to the United States and took a position at Princeton University.
On Aug. 2, 1939 he wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, urging him to provide government help in creating an atomic bomb, and warning that Germany might already be working on one. The bomb was later used to end World War II.
╗Embryo: A Look at Life
1973 AD
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
People have always been able to see much of the world around them, and even -- by examining dead people -- to observe the interior structure of the human body.
But it is only recently that optical and surgical equipment has been developed that allow us to watch the interior of the body in action. In this picture we see one of the most amazing aspects of life, the development of a human being in its mother's womb.
Because human beings are born all the time, we sometimes forget how amazing this process is.
The life process starts when two half-cells -- one half from the mother and the other half from the father -- join together into one full-cell.
Though this cell is so tiny you couldn't see it without a microscope, it contains an astonishing amount of information. The entire design for a person, a being more complicated than anything people have ever designed, is contained in just the smallest part of the cell. This information chain (called "DNA," for deoxyribonucleic acid) is so small that scientists can't see it with regular optical microscopes, so they use powerful electron microscopes. If computer designers could easily duplicate this information chain, they could build computers far more powerful than anything available today.
But this original cell not only contains all the information necessary to design a human body, but also has the ability to build the body. In other words, this little cell is not only like a giant library, but also like a factory that can reproduce itself!
Over nine months in the womb, the body grows. Within several weeks you can begin to recognize the head, then later you can see the arms and feet, and finally -- at birth -- the full body.
εDa Vinci the Scientist
c1512 AD
MILAN, ITALY
As you can see from this sketch by Leonardo da Vinci of a developing human fetus, he (like other Renaissance artists) was deeply interested in anatomy.
Why? Well, partly because the Renaissance was a time when knowledge of all kinds was held up for its own sake, and Da Vinci was very much a man of his time. But for Leonardo and many of his fellow artists, there was also a much more practical reason.
To faithfully depict the human form meant really understanding it, and that meant looking beneath the skin at the muscles and how various parts of the body work together.
Da Vinci began studying anatomy around 1489 and at one time was allowed to perform dissections at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. The embryo he depicts in this sketch was probably done around 1512 during his stay in Milan, where he may have studied anatomy with Marc Antonio dalla Torre, the finest anatomist of his time. Also, this is probably one of the first pictures ever of a fetus in the womb. The Engine: Using Bang Power
1823 AD
LONDON, ENGLAND
Once people learned about gunpowder, it was easy to make a bang, but it was difficult to turn those bangs into a reliable power source.
The first person to suggest an engine that ran on explosions was Christiaan Huygens, who had the idea in 1680 of using gunpowder as the fuel. It didn't work.
Englishman Samuel Brown developed the first commercially available internal combustion engine in 1823, and progress was rapid after that.
Engines work by sending a fuel-air mixture into a cylinder, then igniting the mixture, which explodes, pressing down a piston which turns a crankshaft. Several pistons working in sequence provide a smooth source of power.
Internal combustion engines are now used for a wide variety of applications, particularly in automobiles and other vehicles.Scaling Mt. Everest
May 29, 1953 AD
THE HIMALAYAS
Five and a half miles above sea level among the mighty Himalayan range is the tip of the tallest mountain in the world, Mt. Everest.
The mountain is on the border of Nepal and Tibet, and is named after Sir George Everest, the British Surveyor-General of India who first determined its altitude in 1841. Tibetans call the mountain Chomolungma and the Nepalese call it Sagarmatha.
Everest had foiled several attempts to scale it, the first in 1922, and it wasn't until 1953 that Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa tribesman, finally made it to the top.
The expedition, led by Sir John Hunt, set up a series of tent camps up the slope of the mountain. From the last camp, at 27,900 feet, Hillary and Norgay climbed to the top on May 29, 1953.6Fire: A Hot Time Tonight!
Oct. 8-10, 1871 AD
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Fire. It is one of man's oldest friends -- and enemies.
Controlled, it can cook food, smelt metals, warm homes, generate electricity, and propel automobiles, trucks, airplanes and rockets.
Uncontrolled, it can devastate cities and forests, killing people and animals and destroying property.
One of the biggest and most famous fires in the United States was the Great Chicago fire of 1871, which burned three-and-a-half square miles in the heart of the city.
The blaze is often attributed to Mrs. O'Leary's cow, who is said to have knocked over the lantern as she was milked one night. A popular song had it that the cow was annoyed and said, as she knocked over the lantern, "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!"
For a fire to exist, fuel, oxygen and heat must be present. Combustion can occur even with low levels of heat, but it is very slow. With greater amounts of heat, combustion occurs more rapidly. When the temperature reaches the ignition point, heat is generated more rapidly than it can dissipate and the fuel bursts into flame.ÿThe National Symbol
c740 BC
ROME, ITALY
Flags are usually made of brightly colored weatherproof fabric and are intended to be symbolic of the nature of a country. They have often had this romantic nature, but not always. In the early days of Rome, for example, the army marched behind a handful of hay tied to the top of a pole.
Flags and similar emblems mounted on poles have been known throughout the world for thousands of years and have often had religious symbolism.
For example, the Union Jack of Great Britain combines the crosses of St. George, St. Andrew and St. Patrick. And, according to an ancient story, the cross emblem on the flag of Denmark was adopted after King Waldemar saw a cross in the sky in 1219 as he was leading his troops.
Also of religious significance are the flags of many Islamic countries, which often feature the color green or a crescent moon, both symbols of Islam.
The United States flag, however, does not have a religious emphasis, but depicts the 13 original colonies with red and white stripes, and the states by the number of stars in the blue field.
Nor does the flag of the Soviet Union have a religious emphasis. This once officially atheistic nation has a flag with a hammer and sickle emblem that represents the craftsman and farmer, and a five-pointed star representing the five continents that the Soviet Union hoped would embrace communism.
Perhaps the simplest of the world's flags is Libya's. It is just a green rectangle.
One of the most unusual belongs to Nepal. It is the only non-rectangular national flag, being made up instead of two triangles adorned with pictures of the sun and moon, symbolizing the hope that Nepal will endure as long as they do.JShocking Florence
1854 AD
CRIMEA, UKRAINE
Florence Nigh\tin\gale's parents were horrified. Their daughter had just announced her intention to be a nurse, and nursing was among the lowest of occupations, engaged in by the dirtiest and least-educated women.
But Florence was strong-willed, meticulous and believed God had given her a special calling. "On February 7th, 1837," she wrote, "God spoke to me, and called me into his service."
Despite her parents' objections, she studied nursing at Catholic and Protestant hospitals.
Then, in 1854, the horrible condition of British Army hospitals during the Crimean War prompted the government to ask her to run the hospitals in the Crimea, located on the north side of the Black Sea. With her emphasis on sanitation, she and her 38 nurses brought the hospital death rate from 42 percent down to 2 percent.
Though the strain of the war had permanently damaged her health, she later founded a nurses' school, wrote on hospital administration, petitioned the government for hospital reforms, and served as an inspiration for the founding of the Red Cross by Jean Henri Dunant.kHenry Ford's Forever Car
1909 AD
DETROIT, MICHIGAN
Though Henry Ford is often remembered for his automobiles, the cars he produced were not nearly as noteworthy as the way he produced them.
Though an inventive man, the idea that made Ford a huge success may not seem so inventive. It was to design a good car, then just keep making the same model forever.
And the car he designed was the Model T. It was cheap, simple, rugged, dependable and easy to maintain. It's simplicity meant it was ideal for assembly line production, a process the Ford Motor Company invented and which almost all manufacturing plants use today. In fact, to keep manufacturing as simple as possible, the Ford Motor Company offered the Model T in just one color. Ford once said his customers could have any color car they wanted, "as long as it's black."
Ford first experimented with mass production at his Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit, where he built a 30- to 40-foot assembly line of railroad ties. The chassis were put on one end and pulled forward with rope at a rate that allowed workmen to assemble each car.
His later Highland Park and Rouge River plants were devoted to the assembly line concept. Between 1909 and 1927, 15.7 million Model T cars rolled off the line. But in 1927 slipping sales forced Ford to reluctantly announce the company would stop making the car he hoped would last forever. It was replaced by the Model A.
The Fourth on the Eighth
July 8, 1776 AD
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
The first American Independence Day celebration was not on the Fourth of July, but the Eighth of July, 1776.
On the Fourth, the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence telling the world that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states."
Four days later in Philadelphia there was a parade with cannons and the ringing of the Liberty Bell.
The next year Philadelphia celebrated again, this time on July fourth with a parade, guns, bells and fireworks. By the end of the Revolutionary War, soldiers returning home carried the idea of the celebration with them.
Since then Independence Day is celebrated each Fourth of July throughout the United States with fireworks, games and patriotic displays.ªFrancis' Joy and Poverty
1202 AD
ASSISI, ITALY
If the young men of Assisi, Italy, were having a party, you could bet Giovanni Francesco Bernardone was there as king of the revelers.
But after a sickness in 1202, Francis became dissatisfied with his life and set off on a military expedition, but on his first day he fell sick again and came home to Assisi. Returning to his old ways, Francis and a band of revelers were parading through town when suddenly his companions noticed he was missing. Retracing their steps they found him in a trance, from which he emerged a completely changed man who was devoted to solitude and prayer.
Another turning point in Francis' life came one day when he saw a leper as he was walking along the street. Francis abhorred lepers and passed him by, but his conscience bothered him. Suddenly he turned around, went back to the leper, gave the leper his money and kissed his hand.
From that day, Francis began helping lepers and working in hospitals.
But Francis' father was afraid he would give away all his money, so he disinherited him. In response, Francis took off even the clothes his father had provided. Covered with a borrowed cloak he went to live on Mt. Subasio, where he rebuilt a ruined chapel.
Francis's life of joy and poverty attracted disciples, who were the beginning of the Franciscan monastic order. Francis preached throughout north-central Italy and undertook missionary trips to Muslims in Palestine, Spain and Egypt.╧Franklin's Many Talents
1752 AD
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Flying a kite in a lightning storm is dumb. But the first person to try that dangerous experiment was brilliant.
When Benjamin Franklin flew his kite in 1752, he wanted to know if lightning was electricity. He risked his life to find out that it is, then made good use of his discovery by inventing the lightning rod.
Franklin was born in 1706, the third youngest of 17 children. He was an accomplished printer and writer, he published a newspaper and almanac, served as Philadelphia's postmaster, established the city's first library and fire department, reformed the police department, had the streets paved and founded the city's schools. He studied ocean currents, invented bifocal lenses and the Franklin stove.
He helped draft the Declaration of Independence and helped persuade France to aid the Americans during the Revolutionary War, thus ensuring its success.
But perhaps his crowning performance was at the Constitutional Convention. Big states wanted representation according to population while small states wanted equal representation for each state. Franklin proposed the solution: two houses of Congress, one based on equal representation for each state and one based on population.iRousseau's Revolution
1789 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
On July 14, 1789, the gloomy old Bastille prison in Paris surrendered to a ragtag band of revolutionaries.
It marked the beginning of the French Revolution, a republican movement that had its roots in the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the example of the American Revolution. But while the Americans saw much that was good in their British background, the French tried to wipe away all traces of the old regime by creating everything from a new religion to new names for the months.
The experiment worked and didn't work. The republican ideal -- the idea that people can govern themselves -- has survived and flourished, but the French revolutionary government itself degenerated into anarchy and violence that eventually led to the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte.
For instance, Maximilien Robespierre used his position on the Committee of Public Safety to encourage the bloody Reign of Terror that he hoped would help set up a society based on Rousseau's ideas (though mass executions were not what Rousseau had in mind). Between June 12 and July 28, 1794 alone, at least 1,285 people were executed by the guillotine, one of the last of which was Robespierre himself.
In the painting to the right, Eugène Delacroix portrayed Liberty holding high the French tricolor flag as she leads the people against the barricades. The man in the top hat was meant to symbolize the middle class, and those around him symbolized the lower class. Though this was the alliance that overthrew the French government in July 1830, by the time the picture was shown in 1831, the middle-class/lower-class alliance had dissolved.àThe Mystery of Life
1 Billion BC
The first thing to remember about simple life forms is that there is nothing simple about them. The most basic cell has been compared to a factory carrying out as many functions as every type of factory on Earth put together.
Therefore, it is still something of a mystery how living things were first formed, but many scientists believe that in Earth's early ages rain carried chemicals from the air and ground into the oceans, making a salty soup out of which life evolved.
Though the molecules that make up living things are much more complicated than those found in the primitive oceans, experiments have shown that when acted upon by certain sources of energy, chemicals found on the young Earth could have produced the amino acids and nucleotide bases that are the building blocks of life. Other theories suggest that these building blocks could have hooked together into more complicated proteins and nucleic acids to form "protocells," precursors to true living cells.
Some scientists theorize that after eons of reacting with each other and with other chemicals, some protocells developed skins that could absorb chemicals and grow larger without bursting. Gradually, over many generations, surviving protocells became more complex until some of them were able to grow and then split into two identical copies of the original cell, at which point they would be alive.
But other scientists, such as Nobel Prize winning biochemist Francis Crick, consider this chain of events so vastly improbable that they speculate early life forms may have drifted in from outer space.
Scientists are still searching for definite answers to the complex mystery of life.⌠Life on Earth Tomorrow
Beyond 2000
What will the next century be like? Will we cure cancer, build space factories and have a shuttle service to the moon, or will there be increasingly bad environmental problems, shortages, or even nuclear warfare.
There is no shortage of predictions about what the next century will be like.
Some of the more upbeat projections are that:
-- Man will cure both cancer and the common cold.
-- Seawater will be easily desalinated.
-- Superconductivity will make electrical devices much more efficient.
-- There will be regular flights from the earth to the moon.
-- Orbiting solar power stations will transmit electricity to Earth.
-- It will be possible to clone human organs.
-- New drugs will help people learn, or will help them change bad habits.
-- Genetic engineering will increase farm productivity dramatically.
-- Chemical treatments will control aging, enabling people to live to be 150 or 200.
But there are also the unpleasant predictions:
-- Nations may use nuclear weapons in their battles.
-- As the number of people in developing countries grows, there could be increasing shortages of food and minerals.
-- Immigration to wealthy nations could cause racial and cultural problems.
-- Environmental problems could degrade the quality of life on Earth.éGalileo Challenges Aristotle
1630 AD
PISA, ITALY
When Galileo Galilei wrote a book in 1630 maintaining that the earth revolved around the sun -- not the other way around -- he not only challenged Ptolemy and Aristotle, but also the view of the Catholic Church, which had adopted their opinion as its own.
Galileo's explorations with his telescope led him to the same conclusion as the Polish astronomer Copernicus, who said the sun is the center of the solar system.
But Galileo didn't only challenge Aristotle on the position of the earth in the heavens; he also challenged Aristotle's belief that objects of different weights would fall at different speeds.
According to one story, Galileo dropped two objects of different weight from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show they would both hit the ground at the same time.
When Galileo first declared his views, he was dismissed from the University of Pisa in 1591 for his attacks on Aristotle, and was forced by the church to recant his sun-centered view of the solar system.
But eventually both scientists and the church came to see that Galileo was correct, and today his discoveries are central to our understanding of the universe.
The Bonehead of Notre Dame
c1240 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
What -- you may ask -- is this boneheaded creature doing perched atop a beautiful cathedral?
This carved stone demon, on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, was not placed there to be attractive. This monster -- and those on some other European cathedrals -- was designed to teach a religious lesson.
In the Middle Ages, when the cathedrals of Europe were built, the population was mostly illiterate, and the themes of the Christian faith were often conveyed in part through the artistry of the great churches.
These demons -- originally painted in living color -- were meant to remind people of the reality of Hell and the torments that awaited the unfaithful.
These sculptures developed from lion-head water spouts on the sides of ancient Greek buildings. But instead of using lions, the designers in the Middle Ages sculpted the water spouts (called "gargoyles") in the shape of demons. Then they developed free-standing monsters, which are properly called "chimera," though they are popularly called gargoyles as well.The Colorful Grand Canyon
1540 AD
GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA
Just before dusk, with the low rays of the sun striking its variously colored granite, sandstone, shale and limestone walls, the Grand Canyon lights up in brilliant and beautiful colors.
It is indeed a "grand" canyon, as deep as one mile and 18 miles wide in places. The canyon is in a national park at the north edge of the State of Arizona in an area the size of the State of Rhode Island.
Through the canyon flows the Colorado River, which scientists say cut the canyon into its many rocky formations over millions of years.
The first European to see the canyon was García López de Cárdenas, who encountered it in 1540 as part of Francisco Coronado's expedition in the Pacific Southwest.
The Grand Canyon area was made a national park in 1919.ïGenji: The First Novel
1001-1015 AD
KYOTO, JAPAN
The world's first real novel -- and one of the longest -- is "Genji Monogatari" ("The Tale of Genji"), a tale describing the happy and sad romances of a Japanese prince named Genji (meaning "Shining One"), and of his friends, relatives and descendents.
The book spans several generations, and describes pleasant entertainments in court, painting and poetry contests, to solemn monastery ceremonies.
"Genji" was written around 1001 to 1015 AD by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in waiting for Japanese Empress Akiko at the then-capital of Heian (now Kyoto). The novel, which is made up of approximately 630,000 word-characters brushed onto the paper, was a major undertaking for Murasaki, who also had to perform her court duties.
In her diary, Murasaki says she loved books, but didn't let on since bookworms -- especially women bookworms -- were unpopular. She also found Akiko's court to be a dull place, so perhaps she wrote the novel to fill her free time.
Some have described "Genji" as tedious but valuable for its glimpses into early Japanese life, and particularly court life, while others have praised it as an excellent work of literature.
In Japan, of course, it has received the widest attention. More than 10,000 Japanese books have referred to the tale, and in the 13th Century a 54-volume commentary was written about it. In 1960 a Japanese publisher released a "Tale of Genji" encyclopedia.½Emperor Norton's Bridge
1933 to 1937 AD
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
In 1869 the Oakland Daily News published a suggestion by Joshua Norton -- a local eccentric known to himself as Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico -- that a bridge be built across the Golden Gate just north of San Francisco, California.
Nobody took Norton's claim to a throne seriously, but his bridge plan had merit, and though it took a while his idea caught on and construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge in February 1933.
The massive, bright orange structure was designed by bridge-builder Joseph B. Strauss. It is a mile long and features cables that can each hold 200 million pounds, 746-foot-high towers that are the tallest in the world, and a main span that is 4,200 feet long.
For 27 years after its completion in 1937, the $37 million bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Today it is superceded by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York Harbor.╡Ghiberti's Great Gates
1424 AD
FLORENCE, ITALY
How would you like to spend almost 50 years of your life making two sets of doors? That is what Lorenzo Ghiberti did, and those doors made him famous.
Ghiberti was born in Florence, Italy, and learned goldsmithing from his stepfather. When the black plague struck the city in 1400, he moved to Romagna where he helped paint frescoes. But he returned to Florence when his stepfather told him about a very special competition.
In Florence is a beautiful eight-sided building called the Baptistry with four sets of double doors. One set of doors was made of sculpted brass panels by Andrea Pisano, who had lived about 100 years previously.
But the Florentines decided that the other doors should be the same as Pisano's sculpted doors, so they held a competition.
Ghiberti entered a year-long competition, which required him to create a door panel featuring the biblical character Abraham and his son Isaac. The artist who won would be hired to produce a full set of doors.
Of the six competing artists, only Ghiberti didn't keep his work secret. Instead, he invited his friends to make suggestions.
He depicted "The Sacrifice of Isaac," a remarkable technical achievement since with the entire panel was cast in one piece. He also showed Isaac nude, which was one of the first times during the Renaissance that an artist had used a male nude.
When the entries were judged in 1402 the judges were stumped. They couldn't decide between Ghiberti and architect Filippo Brunelleschi. So Brunelleschi solved the problem. He generously said Ghiberti's sculpture was better than his and withdrew from the contest, letting Ghiberti win.
Ghiberti and his assistants worked 20 years on one set of bronze doors, which were installed in 1424. The double doors had 28 sculpted panels, most of them featuring incidents from the life of Jesus.
The success of these doors led to a request for second pair for another of the doors to the Baptistry.
Ghiberti worked on a second set for 27 years, from 1425 to 1452. A century later Michelangelo said these doors, featuring 10 scenes from Old Testament, were so wonderful they were fit to be the gates of paradise, so ever since they've been called the "Gates of Paradise."
]Rome's Bloody Sport
264 BC
ROME, ITALY
At the funeral of their father in 264 BC, Marcus and Decimus Brutus introduced an ugly sport into Roman life -- man fighting man to the death solely for the pleasure of spectators.
Six gladiators fought that day, but it was only the beginning. The taste for these bloody spectacles spread and soon there were both private and state-sponsored gladiatorial events. Emperor Titus, one of the better Roman emperors, held a 100-day gladiator show in which 9,000 animals were slain. Emperor Trajan exhibited 5,000 gladiators, and in 90 AD Emperor Domitian held a spectacle in which dwarfs fought women.
Gladiators were generally criminals, prisoners of war or slaves who were armed with nets, spears, tridents or firebrands. After training, they were sent to the arena to fight each other or wild animals. Most famous of the gladiators was Spartacus, who led a gladiator's revolt against the Romans in 73 to 71 BC.
In 326 AD the practice was suppressed by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, and was again outlawed in 404 AD by Honorius, though it appears to have continued for some time after that.
└Great Wall: A Raider Dissuader
228-210 BC
NORTHERN CHINA
One of the largest man-made structures in the world, one that can even be seen from space, is the Great Wall of China, often called the Eighth Wonder of the World.
This engineering marvel is about 20 feet tall and 13 feet wide and winds for approximately 1,500 miles across valleys, mountains, and rivers -- from the Pacific Ocean almost half-way across modern China.
The Great Wall is a stone and earth structure built about 228-210 BC under the direction of the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Pi to keep out nomadic raiders living in what is now Mongolia. The emperor joined smaller sections of wall that had been constructed earlier into one long fortification with towers at intervals.⌠Picasso Paints War
1937 AD
GUERNICA, SPAIN
In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German pilots fighting for General Francisco Franco bombed to destruction the little town of Guernica. Thousands of people were killed and injured.
The massacre so deeply angered the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso that he used all his genius to show the world the cruelty of war. For ten days he sketched and re-sketched, then went to work with his brush to create "Guernica," a 10-foot high by 20-foot wide painting of dark colors showing a jumbled assembly of stark figures in agony and rage.
Later, the German ambassador visited the artist at his home in France. Seeing a photograph of "Guernica," he said, "So you did that, Monsieur Picasso?"
"No!" snapped the artist, "You did it!"
Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain, but lived in France from 1904 until his death in 1973. He is considered one of the greatest of 20th Century artists.
He was primarily a painter, but in later life took up sculpture and ceramics.
In his early work, Picasso used shades of blue to capture the tension and inner pain of his subjects. Then, for a while, he attempted to create a purely abstract form of art with paintings that bore little resemblance to recognizable objects. Beginning in 1918 he returned to a more representational style, then adopted the distorted and often angular style for which he is most famous. In 1945, with the end of World War II, his work began to take on a more cheerful and relaxed quality that he maintained for the rest of his life.Frank Lloyd Wright's Design
1943 AD
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The Guggenheim Museum in New York is home of one of the world's greatest collections of modern art. And, fittingly, the building itself is a work of modern art.
Instead of the traditional rectangular building with various flat floors, architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the museum as a six-story, circular, glass-domed structure with a spiral ramp surrounding a hollow core. This means art viewers can take the elevator to the top of the building and walk down the ramp to the bottom. There are no stairs to climb, no masses of rooms to get lost in, and no chance of missing a single piece of art.
The Guggenheim -- designed in 1943, but not completed until 1960 -- was one of the last major projects in Wright's remarkable architectural career.
Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, and studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin. After working as a draftsman, he set out on his own. His designs followed the work of other modern architects in rejecting the highly-ornamented design of the previous century in favor of simplicity. These architects believed that the form of a building should harmonize with its function.
Much of Wright's early work is in what is called "Prairie Style." Buildings designed in this fashion reflect the flatness of the prairie in their low, horizontal appearance. Many of them were built in the Chicago area.
Though he designed several commercial buildings, such as the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, one of his most famous works is the "Fallingwater" house on Bear Creek near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a low, horizontal house that incorporates a waterfall into the design.
The Guitar Electrifies Music
50 AD
SOUTH CENTRAL ASIA
The instrument used by so many rock, soul, and classical musicians today is not as new as you might imagine. The earliest guitar-like instrument appeared in Central Asia shortly after the beginning of the Christian Era.
The name "guitar" may be derived from a harp-like instrument called the "kithara," used by the ancient Greeks.
During the Renaissance the guitar was called the "Guitarra" and was about half as large as a typical guitar today. The earliest printed music for the guitar appeared in 1546.
During this time, the guitar was considered unimportant compared to the lute and vihuela (an instrument similar to a fiddle). In fact, it was considered a vulgar folk instrument.
Well, the people are not always wrong. While the vihuela has disappeared, and the lute is rarely used, the underrated guitar has virtually taken over today's musical scene.
Experiments with electric guitars began in the early 1920s. In the early 1930s, Leo Fender and his associates significantly improved electric guitars by using one pick-up magnet for each guitar string rather than one large bar or horseshoe magnet for all the strings.
In 1943 Fender began producing the first solid-body electric guitars. At first, other guitar companies made fun of them, but as Fender's sales grew higher than theirs, they stopped laughing and started copying.
Whether you listen to the brilliant technique of classical guitarist Andres Segovia or the hot licks of rock musician Eddie Van Halen, the "vulgar" guitar has certainly come into its own.OFrom Iron Pots to Rifles
c1300 AD
EGYPT
While the Chinese invented gunpowder, the idea of using it to shoot a projectile belongs to others, possibly the Arabs.
The first cannons to appear in Europe turned up in the 1300s. Primitive pots-de-fer (iron pots) were reportedly used at the battle of Crécy in 1346. These were bottle-shaped devices containing gunpowder. The projectile was an iron arrow inserted in the neck.
There have been three major improvements in guns over the following centuries. The first was the development of increasingly effective methods of igniting the charge that propelled the projectile. The second was rifling, spiraling grooves along the barrel of the gun that spins the bullet and makes it fly straight. The third was the development of breech loading, which meant the gun could be loaded from the back instead of from the front.
Today bullets are attached to metal cartridges filled with explosive and backed by a primer (a small cap of a chemical that explodes when struck). When a pin strikes the primer, the chemical explodes, igniting the main charge and propelling the bullet through the barrel.ìGutenberg's Metal Letters
1440 AD
MAINZ, GERMANY
Before the invention of movable type, printers would laboriously carve all the words for an entire printed page from a single block of wood.
But then, around 1440 AD, Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, came up with the idea of casting single letters in metal and then simply aligning them in a form to make up a page. This not only made it quick to assemble a page, but when the printer was finished using them to print one page, he could use the same letters to make a completely different page. By cutting costs, Gutenberg's process made books more widely available and led directly to the spread of knowledge.
Gutenberg's most famous effort was the beautiful Latin Bible he printed. Even though he had invented a faster way to do printing, it still took many workmen laboring on six printing presses several months to print 200 of these Bibles, of which 21 complete copies remain today.
Gutenberg was not the first to invent movable type, and he may not even have been the first European to come up with the idea. The Chinese had the same idea about 400 years earlier, but the huge number of Chinese characters made the invention impractical in that part of the world.
Interestingly, the invention of movable type is similar to the development of the personal computer. Both inventions have dramatically cut the cost and time involved in communicating, and both have radically changed the world.
yNo King George in America
1789 AD
WASHINGTON, D.C.
In 1782, following the American Revolution, Col. Lewis Nicola suggested to General George Washington that the army establish a monarchy and make him king.
It might have happened. Washington was loved by his troops; he had endured a difficult war with his men and they had little love for the Continental Congress, which had given them such inadequate support.
But Washington believed firmly in democracy, and was appalled at Nicola's suggestion: "Banish these thoughts from your mind," he replied.
Washington was born in 1732 in Virginia and served as an officer in the British army during the French and Indian War. In 1758 he was elected to Virginia's House of Burgesses, where he served for 15 years. With the advent of the revolution, he was made commander-in-chief of the army by the Continental Congress. One of the most famous pictures of him is an inaccurate work showing him crossing the Delaware River standing up in a boat, not a very smart thing to do in a boat.
Following the war, he served as president of the Constitutional Convention, and in 1789 was elected to be the first president of the United States.{Yosemite: Grizzly Bear Valley
1905 AD
YOSEMITE VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
One of the most spectacular sights of the spectacular Yosemite National Park is Half Dome, a magnificent rock that dominates the head of this glacier-carved valley.
Yosemite Valley is a deep valley in the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California. The valley floor is about 4,000 feet above sea level, surrounded on either side by 3,000- to 4,000-foot cliffs punctuated by fleecy waterfalls. The 7.5-mile-long valley is covered with lovely wooded areas and flowering meadows.
Yosemite was discovered by Indians at some unknown time, but came to the attention of the general public in 1851 when Major James Savage and members of Mariposa battalion pursued Indians into the valley. Savage's Indian guides told him the name of the valley, which he heard as "Yo-sém-i-ty," meaning "grizzly bear."
Pictures of the area by artist Thomas Ayres made Yosemite's scenery know to the public, but seeing the area at first was difficult, requiring a determined hike or horseback ride. But by 1900 the first automobile had entered the valley.
At the urging of naturalist John Muir, and others, the area was first protected by Congress in 1864, and later made a National Park.
Muir also was one of the main proponents of the idea that glacier action created the valley, an explanation that is now generally accepted.
Today, Yosemite attracts more than 3 million visitors a year.πThe Harness: Early High Tech
c500 to c800 AD
SOUTHERN EUROPE
A horse harness is a fairly simple device. It consists of a collar for the horse to pull against, straps to connect the collar with a plow or vehicle, and the bridle and reins, which allow the driver to control the horse's direction.
But for Europe during the Middle Ages, the horse harness was a wonderful invention. Formerly farmers had to use oxen to plow, but oxen were slow and expensive to maintain.
When the horse harness came to Europe (possibly from the Arabs or Vikings) horses could be used to do the plowing, and they could plow twice as much as an ox. When used together with a new plow and horseshoes, the horse harness caused food production to soar, which enabled Europe's population to expand as well.
Hawaii: Strategic and Beautiful
1907 AD
HAWAII
Millions of years ago, on the ocean floor in the mid Pacific, volcanos began erupting, spewing hot magma into the ocean. Over thousands of years, this rock built up and formed a chain of islands known today as the Hawaiian Islands.
These islands have wonderfully rich volcanic soil and warm weather, ideal for growing such crops as sugarcane, pineapples and flowers. Ideal too, for the tourist industry.
Hawaii, the 50th state of the United States, is a chain is made up of five major islands: Hawaii (sometimes called "The Big Island" because of its size), Oahu (where most of the people live, and the site of the capital, Honolulu), Kauai, Maui, and Molakai.
Hawaii is important not only for its agriculture and tourist trade, but also for defense purposes. Pearl Harbor, located on Oahu, is a major port for the United States Pacific fleet.
The Hawaiian Islands were originally independent and governed by Queen Liliuokalani. But she was overthrown in 1893 (with some unauthorized help by American troops from a warship in the harbor) and the new government asked to become part of the United States.
President Grover Cleveland declined to accept the islands, but after the Spanish-American war, the strategic importance of the islands became apparent, and in 1898, under President William McKinley, the United States assumed sovereignty of the islands, which became the 50th state in 1959. Hemingway: Life is Courage
1899-1961
CUBA
What makes life meaningful? For American novelist and short-story writer Ernest Hemingway, it was courage. The characters in his works might not win, but they would live and die bravely.
Hemingway is well known for his novels of war, big game hunting, fishing and bullfighting. One of his most famous works, "The Old Man and the Sea," describes an old fisherman's fight to keep a giant fish he caught from being eaten by sharks.
Another of his famous works, "For Whom the Bell Tolls," describes a guerilla fighter during the Spanish Civil War who knew he was doomed to fail.
For much of his life, Hemingway lived the life he described in his novels.
He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and spent his summers in the outdoors, at Walloon Lake in Upper Michigan.
He volunteered to fight in World War I, but was rejected for the army because of a bad eye. So he became an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was injured in 1918. The Italian government honored him for bravery. His novel, "A Farewell to Arms," draws upon his wartime experience in Italy.
Hemingway became a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and began writing novels. His first successful book was "The Sun Also Rises," a pessimistic look at the post-World War I generation.
Later he raised money for the loyalist side during the Spainish Civil War. In World War II, he organized an anti-submarine patrol off the coast of Cuba, where he was living, flew with Royal Air Force, and participated in the Normandy invasion.
After the war he lived in Cuba with his fourth wife. In 1953 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and in 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
He moved to Idaho when the communists came to power in Cuba, but suffered from depression and loss of memory. In 1961 he killed himself with a shotgun.
T Heraclitus: Change is All
c540-475 BC
WESTERN TURKEY
Nothing stays the same for very long.
In brief, that is the philosophy of an early Greek thinker named Heraclitus.
Very little is known about Heraclitus, except that he was born and lived in Ephesus (in what is now Turkey) of wealthy parents and that he wrote a book called, "On the Universe," of which only 130 fragments remain.
In it he makes some rather strange speculations on the heavens. The stars, he said, are boats into which glowing evaporations from the earth have gathered. We can see the gleaming cargos most of the time, but sometimes the boats turn away and the shining is shielded from our eyes, resulting in what we would call an eclipse.
More interesting are his observations of the world around him, which can be broken down into four themes.
The first of these is that conflict is constant. When things remain the same for a while, he said, it is because opposite forces are balanced, like a bowstring that holds its shape by being pulled by the archer in one direction and by the bow in the other direction. Examples of such opposites are day and night, summer and winter, life and death. He said this harmony is maintained by the goddess Justice and her avenging Furies.
Second, everything is part of a whole. Everything comes from fire and all things return to fire, he said.
Third, everything is changing. This is perhaps best summed up in Heraclitus observation that: "You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters forever flow in upon you."
Fourth, is the idea of contrasts. Heraclitus notes that while gold is valuable to men, donkeys would prefer straw, and while sea water is great for fish, men drown in it, and even though there are wise men, even they are as dumb as apes compared to God.
Plato, an unsympathetic observer of the Heraclitist philosophy, tells an interesting story of some Heraclitists who seem to have taken the idea of change a bit too far. He said they refused to talk about anything because that would imply the continued existance of the thing under discussion.
Others have felt that his idea that all is just change seems to make life rather pointless, and have therefore refered to Heraclitus as "The Dark Philosopher."
Still, Heraclitus' observation that change is fundamental has been picked up repeatedly -- though in different forms -- by philosophers as different as Aristotle and Hegel.°The End of the Hindenburg
May 6, 1937
LAKEHURST, NEW JERSEY
The 803-foot-long Hindenburg had almost completed its first transatlantic flight from Frankfurt, Germany, and was coming in to its mooring site at Lakehurst, New Jersey.
A storm had just passed and it now appeared safe to land, so the great airship dropped to 200 feet, threw out the landing cables and approached the mooring mast. Newsmen were on hand to record the first arrival of the great airship.
Suddenly a bright flash appeared near the upper fin on the Hindenburg's tail. Instantly, the flash became a red fireball that engulfed the hydrogen-filled ship.
As the reporters recorded the disaster, the great airship slowly slid to the ground, a blazing heap of twisted metal.
Surprisingly, only 36 people died. Many simply stepped off the gondola as it touched the ground.
The Hindenburg burned so quickly because it was filled with flammable hydrogen. The Germans had planned to fill it with non-flammable helium, but the United States had a monopoly on helium and was afraid to sell it to them for fear the Nazi government would use it in warfare.
But what ignited the hydrogen is still a mystery. Some people think it was a spark from the passing storm or from the mooring mast. Others think it may have been sabotage by anti-Nazis.
The Religion of Many Faces
2000 BC
INDIA
Though it is a complex religion that has changed over thousands of years, Hinduism finds its roots in seeds sown by tribes that invaded India about 4000 years ago.
Like the Romans and Greeks in the western world, these Aryan invaders from Central Asia believed in many gods, as do many Hindus today. And as conquerors, they believed in staying in charge, which seems to be the origin of the Indian caste system (strict social levels).
Though it retains a belief in many gods and in caste -- though there have been strong efforts to abolish caste -- these are no longer the real core of Hinduism.
Over the centuries Hindus came to believe that everything that is (including their many gods), is God, a belief called "pantheism." Though some continue to believe in the personal gods, others would say these gods are illusions, or masks, of the universal "Brahman." Brahman, though often portrayed in human-like form, is considered by most Hindu thinkers as being completely impersonal.
These masks represent a wide range of characteristics of Brahman, from mighty Shiva, the destroyer/creator, to his wife, who as the golden Uma is a god of beauty, light, and a mediator of conflicts. But as the bloodthirsty Kali, she wears snakes and a necklace of her sons' skulls.
For the Hindu, salvation is to escape an almost unending cycle of reincarnation caused by "karma," which is essentially a very strict version of the law of cause and effect. Karma says that whatever state a person finds himself in -- rich or poor, happy or sad -- it is the result of that person's actions and attitudes in past lives.
For many, escaping reincarnation means trying to obey the duties of their social caste. If a person is good enough, he can be reborn into higher and higher castes and eventually break free of reincarnation.
Other Hindus try to escape the cycle of life by practicing yoga, an exercise of self-discipline and meditation to persuade themselves that all is illusion except Brahman.
Another method is to search for salvation through intense devotion to one of millions of gods, such as the popular Rama and Krishna, who are also considered "avatars," or personal incarnations of the impersonal Brahman.
Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world today, with about 690 million adherents.IHokusai: Mad About Painting
1880 AD
TOKYO, JAPAN
Hokusai Katsushuka painted big! One of his paintings was so large that people could only see the whole thing from their rooftops. But he also painted small, on one occasion painting two sparrows on a grain of rice.
Hokusai was not only a showman of art, but an astonishingly prolific artist who produced about 30,000 paintings during his lifetime. At a rate of just one picture a day, it would have taken him more than 82 years to produce that many. No wonder he often signed his paintings, "The old man mad about painting."
In Japan, painting had always been the art of the philosopher and poet, that is, until the 17th Century when a new style appeared called "Ukiyo-e" (meaning "scenes from the passing world"). Hokusai was a master of this popular style, which emphasized the here and now.
Hokusai was born in Edo (now Tokyo, Japan) and raised by a mirror maker. Later he worked with a bookseller and wood engraver, then, at age 19, entered the shop of Katsugawa Shunsho, an ukiyo-e painter, but was expelled for disregarding his master's artistic instructions.
His early work in the 1790s depicted slender women, legends, and animals. He also illustrated a vast number of books, including "Mangwa," a 15-volume pictorial encyclopedia of Japanese life that appeared from 1812 to 1875, "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji," "Views of Famous Bridges," "Waterfalls," "Views of the Lu-chu Islands," and his three-volume work, "Hundred Views of Mount Fuji," which appeared from 1823 to 1829.
Copies of his "Hundred Views of Mount Fuji" came to Europe in 1880 and greatly influenced European artists.
Though Hokusai's work sold well, he remained a poor man because his eldest son spent money -- Hokusai's money -- extravagantly. He often hid from bill collectors and frequently moved to new homes to escape the dirt he let accumulate and the back rent he failed to pay.
Hokusai painted until the day of his death and always maintained a certain humility about his art and a willingness to learn. On his deathbed he said, "If Heaven would only grant me ten more years, I would have become a real painter."
╬The Nearsighted Telescope
1990 AD
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA
On a clear day, you may think you can see forever, but even a clean night sky is a barrier to telescopes aimed at distant parts of our universe.
This was the obstacle that the Hubble Space Telescope was designed to overcome.
On April 25, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery placed the telescope into an orbit 381 miles above the surface of the earth, a particularly high orbit so the telescope would not encounter any trace of the earth's atmosphere.
Scientists were excited. They calculated the 94.5-inch reflector telescope mirror would let the satellite see with 10 times the clarity of an earthbound telescope.
But when they began operating the telescope, they discovered a major problem -- Hubble was nearsighted. The mirror had been improperly curved, so the focus was only a third as sharp as planned.
Because of this carelessness, the telescope's usefulness will be limited until the problem can be fixed, which could take several years.rNature's Helicopters
COLOMBIA
There it is! A beautiful little bird with a metallic green or red throat, hovering in midair in the sunshine, wings beating so fast it sounds like a hum.
Hummingbirds are one of nature's fascinating and beautiful creatures. With their wings beating 38 to 78 times a second, they can hover virtually motionless and then dart off instantly in any direction.
There are 350 species in the hummingbird family, and they live in the Western Hemisphere from southern Alaska to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, but most varieties live in the rain forests of Colombia and Ecuador where they can easily find the flower nectar and insects they consume in such huge amounts.
Hummingbirds eat an average of half their body weight in sugar every day, and though they are small, some species migrate the 2,500 miles from Alaska to Central America every autumn and spring.nStorehouses of Knowledge
c300 BC
ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT
Welcome to the Knowledge Adventure Library! You can use the card catalog in the library picture to find any topic you wish.
Just click on the card catalog drawer containing the topic you want to find, then click on the topic itself. Knowledge Adventure will take you right to a screen on that topic.
For help, click on the "Help" sign or the librarian. To play a game, click on the checker board.
Though electronic libraries such as this one are new, other types of libraries have been around for ages. One of the earliest libraries was a collection of about 10,000 clay tablets discovered in Nineveh (an ancient city in what is now Iraq) during an archaeological excavation in 1850.
But perhaps the greatest storehouses of knowledge in the ancient world were the great libraries at Alexandria, Egypt. These libraries were greatly expanded by Ptolemy Philadelphus, the son of one of Alexander the Great's generals and the ruler of Egypt. They were frequented by many great scholars from throughout the Mediterranean world.
The Alexandrian libraries held a huge collection of volumes from throughout the Hellenistic world. Various estimates put the collection at anywhere from 400,000 to 700,000 volumes.
But as Alexandria declined in political importance, it appears the libraries also declined, and in 640 AD were completely destroyed in a fire of unknown origin.3Jefferson's Legacy
1776 AD
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA
On the Fourth of July, 1826, 50 years to the day after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson died. The same day, just a few hours later, John Adams spoke his last words and died: "Thomas Jefferson," he said, "still survives."
Jefferson and Adams had long been acquainted. In 1776 they were appointed to write the Declaration of Independence. Adams recalls that they argued about it, with Jefferson suggesting Adams write it and Adams saying Jefferson should. But Adams won the argument. A Virginian should write such an influential document, he said, and besides, "I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise." And finally, Adams said: "You can write ten times better than I can."
So Jefferson wrote one of the most important documents in United States history, a justification for the colonies to end their political ties to Great Britain.
After the American Revolution the United States was governed by the Articles of Confederation. But it was a failure, so a delegation sat down to write out a new governing document, the U.S. Constitution. Though Jefferson approved of the Constitution, he was disturbed that it contained no Bill of Rights. Later Congress created a Bill of Rights, including many of Jefferson's ideas, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and trial by jury.
In 1801 Jefferson was elected president by the House of Representatives, becoming the third president.
During his presidency, he bought the 828,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory from France, doubling size of the United States at less than three cents an acre.
In 1814, toward the end of his life, he was invited to become a member of the Board of Trustees of Albemarle Academy in Charlottesville, near his hilltop home of Monticello, later to become the University of Virginia.
Jefferson designed the college's buildings and landscaping, wrote curriculum and recruited faculty. Though there were other universities at this time, it was the first in the United States with no religious affiliation.╕ In Honor of Jefferson
1943 AD
WASHINGTON, D.C.
A grateful nation had honored presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln with monuments, but Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest givers and thinkers among the nation's presidents, had gone unrecognized.
So, in 1934, Congress created a commission to plan a memorial for Jefferson as well. The monument was dedicated on April 14, 1943, Jefferson's 200th birthday.
The building is a circular white marble structure surrounded with columns and topped by a dome, similar to the Pantheon in Rome and the Rotunda Jefferson designed for the University of Virginia. In the center is a black-granite sculpture of Jefferson.
By applying Jesus' philosophy that "There is more happiness in giving than in receiving," Jefferson accomplished much for Virginia and the struggling new United States. (Though not a Christian in the traditional sense, Jefferson respected Jesus' teachings and compiled many of them in a little volume.)
For example, at age 24, as a new Virginia legislator, Jefferson proposed letting slaveholders free their slaves; this at a time when slaves could only be released for "meritorious service." He was denounced as an enemy of his country.
Today we take the separation of church and state for granted, but in Jefferson's time the idea was radical. He did not believe all the doctrines of the Church of England, so through the Virginia Assembly he attempted to overthrow this church-state combination.
He wrote, "Almighty God hath created the mind free.... To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.... The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.... Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself...."
Eventually these ideas were incorporated in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution and have become a model to the world.
Ten days after beginning his service the Virginia Assembly was closed by the royal governor because of protests against British rule. Rather than accept the closing, the assembly moved to the Raleigh Tavern and boycotted British goods. By joining this group Jefferson began to become a revolutionary.
In 1775 Jefferson became a member of the Continental Congress where he impressed older members with his expertise in literature, science, languages, and writing. Because of this, on June 11, 1776, the 33-year-old Jefferson was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence.
In his later years, Jefferson's fortunes took a turn for the worse. Bad crops, the financial panic of 1819, and a flood which demolished the dam that provided power for his mill brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. Though he loved his books, he wanted to repay the money he owed, so he sold them to the government. These volumes formed the core of the Library of Congress, which has grown to more than 14 million volumes and is the largest library ever.
In fact, if you are over 18 and come to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., you can read a book that Jefferson held in his own hands. It is there waiting for you. Read it with the love Jefferson had for it!"Jerusalem the Unique
2000 BC
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL
Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, is unique among world cities in that it is revered by three great world religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Jews are drawn to it as the ancient capital of King David and the location of Judaism's holiest site, the Temple, which was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. The only remains of the Temple complex is a retaining wall called "The Wailing Wall," which takes its name from the crowds who stand before it to pray sorrowfully over the destruction of the Temple.
Muslims also revere the city and believe Muhammad rose to heaven from the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock mosque. This is Islam's third holiest site, after Mecca and Medina.
Interestingly, the Dome of the Rock is on the same site where the Jewish Temple was once located, a factor that has become a source of controversy between Jews and Muslims.
Christians look to Jerusalem as the site of Jesus' crucifixion, and many believe the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is built over the place where Jesus was entombed.
Because it is important to all three religions, Jerusalem has sometimes been the focus of religious disputes. Christians and Muslims fought over Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, and in a 6-day war in 1967, the Jewish state of Israel captured it from Muslim Jordan.╠The Death of Jesus
c29 AD
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL
Jesus was not of noble birth or from a wealthy family. He was a Jew born in Bethlehem in Israel sometime between 6 to 4 BC, the son of a carpenter. But though he was never wealthy or of high rank, though he never commanded an army or ruled a country, his life changed the world.
According to the New Testament, Jesus performed miracles, gave instructions on living and had conflicts with religious authorities, the last of which led to his death by crucifixion at about age 33. But far from being a defeat, the New Testament says Jesus' crucifixion was his greatest triumph, after which he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.
Jesus summarized his teaching on how to live when asked which was the greatest commandment. In response he quoted from the Hebrew scriptures: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." And, he said, the second greatest commandment is, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
Though much of the Christian scriptures are about Jesus' life, it is his death that is central to Christianity.
Death is the divine punishment for sin, the New Testament says, but because God is merciful, Jesus took the death penalty upon himself for sinners. A central requirement of Christianity, therefore, is for people to ask God for forgiveness of their sins through Jesus' sacrifice.
Today, Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with 1.7 billion adherents worldwide.┴Jupiter: King of Planets
1610 AD
FIFTH PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM
Why is it you never hear of plans to send astronauts to Jupiter?
Well, who would want to go there? Jupiter is a huge planet composed primarily of a madly swirling, electrically-charged atmosphere with a liquid hydrogen ocean perhaps 10,000 miles deep. Some scientists theorize that there is a tiny rocky core deep within Jupiter's center just inside a sea of liquid metal. It is certainly not a hospitable place for astronauts to visit.
Jupiter is about 400 million miles from Earth. If you were to shine a laser toward the Jovian system, it would take 36 minutes for the beam -- traveling at 186,000 miles per second -- to reach Jupiter.
Looking from Earth with the naked eye, Jupiter looks like a very bright star. It is the largest of all the planets. In fact, if you put all eight of the other known planets together, Jupiter would still be one-and-a-half times larger than their combined size. More than 1,300 Earths could comfortably fit inside Jupiter.
In 1610 Galileo turned his telescope toward Jupiter and was surprised to see four additional bright dots near Jupiter's equator. As he watched over several evenings, he noticed that the dots moved. The dots were moons orbiting Jupiter! It turns out that Jupiter has its very own "solar system" of orbiting mini-planets.
Jupiter and its largest moons, Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede, were visited by the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. Io, slightly larger than our moon, is extremely active. It has volcanos that erupt with such force that liquid sulfur is thrown hundreds of miles into space. This sulfur gives Io a reddish color. The other three major moons are rocky, cratered, and covered with ice. Twelve additional moons have been discovered since Galileo first looked toward the planet.
In 1664, Robert Hooke discovered on Jupiter the solar system's largest and longest-lived superhurricane. The Great Red Spot, now at least 300 years old, is a vast planetary storm system so large that two Earths could fit inside.
Because hydrogen is a wonderful rocket fuel and so much of Jupiter is made of this gas, some designers think it will make a fine "gas station" for future space flights to the farther reaches of our solar system and beyond.bKing: "I Have a Dream"
1955 AD
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA
Mrs. Rosa Parks, a black, middle-aged seamstress, was an unlikely revolutionary. When the footsore woman got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, she was just glad to find a seat.
But at another stop some white people got on, and the law required blacks give up seats for whites. She refused and was arrested.
The black community, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, urged blacks not to ride buses. The buses ran empty. White businessmen, who were hurt by the boycott, urged the problem be settled.
Montgomery made King famous, and for the rest of his life he was active in desegregation causes through a black ministers' organization called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
He fought for an end to the poll tax and other devices that prevented blacks from voting, and supported lunch-counter "sit-ins." At these sit-ins, blacks refused to leave restaurants until they were served, and sympathetic whites refused to order until the blacks were served.
Demonstrations of this type spread throughout the South, and many demonstrators were injured and some were killed.
In 1963 King organized a "March on Washington," to support a civil rights bill proposed by President John Kennedy. In front of the Lincoln Memorial he gave his most famous speech to about 200,000 people.
"I have a dream," King said, "a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson signed a comprehensive civil rights bill and King won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Then, in 1968, King went to Memphis to address a group of striking garbage men. On April 4, while standing on the balcony of his hotel, he was shot dead. His assassin was James Earl Ray, an escaped convict. Ray was later arrested by Scotland Yard in London.
But King's work was not lost. As a result of his efforts, many large cities have elected black mayors, more blacks have found white collar jobs, and many white suburbs have become integrated.*The Flaky Last Supper
1497 AD
MILAN, ITALY
"Surely not I, Lord?" the disciples cried out.
In this classic mural, "The Last Supper," Leonardo da Vinci has captured the 12 disciples' various reactions the moment after Jesus said that one of them would betray him.
Jesus is portrayed serenely alone in the center of the picture while his disciples discuss this shocking announcement in small groups on either side. Only Judas, who betrayed him, also seems to be alone.
Da Vinci finished the Last Supper in about 1497 for the dining hall of the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. He did not want to paint quickly, as the commonly-used fresco technique demanded, so he used a material of his own invention to hold the paint to the wall. Unfortunately, the invention failed, and much of the mural has flaked away over the years.ÄLeif Gets Lost
c1000 AD
NORTH AMERICAN COAST
According to an Icelandic saga, Leif Ericsson set sail from Norway on a missionary trip to Greenland, which had been settled by his father, Eric the Red. However, Leif missed Greenland. But after a long time he encountered a fertile land with wheat, vines and maple trees. Many believe he was the first European to discover North America.
When Leif returned to Greenland, others were inspired to go to the same land, which they called "Vinland." There they first traded with, and then fought, Indians or Eskimos. Though the land was fertile, the saga says they decided not to settle there because of the strife.
The story of Leif Ericsson's trip, which apparently occurred around 1000 AD, is bolstered by the discovery of a map drawn by a Swiss monk in 1440. It shows an island southwest of Greenland called Vinland, whose discovery is credited to Bjarni Herjolfsson and Leif Ericsson.WLenin: Revolution Now!
1919 AD
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
According to communist theorists, communism was an inevitable force that would sweep the world no matter what people did, but Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (or Lenin, as he called himself) was not a patient man. He wanted revolution now!
Lenin was born in 1870 to a middle-class Russian family. His parents were both teachers with leftist views and his brother was hanged for plotting against Czar Alexander III. Lenin became a Marxist and was kept under surveillance by the Czarist police.
In December 1895 Lenin was arrested in St. Petersburg and sent to jail, then was sentenced to three years in Siberia. When he was released in 1900 he went abroad for 17 years where he became an active revolutionary leader.
In his most important work, "What is to Be Done" (1902), Lenin downplayed the ability of communism to occur on its own and emphasized the professional revolutionary. Power, he argued, should be tightly held by a small, disciplined band of professionals.
Lenin insisted that communists form cells and infiltrate all political, industrial, military, cooperative, educational and athletic organizations, operating secretly when necessary or in the open when possible.
During World War I, Lenin had his chance. In 1917 a revolution toppled Czarist rule in Russia and an unstable republic took its place. But the republic continued the war against the Germans though Russian troops were sick of the battle and ripe for revolt. So, knowing he would further disrupt Russia, the Germans transported Lenin from Switzerland to Sweden, from which he entered Russia.
Though Lenin's Bolshevik party was a small one, it was disciplined and in November 1917 it seized power from the faltering republic.
The Bolsheviks quickly made peace with Germany and began instituting communism, which remained the ruling philosophy in the Soviet Union until the early 1990s.6Da Vinci: A Scientist-Artist
1507 AD
MILAN, ITALY
One of the greatest painters of history was almost as much scientist as he was artist.
Leonardo da Vinci observed nature in the meticulous manner of a scientist. He examined rocks, hills, plants and animals -- and especially people. As a young man, he would even gather friends and tell jokes so he could watch their expressions.
While living in Florence, Italy, he painted a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the young wife of a Florentine merchant. He worked on the portrait for four years, capturing her natural appearance and subtle half-smile. This "Mona Lisa," completed in 1507, became one of his most famous paintings.
On the wall of a Milan monastery is another of Da Vinci's famous works, the "Last Supper." It depicts Jesus and his disciples at the Passover meal just after he has said that one of them would betray him.
Though Da Vinci is best known as an artist, he was also knowledgeable about astronomy, anatomy, botany and geology. During his last years he sketched hundreds of inventions, including a model for a helicopter-like flying machine.
His Mom: The Statue of Liberty
1886 AD
NEW YORK HARBOR
Disgusted with his sketches for a great statue, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi had thrown them all into the ocean the night before. But now his ship was entering New York Harbor and he didn't have a single idea to present to the Americans.
Bartholdi had come to New York in 1871 to suggest that the Americans and French build a giant statue for the United States' 100th birthday that would honor the idea of liberty.
As the ship sailed into the harbor, Bartholdi noticed little Bedloe's Island with its star-shaped fort. Suddenly he knew what he would do, and rushed to his cabin to sketch a giant woman standing atop the old fort holding a torch. He even knew her name. She would be called, "Liberty Enlightening the World," and her calm, strong face would be the face of his mother.
His trip was a success. The Americans agreed to build the pedestal if the French would build the statue.
Back in Paris, Bartholdi worked without pay to build a great statue of heavy copper plate around a metal skeleton designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, who also built the Eiffel Tower.
Though Bartholdi couldn't complete the job by the 1876 centennial, he did finish the hand holding the torch, which was displayed in Philadelphia. Until then, Bartholdi's American friends had been doing mostly nothing, but on seeing the torch a committee got busy raising money.
In 1884 the statue was finished, but the pedestal was not, so Liberty just stood in Paris. Finally, Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the "World" newspaper, got fed up and used his paper to ask the "little people" to send money. They gave $100,000, enough to finish the pedestal.
On Oct. 28, 1886, dedication day, Bartholdi accidentally unveiled Liberty in the middle of Senator Evart's speech, which was immediately drowned out by the screech of boat whistles, ring of church bells, blast of cannons and music from the bands.
The Statue of Liberty, as it is now known, stands 151 feet high on top of an 89-foot tall pedestal on top of a 65-foot tall base. She wears a crown of seven spokes and holds a book of law on which is written the date of the United States' independence, July, 4, 1776.
In 1903 a brass plaque was added with a poem by Emma Lazarus that includes this famous line: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free."æ
Lincoln: From Hick to Hero
1860 AD
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Abraham Lincoln is remembered as one of the United States' greatest presidents, but that wasn't what people thought of him during the Civil War.
Then he was an amateur, a hick, a tyrant and a bungler. Not only did Southerners hate him, many Northerners did as well. They were sick of the slaughter of the Civil War. There were riots in the cities and it was very likely Lincoln would have been thrown out of office by a peace candidate. If not for General William Sherman's capture of Atlanta just before the presidential election, the United States might have become two countries.
Though it is well known that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin and was mostly self-educated, he did not jump from the cabin to the presidency.
By the time he became president he was a successful lawyer with a high income. He had served in the Illinois State Legislature, the House of Representatives and Senate. He become particularly prominent through his slavery debates with William Douglas.
Lincoln was tall and -- many thought -- rather homely. He even joked about it. When accused of being two-faced, he replied: "I leave it to my audience, If I had two faces, do you think I would wear this one?"
In 1860 Lincoln was selected as the presidential candidate of the Republican Party. Though he won the election by carrying every Northern state, the South was furious at his anti-slavery beliefs and withdrew from the Union. Lincoln tried to prevent a war between the North and South, but when Confederate forces in South Carolina fired upon the Union-held Fort Sumter, the Civil War began.
After the battle of Antietam, Lincoln announced his Emancipation Proclamation, which announced that slaves in the breakaway southern states were free.
Fearing that his proclamation would be overturned by legal means after the war, he pushed through a constitutional amendment to ban slavery forever, which was ratified in 1865.
Shortly before the fall of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, Lincoln had a disturbing dream. In it he wandered around the White House and heard people sobbing, but went from room to room and saw nobody. Then, in the East Room he saw a corpse surrounded by guards. "Who is dead in the White House?" he asked a soldier. "The President," he replied. Lincoln awoke and didn't get more sleep that night.
On April 14, 1865, just five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, were watching the comedy "Our American Cousin" at Ford Theater in Washington, when John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer, came into his box and shot him in the back of the head. The funeral was held in the East Room of the White House.î
Lindbergh: The Lone Eagle
1927 AD
OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
Though shy with people, Charles Lindbergh was not shy about flying, and his transatlantic voyage thrilled the world.
Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised on a farm near Little Falls, Minnesota. At age 18 he began attending the University of Wisconsin, but after two years quit to become a daredevil stunt flyer.
In 1924 he enlisted in the U.S. Army so he could train as a pilot, and in 1925 began flying mail between St. Louis and Chicago.
While making the mail runs, he decided to attempt the premier aviation challenge of his day. New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig had offered $25,000 to the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, and Lindbergh thought he could do it.
Several flyers had been killed or injured attempting the flight, but that didn't discourage Lindbergh. He persuaded nine St. Louis businessmen to finance a plane incorporating features of his own design. In their honor he called the craft the "Spirit of St. Louis."
When it was finished, he flew the Spirit of St. Louis from San Diego to New York (with a stop-over in St. Louis) on May 10-11, 1927. It was a record for the transcontinental flight.
Then, just before 8 a.m. on May 20, Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field in New York and headed east across the Atlantic Ocean. He landed at Le Bourget Field, near Paris, in the evening of May 21.
Thousands cheered his arrival. The press called him "Lucky Lindy," and the "Lone Eagle." The French government awarded him the French Cross of the Légion d'Honneur; Great Britain gave him the Royal Air Force Cross, and the United States awarded him the Congressional Medal of Honor and the first-ever Distinguished Flying Cross.
Later, Lindbergh flew a good-will mission throughout Latin America and wrote of his transatlantic trip in his book "We." Unfortunately, his fame also brought him great heartache by making his family an attractive target for criminals. In 1932 his son, Charles, was kidnapped and murdered.
Prior to the United States entry into World War II, Lindbergh criticized what he considered the country's drift toward involvement in the conflict, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he gave himself wholeheartedly to the fight -- in fact, too wholeheartedly.
Lindbergh repeatedly -- and effectively -- flew combat missions in the South Pacific. The only problem was that he was a civilian and so it was illegal for him to participate in military actions. But with the tacit approval of local military commanders he continued doing so until forbidden by higher authorities.
Lindbergh's "Spirit of St. Louis," shown here, is now on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.Lions: The Sociable Cats
EAST AFRICA
Unlike other members of the cat family -- who have a reputation as loners -- lions are rather social creatures, living together in prides of 10 to 35 members and sleeping or loafing about 20 hours a day and eating as much as 75 pounds in one meal.
Lions are generally a dusty yellow color, with a tuft of hair at the end of their tails and a mane around the neck of the males. Male lions range from 350 to 400 pounds and can be as long as nine feet.
Because lions are slower than many of their prey, such as zebra and antelope, they stalk their dinner, often at night when they cannot be easily seen, but when they can see quite well.
Lions once roamed Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa but now are confined mainly to the grasslands of Africa.
` Singing for his Supper
1918 AD
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
Louis Armstrong began singing for pennies on the streets of his native New Orleans at age seven, supplementing the money his mother earned after his parents separated. At 13, he was arrested and sent to a home for street waifs.
For some children in that situation, the future would have been bleak. But for Armstrong, life was just beginning. Along with the regular meals he got in the home, Armstrong got cornet lessons from the director and the warden, both of whom were amateur musicians.
His mastery of the cornet, and later the trumpet, helped Armstrong become a world-famous entertainer and a major influence on the history of jazz.
He achieved fame at an early age when he began playing with the jazz band of Joseph "King" Oliver in 1918. Oliver's "Creole Jazz Band" was the first black jazz ensemble to make recordings.
Armstrong's trumpet expertise inspired awe, and he made improvising solos not only a test of skill and invention but also an opportunity for musical imagination and emotional expression.
He formed his own band, "Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five," in 1924 and in the same year married pianist Lillian Hardin. He went on to a glorious and world-wide career in popular entertainment, introducing his famous "scat" singing style in the 1926 recording of "Heebie Jeebies." In scat singing, the voice is used like an instrument and nonsense syllables are substituted for notes.
Armstrong appeared as himself in dozens of movies, authored a book on jazz and made famous recordings of such classics as "Star Dust," "Mack the Knife," "West End Blues," and his signature song, "When It's Sleepy Time Down South."
A film biography of Armstrong, "Satchmo the Great," was released in 1957. Armstrong got the nickname "Satchmo" in the early 1930s, during his first of many European tours.
Londoners who thronged to his concerts at the Palladium dubbed him "Satchelmouth" because of his large mouth and the way his cheeks puffed out hugely when he blew his horn. The cheek-puffing was the result of improper musical technique passed on to him by his first amateur teachers.
His wife said that Armstrong's only unrealized dream was to sing the national anthem at Shea Stadium, home of his beloved New York Mets. Although he practiced for years, Armstrong never received a long-hoped-for invitation to open a Mets' game. He died of a heart attack in 1971.ΘThe Louvre's Time Machine
1546 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
Have you ever heard the word "anachronism"? It means something that doesn't seem to belong to the time it is found in. That is what some people think I.M. Pei's spidery modern glass pyramid looks like beside the old buildings of the Louvre. What do you think?
Although beautiful in its own right, many Parisians objected to this modern pyramid being situated in the center of the ancient complex of buildings known as the Louvre, Europe's premier art museum.
Before the pyramid was constructed, it was quite difficult to tour the museum conveniently. Pei's pyramid was chosen as the design which would best integrate the various departments and divisions of the museum.
Perhaps you'd like to step inside the Louvre itself now?ÆThe Greatest Living Room
1546 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
The living room of a home is rarely where most people spend most of their living time. In most European homes for example, the living room is actually reserved as a mini museum where a family's pictures, knickknacks and best furniture are on display. The Louvre is France's grand living room, or museum. In it are some of the most priceless and treasured art objects in the world.
At one time the site where the Louvre stands was used as a fortress for Philippe Augustus II (c1200 AD) and as a castle for Charles V in the 14th Century. In 1546 King Francis the First, a great art lover, began to build a great house to store his art treasures -- the Louvre. Since that time, nearly every monarch of France added to the collection. The minister of Louis the XIII, Cardinal de Richelieu (of Three Musketeers fame) made extensive additions to the collection.
Notice the large number of visitors to one of the galleries in the picture here. This scene would have been impossible before 1793. Prior to that time, all the Louvre's artwork was for the private pleasure of the French king and his guests. In 1793, after the French Revolution, the Louvre was opened to all art lovers.
The Louvre's collection of paintings extends from the 13th to the 19th centuries. Its sculptures go back to the times of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans.
What do you suppose is behind the glass in the picture?╦Last Supper: Sad but Serene
1497 AD
MILAN, ITALY
In this close-up of Jesus in Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper," you can see both the sad condition of the painting and the sad but serene expression on Jesus's face after telling his 12 disciples that one of them would betray him.
Da Vinci finished the painting in about 1497 for the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Unfortunately, the painting technique he used was experimental and much of the mural has flaked away over the years.åMartin Luther's List
1517 AD
WITTENBERG, GERMANY
When Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 debating points to the door of the Wittenberg Church in Germany in 1517, he just wanted to correct a religious abuse. But what occurred was one of the largest divisions in the history of Christianity.
Luther was an Augustinian monk and professor of theology who rigorously followed the rules of his monastery, but found no peace. Then, in the winter of 1512-13, while meditating on Romans 1:16-17, in the Bible, it struck him that sinners are made right with God by trusting in His mercy, not by their own good works.
Though central to his thinking, Luther's break with the Catholic Church didn't come over this, but over indulgences, a form of penance which often degenerated into simple payments to the church. He objected to them and nailed his challenge to the church door. In response, he was accused of heresy.
In a debate, John Eck forced Luther to concede that he placed the authority of the Bible above the Pope and church councils. And later, when asked to recant and throw his books in the fire, Luther replied that he would not unless convinced that he was wrong by Scripture or reason.
What started as a reform movement ended as a break. Protected and hidden by some government leaders, Luther continued to publish his views. Those who broke away from the Roman Catholic church to follow Luther's teachings became known as Protestants.
N"Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?"
1871 AD
UJIJI, EAST AFRICA
Few Europeans have contributed as much to the exploration of Africa as a gentle Scottish missionary named David Livingstone.
Livingstone was a curious combination of missionary, doctor, explorer, scientist and anti-slavery activist. He spent 30 years in Africa, exploring almost a third of the continent, from its southern tip almost to the equator. He was the first white man to see Victoria Falls and though he never discovered the source of the Nile, one of his goals, he eliminated some possibilities and thereby helped direct the efforts of others.
In 1865, at age 52, Livingstone set out on his last and most famous journey. He soon lost his medicine, animals and porters, but struggled on almost alone.
At a village on the Lualaba River he witnessed the slaughter of villagers by slave traders. The letter he sent home describing the event so infuriated the public that the English government pressured the Sultan of Zanzibar to stop the slave trade. The pressure was only partially successful.
On Nov. 10, 1871 in the village of Ujiji, on the east side of Lake Tanganyika, Livingstone encountered Henry Stanley, who had been sent by the New York Herald Tribune newspaper to find and help him.
With Stanley's supplies Livingstone continued his explorations, but he was weak, worn out and suffering from dysentery. Then, on the morning of April 30, 1872, his two African assistants found him kneeling at his bedside, dead. They dried his body and carried it and his papers on a dangerous 11-month journey to Zanzibar, a trip of 1,000 miles. From there his body was taken to England.╩Hidden City of the Andes
1500s AD
MACHU PICCHU, PERU
Led by a Peruvian guide in 1911, American explorer Hiram Bingham made his way through the jungle and up the mountain.
Suddenly, high up on the knife's edge of a mountain range, Bingham came upon a lost mountain city. Decayed and overgrown though it was, Bingham was impressed by the incredible stonework. It was, he said, "one of the finest examples of masonry I had ever seen. Clearly it was the work of a master artist."
The Inca city, called Machu Picchu -- though its original name is unknown -- is 8,000 feet above sea level and about 50 miles northwest of Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital. The fortified town had temples, plazas, houses, terraces for farming and aqueducts for water. It was connected with Cuzco by a rugged, mountain road.
Perhaps some of the Incas found refuge in Machu Picchu when the Spanish overthrew the Inca empire in the 16th Century. But while the Spanish had heard rumors of a hidden Inca city, they never found it.$Madonna of the Stairs
1492 AD
FLORENCE, ITALY
As a teenager, Michelangelo Buonarroti worked as an apprentice in Florence, learning to paint frescoes on buildings. But he longed to sculpt.
So one night he sneaked away, found a piece of marble, and with the help of friends carried it to his shop, where he secretly began work on his first sculpture.
For six months he worked on his "Madonna of the Stairs" (shown here), one of his first known works.
The sculpture, which was finished in 1492, broke new artistic ground and foreshadowed Michelangelo's coming greatness. It was the first time a Madonna and Child (Mary with her baby son Jesus) was ever shown with Jesus facing Mary. The pose was revolutionary -- and even provoking -- at the time. It was also one of the first sculptures to have various degrees of finish. The upper left corner is very rough, while other areas are highly polished. Michelangelo perfected this method in his later works.
Madonna of the Stairs and several of his other early works, are now in Casa Buonarroti, Michelangelo's quiet little home in Florence.qThe First World Tour
1480-1521 AD
STRAIT OF MAGELLAN
Like Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan was convinced there was a westerly route to the Far East, but unlike Columbus, Magellan found it.
After failing to persuade his own king, Manuel I of Portugal, to finance an expedition, Magellan went to the king of Spain, who gave him five ships and 241 men.
He set sail on Sept. 20, 1519, but after a mutiny on the coast of what is now Argentina, one ship returned to Spain.
The remaining four sailed south through what is now the Strait of Magellan and across the Pacific Ocean.
But the Pacific was far wider than Magellan had imagined. Food and water gave out and the crew ate rats, ox hides and sawdust before reaching Guam, where they obtained enough food and water to make it to the Philippines, where Magellan was killed when he joined in a fight between Filipino groups.
With only enough men left for two ships, the expedition abandoned the Concepción and sailed south to the Spice Islands, where they loaded the Trinidad and Vittoria with spices. The Trinidad then tried to return home by sailing east, back across the Pacific, but disease and leakage forced the ship to return to the Spice Islands where the crew was imprisoned by the Portuguese.
But the Vittoria continued sailing west, rounding the tip of Africa and finally making it home to Spain with just 19 men, almost three years after leaving Spain._King John Bows to the Barons
June 15, 1215 AD
RUNNYMEDE, ENGLAND
King John had been acting too uppity for the English aristocracy and clergy. Since becoming king in 1199, he demanded more military service than earlier kings, he sold governmental positions to the highest bidder and he decided legal cases without regard to law.
Chafing under his rule, barons and church leaders met at St. Albans to demand he stop the abuses. Twice he refused, so they raised an army that was too large for John to defeat.
On June 15, 1215, at Runnymede meadow near the Thames River, John signed the Magna Carta (Latin for "Great Charter"), which limited his power. One of its most important articles required the king obtain the barons' consent before raising taxes.
The barons formed a council (later to become Parliament) to ensure John kept his word. He didn't, and war broke out between the king and barons. But John died in 1216 and his successor agreed to the terms of the Magna Carta.
Building on the authority given it by the Magna Carta, Parliament expanded its power so that today's British monarchs are figureheads and all political power is in Parliament's hands.,All in the Family?
3.5 million BC
EAST AFRICA
How far back can you trace your family tree? Probably not 3.5 million years, but that is the age of some hominid footprints scientists have found.
Such evidence indicates that hominids -- creatures that were somewhere between primates and humans -- lived in East Africa that long ago. These ancient beings were probably scavengers who may have used stones and pieces of wood in their quest for food.
Scientists believe that over millions of years, hominids learned to manufacture simple tools, hunt, and use fire to cook food and improve weapons. They flourished in East and South Africa and moved into Europe and Asia, usually living in caves or rock-shelters.
Eventually, about 100,000 years ago, a new hominid species appeared called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. They were taller than other hominids, with shorter arms, straighter limbs, and larger brains.
Then a mysterious thing happened around 35,000 BC. All trace of the Neanderthals disappeared. No one knows whether they were killed by other humans, by disease, by a failure to adapt to a warming climate, or some other cause.
About the time the Neanderthals disappeared, Homo sapiens sapiens appeared, though scientists doubt this new group (also called Cro-Magnon man) is related to the Neanderthals. The Cro-Magnon are essentially the people of today. Compared with the Neanderthals, they are taller, have smaller faces, smaller brains, higher foreheads, lighter skulls and straighter limbs.
Over the years, Homo sapiens sapiens have flourished, but there are no Neanderthals on your family tree.oManet's Not-Noble Art
1850 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
Edouard Manet decided to study law, but failed the entrance examination. Then he decided to enter the navy, but again failed the test. In 1850 he decided to be a painter, and there he succeeded.
Manet was the son of a French civil servant and jurist. Because of his family's money, he did not need to struggle to sell his works. He had a gentleman's manners and always wore impeccable clothes, but he was often cruel in his remarks. One observer said, "He always found the right words to tear and destroy at one blow."
Though Manet did not worship spontaneity as much as other impressionist painters, he did take his subjects from everyday life. His first major work was "The Absinthe Drinker" (1859), which depicted a bleary-eyed man who had apparently been drinking too much of the flavored liquor.
That Manet chose a low-life topic instead of a great moment in history made "The Abisnthe Drinker" unpopular, but not nearly as unpopular as his "Olympia" (1863), which caused outrage not for depicting a nude woman -- which was common -- but for depicting a prostitute. It was hung up high, out of range of angry art patrons with umbrellas and canes.
Other impressionist artists did not introduce politics into their art, but on occasion Manet did. Shocked at the brutal suppression of a Paris revolutionary group called the "Commune," Manet painted "The Barricade," showing a brutal street battle scene. And though he was one of the more conservative of the impressionists, he was the only one ever to have a painting banned. It was a caricature of General MacMahon, who was in charge of the suppression of the Paris Commune.ùThe World's Deepest Spot
1899 AD
BELOW THE PACIFIC OCEAN
If you took the tallest mountain in the world, Mt. Everest, and set it down at one particular spot in the Pacific Ocean, all five-and-a-half miles of its height would disappear beneath the waves. And if you dived down to reach its peak, you would have to descend more than a mile.
This spot is called the Marianas Trench, and its deepest point, 36,198 feet, is the lowest spot on the surface of the earth. The trench, about 45 miles wide at its maximum, begins about 200 miles south of Guam and curves northeast for about 1,835 miles towards Japan.
The trench was discovered by the British exploration ship, Challenger, during its survey of the Pacific floor in 1874-75.
On January 23, 1960 Lt. Don Walsh of the US Navy and French scientist Jacques Piccard descended 35,800 feet in a bathyscaphe -- a submarine-like vessel -- to the floor of Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the trench.RMars' Canals and Canalis
1877 AD
FOURTH PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM
The rust-colored, cratered, wind-swept desert surface of Mars that the Mariner 4 spacecraft first photographed in 1964 is a far cry from the Mars that scienctists thought it to be prior to receiving those pictures.
In 1877 Mars and Earth passed very close to each other, making it an opportune time for astronomers to get a better look at Mars. One year later Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing lines that might be a network of natural channels or rivers on Mars' surface.
When Schiaparelli's report was translated into English, the Italian word "canali" was mistranslated "canal" (manmade watercourse) instead of the more correct "channel" (natural water path). This mistranslation touched off a wave of excitement as people theorized that the "canals" could have been built by Martians. Rather than correct the error, Schiaparelli and many other astronomers jumped on the bandwagon. American astronomer Percival Lowell carried the canal theory the furthest, even writing three books describing life on the planet.
So strong was the belief in Martians that in 1898 author H.G. Wells wrote the novel, "War of the Worlds," which describes an invasion of Earth by Martians and their war machines.
Even as late as 1938 many people believed very strongly in Martians. This became obvious from the reaction to a prank by radio personality Orson Welles (no relation). On Halloween of that year Welles broadcast a revised version of "War of the Worlds" as though it was a real news report. This "news" program was widely believed, and led people in many areas of the country to panic because of the Martian "invasion."
In 1976 the Viking 1 landing vehicle performed experiments on the surface of Mars. Its primary mission was to determine if life exists or did exist on Mars. The result? While Mars has some of the ingredients needed for life, no organic substances whatever were found -- no evidence of life.
But rather than be disappointed at Mars' lifelessness, why not appreciate and help conserve the only known vessel of life in the universe -- our jewel in space -- Earth.₧
Marx's Failed Revolution
1848 AD
LONDON, ENGLAND
Capitalism was doomed!
According to the philosopher Karl Marx, the capitalist system carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. One day, he predicted, a violent revolution would eliminate all social classes and result in a society of plenty for all.
Like philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Marx believed history was moving inevitably toward a goal. But for Marx this goal was purely economic, the result of a struggle between industrial workers and owners.
Marx, a German, studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He later moved to Paris where he met Friedrich Engels, who became his lifelong companion and co-author of "The Communist Manifesto" (1848).
Marx visited London in 1849 for a few weeks, but found so much material in the British Museum that he spent the rest of his life researching and writing his three-volume work, "Das Kapital" (Capital), which examined capitalism and predicted its failure.
In his writings, Marx argued that the true cost of any product is the labor employed in building it. But the factory owner, he said, doesn't labor to create a product, he just buys the labor and raw materials and sells the resulting product.
Although laborers contributed the full value of the product, Marx said, factory owners sold the product for more than they paid their workers. Therefore, he said, the difference was stolen from the workers.
Owners, he predicted, would increase their profits by paying their workers as little as possible, so workers would be increasingly impoverished. Eventually the wealth of the owners and poverty of the workers would lead to revolution.
Sometime after the revolution, true communism would come. Government would wither away, the new social order would change people so they were no longer hungry for profits or power, religion (which Marx considered a tool of oppression) would disappear, and people would live prosperous lives. Each person would work according to his ability and each person would receive according to his need.
But communism hasn't worked. While they were in power, communist governments didn't wither away, but attempted the most detailed control of people's lives; the desire for wealth and power didn't disappear; instead of providing prosperity, communism gave poverty; and despite persecution, religion endured.
This is not to say communism never works, but it only seems to work on a very small scale. In healthy families, for example, members work according to their ability and receive according to their need. Other examples would be some tribal peoples, and members of a small Protestant sect called the Hutterites, who have lived in communal groups since the 1500s.dLudovico's Stubborn Son
1475-1564 AD
FLORENCE, ITALY
Ludovico was very displeased. Despite his beatings, his foolish son Michelangelo wanted to be -- of all things -- a sculptor.
Fortunately for art lovers, Michelangelo Buonarroti was just as stubborn as his father.
Michelangelo was born in 1475 in Caprese, Italy, and at age 12 apprenticed with Domenico Ghirlandaio, then the most popular painter in Florence. He later studied under the sculptor Donatello and worked in Florence and Rome.
Interestingly, though he didn't consider himself a painter, he is most famous for his incredible painting, "The Creation of Adam," a depiction of God's creation of the first man, which he painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
His best known sculptures are "David," a larger-than-life depiction of the Biblical King David, and the "Pietà" (a statue of Mary holding the body of the dead Jesus).▓The Fleet-Footed Planet
265 BC
FIRST PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM
Because Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, the sun's extreme gravitational pull swings it around very fast -- like a ball on a very short string. It travels in its orbit at more than 107,000 miles per hour, circling the sun every 88 days.
But Mercury turns slowly on its axis, so one of its days is equal to 59 of our Earth days. Its slow rotation rate combined with its nearness to the sun also means that Mercury is about 800 degrees hot on the side facing the sun and 300 degrees below zero on the side facing away.
Mercury can only be seen for 35 days a year because it is so close to the sun's glare. During those days, it appears either at sundown or sunup, like Venus.
The first recorded sighting of Mercury was in 265 BC by the Greeks, who thought it was two gods. (To the Greeks, what we know as planets were "known" to be gods.) When it appeared in the morning the Greeks thought it was Apollo. When it showed up in the evening it was called Hermes. Once they realized it was a single "god," they dropped Apollo. Since it was such a fast planet, they stuck with the name Hermes, the fleet-footed messenger of the gods.
Later, the Romans borrowed the Greek gods and gave them Roman names. The Roman name for Hermes is Mercury, and since the Romans ruled the world for so long, the name Mercury took hold.
Not much was known about the planet before Galileo invented the telescope in 1609. Shortly thereafter, in 1639, astronomers found that Mercury has phases just like our moon's half-moon and crescent-moon phases. In 1974-75 the Mariner 10 spacecraft took detailed pictures of Mercury that show it has a surface pitted with crater holes very much like the moon.
4Mice: Thieves and Companions
MESOPOTAMIA
For about as long as anybody can remember, mice and men have been constant companions, though the relationship has not always been a happy one.
The word "mouse," for example, illustrates both the antiquity and the adversarial relationship between man and mouse. It comes from the ancient Indo-European language, Sanskrit, and means "thief."
Mice are some of the smaller members of the rodent family, which also includes rats, gerbils, lemmings and others. And while there are several types of mice, including harvest mice, deer mice and grasshopper mice, the most commonly seen is the house mouse, which grows to about two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half inches long and lives almost everywhere in the world where there are people.
Living up to the name of "thief," these little rodents steal their meals from people, eating grain, vegetables and meat, or even leather, glue and soap.
But if house mice make their living from people, people also take advantage of mice, sometimes keeping them as pets or using them as subjects to test drugs or study behavior.0Michener: A Heavy Writer
1977 AD
SOUTH PACIFIC
If you ever have a few months free and want to read all the works of one author, just jog over to your local library and walk down the fiction aisles looking for the longest row of the fattest books you can find. When you come to them, the author will almost undoubtedly be James Michener.
Michener, an American writer born in 1907, is best known for his gigantic geographical-historical novels that examine a particular area of the world from its geologic past to the present. These include such works as "Hawaii," "The Drifters" (Spain and Portugal), "Alaska," "Texas," "Centennial" (midwestern United States), "Poland," "The Covenant" (South Africa), "Chesapeake," and one of his best in this style, "The Source," (Israel).
Reviewers have occasionally joked about the size of his books, saying, for example, that the 1,100-page "Texas" is so heavy that if it was set down on a coffee table in Texas, it would stay put even if a tornado blew everything around it off to Kansas.
In one remarkable instance of foresight, Michener started work on "Poland" in 1977 after correctly deciding the country would be a focal point of world attention within a decade.
Michener began his first novel while serving as an historian with the United States Navy in the South Pacific during World War II. Though much smaller than his later works, "Tales of the South Pacific" was similar to them in that it is a series of stories with a common theme, in this case, about U.S. troops and Pacific islanders during the war.
The book has been called one of the best fiction works to come out of the Pacific war, and it won Michener the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. It also won him a lot of money after Rodgers and Hammerstein made the book into the Pulitzer-winning play called "South Pacific."
Before he began writing historic epics, Michener also wrote several good shorter books, including "Return to Paradise," about the South Pacific after World War II, "The Bridges at Toko-Ri," about bomber pilots in the Korean War, and "Sayonara," a love story in American-occupied post-World War II Japan.%Anton Takes The Small View
1683 AD
AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
While Galileo used the lens to study the sky, shopkeeper Anton van Leeuwenhoek of Amsterdam focused his attention on little things, a bit of skin, an ox eye, or an animal hair.
During the daytime, van Leeuwenhoek sold his drygoods, but at night he made the finest lenses in all Europe.
Using a single-lens microscope he invented, van Leeuwenhoek observed what he called "little animals," or "animalcules," that he found in a drop of water from a rain puddle.
Van Leeuwenhoek kept detailed records of what he saw and wrote about his findings to the Royal Society of London and the Paris Academy of Science. He made the first drawing of a bacterium in 1683.
Though van Leeuwenhoek may not have realized it, his invention and discoveries would lead to great advances in medicine.DMilky Way: It's Not a Cloud
10 billion BC
MILKY WAY GALAXY
If you are far from the city lights on a clear night, you can look up and see a broad cloudy band of white across the night sky.
This is called the Milky Way, and it is a spiral disk of more than 100 billion stars rotating clockwise once every 300 million years.
Astronomers estimate the Milky Way is about 10 billion years old and about 100,000 light years in diameter (the distance light can travel in 100,000 years). And though the Milky Way is huge, it is just one of a myriad of similar galaxies in the universe.
Our solar system is part of the Milky Way. It is about two-thirds of the distance from its center.
The first real Milky Way astronomer was Galileo. After turning his telescope on the galaxy, Galileo found that it was not a cloud, as the ancient Greeks thought, but "a mass of innumerable stars."
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, English astronomer William Hershell counted the stars in different parts of the sky and made a crude picture of the Milky Way, but he placed our solar system in the middle of the galaxy.
It was not until the 20th Century that astronomers realized the size and spiral shape of the Milky Way, and that our solar system is not near the center of the galaxy. And that is a good thing since heavy radiation near the star-packed center of the galaxy would be too strong for life.┬The Moonlight Sonata
1801 AD
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
The opening movement of the sonata, wrote a music critic named Rellstab, reminded him of the moonlight on Switzerland's Lake Lucerne.
Though Beethoven called it "Sonata quasi una fantasia, op. 27, no. 2," and had probably never seen the moonlight dancing on Lake Lucerne, Rellstab's romantic image stuck, and it became known as the "Moonlight Sonata."
When he wrote the Moonlight Sonata in 1801, Beethoven was coming to grips with the great personal tragedy that almost destroyed him, his increasing deafness. Soon after he finished the piece, he learned the worst, that he would soon live in total silence.
Shown here is an image of the Moonlight Sonata manuscript in Beethoven's hand. Musically, Beethoven's intention with the piece was to break the tradition of clear divisions between a sonata's movements in order to create an unbroken musical flow. But personally, he poured out his agitated soul in this urgent and emotional creation.╥Muhammad Founds Islam
630 AD
MECCA, ARABIA
In the city of Mecca in Arabia, a merchant named Muhammad began preaching messages he said were from the angel Gabriel. While in a trance he would dictate these to a scribe. These teachings became the Koran, which Muslims believe supersedes Jewish and Christian scriptures.
Muhammad's message of Islam (submission to God) was that there is only one God and that idolatry is wrong. But Meccans opposed his preaching so he fled to Yathrib (now Medina) where he built an army and began attacking Meccan caravans, finally capturing Mecca in 630 AD.
Muhammad destroyed the idols in Mecca's main temple (the Kaaba), conquered Arabia and was planning an attack on Syria at the time of his death in 632 AD.
By 750 AD, the armies of his followers had marched west across North Africa and into Spain and France, and east, conquering to the edges of India and China.
Today, Islam is the second largest religion in the world, with almost 925 million adherents worldwide.{Well-Protected Mona
1505 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
The most famous painting in the world is undoubtedly Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, also known as "La Gioconda."
The picture was purchased by French King Francis I and was placed in the Louvre in Paris. Now it is behind thick glass to protect it from vandalism.
Applying paint in thin layers that almost make the painting glow, Leonardo somehow captured the character of his subject, Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine businessman.
Her smile is the most intriguing part of the painting. It is one of the only smiles in the history of art to be described as "mysterious." Is it a fleeting smile captured by the artist, or a knowing, timeless, symbolic smile?
And the haunting, subtle smile is not something that Da Vinci accidentally captured on his canvas. He wanted it there. And to make sure it wouldn't fade, he had beautiful music played during the sittings.ÇMonet's Impressions
1874 AD
LeHAVRE, FRANCE
In reviewing Claude Monet's painting "Impression, Sunrise," journalist Louis Leroy cuttingly called it an example of "impressionism," meaning that the art was nothing but an impression of nature.
Though Leroy intended to be insulting, Monet's pictures, and those of the other impressionists, do indeed have that quality, and initially the public was no more impressed than Leroy. The fuzzy-images seemed to indicate that the pictures weren't done, or were slapdash. Artists objected that they were anti-intellectual, mere snapshots of everyday life rather than carefully planned scenes.
But the impressionists' ideal was not history or carefully-drawn images, but light and color captured at a particular moment. And few artists did that as well as Monet.
Monet began his artistic career drawing caricatures in the French city of Le Havre, but met painter Eugène Boudin, who taught him the importance of first impressions and painting on the spot.
To maintain this first impression, Monet went so far as to dig trenches for his big paintings, so he would not have to climb a ladder and change his perspective. In 1874, to demonstrate the effects of different light, he painted about 40 pictures of the facade of the Rouen Cathedral during different hours and seasons.
Monet loved light and the effects it had on rivers, smoke, crowds and landscapes. He even admitted to a friend, "When it gets dark I feel as though I'm dying." And even as his wife lay dying, Monet was shocked to find that he continued to examine the colors of her face.
In the 1890s Monet created a water garden at his home. The garden -- and especially the water lilies -- became his main subject for last 25 years of his life.
Monet's brilliant colors became even brighter toward the end of his life, but at the expense of form. One critic said Monet had reached the point of "illuminating nothingness with sumptuous color.",An Explosion From Mongolia
1206 AD
MONGOLIA
In the late 10th and early 11th centuries, an obscure tribal conflict in the remote steppes of northern Asia was being decided. It resulted in one of the darkest hours in world history.
From his youth, a Mongol chieftain named Temujin fought other tribal leaders, gradually growing in strength until by 1206, when he was 56, he had unified these mounted herdsmen into a nomadic empire.
In the remaining 21 years of his life, Temujin -- now called Genghis Khan -- almost effortlessly conquered from the Pacific Ocean to the Dnieper River in Russia, defeating armies, leveling cities and slaughtering civilians unmercifully. China, the Khwarezmian Empire (in south-central Asia) and Russia fell easily.
In the 14 years following his death, Genghis Khan's generals overran Poland and Hungary, obliterating every European army that faced them. Then, in 1241, Genghis Khan's successor, Ogdai, died. Though Europe was now defenseless, the Mongol armies suddenly turned around and left, possibly to help select a new leader. They never again returned to Europe.a"The Eagle Has Landed"
July 21, 1969
MOON, EARTH ORBIT
For centuries people dreamed of what it would be like to go to the moon. They imagined methods of getting there and strange lunar creatures. But on July 21, 1969, it really happened. Astronaut Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," he said.
Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin landed on the moon in the Eagle lunar module. While on the surface they performed various experiments, planted a U.S. flag and explored the area around their landing site. Meanwhile, Michael Collins orbited the moon in the Apollo 11 "Columbia" command module.
This great scientific accomplishment was prompted by a scare. In April 1961, Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Jolted by this Soviet accomplishment, the United States decided it must catch up.
And it did. Through a series of space programs, from the single seat Mercury capsules to the slightly larger two-man Gemini missions, and finally to the three-man Apollo spacecraft, America gradually obtained the expertise in space exploration necessary for a trip to the moon.
±Moses and the Law
c1300 BC
MT SINAI, SINAI PENINSULA
It was not a good time for a Hebrew boy to be born. According to the Bible, the Egyptian pharaoh had ordered all male Hebrew babies be thrown in the Nile River.
So, obeying the letter of the law if not its spirit, Moses' mother placed him in a basket among the reeds in the Nile and had his sister keep watch. Ironically, Pharaoh's daughter came to bathe, found Moses and adopted him. Then Moses' sister appeared and suggested a nurse for him, which was, of course, Moses' own mother.
As an adult, Moses killed an Egyptian for abusing a Hebrew, then fled the country. Later he was called by God to return to Egypt and lead the Jews to Canaan (now Israel).
The Bible says that after 10 God-initiated plagues that persuaded the Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt, and after the parting of the Red Sea, Moses led the Israelites toward their new home. While they were wandering in the Sinai desert, God told Moses to climb Mt. Sinai, where he was given two stone tablets inscribed with Ten Commandments.
Though there were additional commands given later, these commands -- which deal with man's duties toward God and his fellow man -- are at the heart of the Jewish religion. Today, there are about 17.3 million Jews in the world.eThe Genius Of Mozart
1787 AD
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
How did he do it? During his short lifetime Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote more than 600 musical compositions -- a huge number -- and many of excellent quality. And he wrote many types of music, from symphonies to chamber music, and for almost every instrument from the piano to the offbeat "glass harmonica" invented by Benjamin Franklin.
Mozart sometimes worked unceasingly when an idea hit him, not stopping until he was finished. He would even write during meals and while socializing with friends.
On other occasions he was lazy and delayed until he was motivated by another type of inspiration -- a deadline. For example, he didn't write the overture to his 1787 masterpiece opera, "Don Giovanni," until the night before its opening.
Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1756. By age five he was improvising minuets and was soon playing before Europe's royal courts. As an adult he settled in Vienna, where he produced some of his most remarkable pieces.
Though he was a genius with music, he was anything but a genius with money, and when he died at age 35 he was buried in a pauper's grave.
Why do we Like Music?
1955 AD
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
You can't touch it, you can't eat it, and you can't see it. So, why do people enjoy music so much? So much in fact that they spend billions of dollars each year buying recordings and equipment to play it back.
Do you remember the first time you heard music? Probably not. In fact it's very likely that you first heard music before you were born -- the music produced by your mother's body.
When you were a baby inside your mother, there was very little to see, feel, taste, or smell. Your one active sense was hearing. Inside the womb, a baby hears its mother's heartbeat and breathing. Babies can even hear sounds outside the mother, such as conversations between Mom and Dad.
When your mother was resting, her heart would thump slowly and regularly in a restful way. But if she got excited, her heart and breathing would speed up and her body would produce adrenaline -- the hormone that temporarily provides extra energy and strength. So you would hear and feel your mother's faster heartbeat and breathing and would also be affected by her adrenaline.
Perhaps this is why music is called the international language, a language that all people understand.
Slow music promotes rest, meditation and a sense of well being. It is used in elevators to keep people calm in close quarters. Quicker rhythms make us move faster, which is why light, rapidly-paced music is used in stores -- to get us to actively look at the products and buy more. Very fast and loud music arouses, agitates, and energizes us. Think how a military march, loud rock music, or the climax of the 1812 Overture can get our own hearts beating faster.
Doctors recommend laying a crying baby on its mother's chest. Why? So the baby can hear the familiar, restful and secure sounds that are such music to its ears.
Napoleon: Island to Island
1815 AD
ST. HELENA, SOUTH ATLANTIC
Short and baby-faced, he was not inspiring to look at, but Napoleon Bonaparte was fired by an ambition that made him master of most of Europe.
He was born in 1769 on the island of Corsica and at 16 was made a second lieutenant in the French Revolutionary army. He rose quickly, eventually commanding an army that drove the Austrians out of northern Italy. Then, after a disastrous invasion of Egypt, he returned to France to seize control of the government.
During his 15 years in power he conquered most of Europe except England. Then, after invading Russia and taking Moscow, winter forced him into a deadly retreat. With allied armies closing in, Napoleon abdicated his throne and was exiled to Elba, a Mediterranean island. But after about a year and a half he escaped and took control of France once again, but in a major battle at Waterloo in 1815, he was defeated by the British.
This time the allies took no chances and sent Napoleon to a little island in the South Atlantic called St. Helena, where he died in 1821.▀
Neptune and the Unbelievers
September 23, 1846
EIGHTH PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM
In 1841, about 60 years after the discovery of the planet Uranus, John Adams of Cambridge University and Urbain Leverrier of Paris noticed that the planet was behaving rather unpredictably, not exactly following the orbit predicted by Newton's and Keppler's theories of planetary motion.
Independently, they guessed that there might be yet another planet whose pull was affecting Uranus. But where in the endless millions of miles of solar system should astronomers look for this planet?
Fortunately, both men were brilliant mathematicians. By calculating why Uranus was in the wrong place from time to time, they were able to estimate the orbit of the theoretical planet.
John Adams was the first to mathematically locate this planet, but just as Uranus was in the wrong place, so was Adams. Instead of applauding his brilliant calculation, the two men who controlled English observatories refused to believe a planet could be located simply with mathematics done by an unknown astronomer.
While ignoring their own countryman, they paid some attention to the Frenchman Leverrier. On July 29, 1846 the observatory at Cambridge began searching for the planet. But incredibly, the head of the observatory did not look where Adams and Leverrier predicted the planet would be. Having no confidence in their math, he ordered a long, tedious -- and rather carelessly done -- study of a large part of the sky. On August 4 and 12, 1846, the object's position was recorded -- but as a star, not a planet.
Like Adams, Leverrier was also a prophet without honor in his own country. When his countrymen wouldn't look for the planet either, he sent his work to a German astronomer whom he admired, Johann Galle. Galle teamed up with Heinrich d'Arrest and on Sept. 23, 1846 the two began searching for the planet. Within an hour of their second night's search, they found it -- precisely where Leverrier said it would be.
Because the planet was blue-green, it seemed appropriate to name it Neptune, after the Roman god of the sea. Other than its orbit and general color, not much was known about Neptune until the Voyager spacecraft arrived on August 25, 1989. Voyager found a stormy world with superhurricanes similar to those on Jupiter.
The interior two thirds of Neptune is made of melted rock, methane, water, and ammonia. The outer third is storm-swept hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia, and water. Neptune takes 165 years to orbit the sun, is about 30,000 miles in diameter, and rotates once every 16 hours. Its system of four rings is similar to those of Uranus, being made mostly of dust.
At the moment, Neptune is actually the farthest planet from the sun, because the ninth planet, Pluto, has a narrow orbit which brings it inside Neptune's orbit.║Emperor Nero: What An Artist!
64 AD
ROME, ITALY
Legend says that when Rome caught fire in 64 AD, the brutal and degenerate but artistically-inclined Emperor Nero sat and played his fiddle.
With most of Rome in ashes, Nero blamed the Christians for starting the blaze, possibly to divert suspicion from a more likely candidate -- himself.
Then Nero rebuilt Rome, including a fabulous palace for himself. But his murderous ways and the heavy taxation he levied to pay for his constructions led to revolt.
Eventually, with Spain and his own guard in rebellion, the Senate declared Nero a public enemy. With the coming of horsemen to arrest him, Nero committed suicide, reportedly saying, "What an artist the world is losing in me!"
╤Castle of the Fairytale King
1869 AD
BAVARIA, GERMANY
The king was just plain crazy.
At least that's what the Bavarian government said when it stripped him of his royal powers in 1886 and confined him to his summer house.
It wasn't that "Mad" King Ludwig II was evil, it was just that the fairy-tale castles he kept building were driving Bavaria broke.
Ludwig came from the art-loving Wittelsbach family, which had ruled Bavaria for centuries. The family had promoted music, arts and building in Munich, and gave it much of the character it has today. But Ludwig took this love to an extreme. Sometimes he would go for midnight sleigh rides with cavalrymen with torches ahead of him. At Linderhof, another of his dreamy retreats, he enjoyed being rowed in a swan boat while dressed as Lohengrin, the hero of a German romantic tale.
But that was the least of it.
When the government deposed him, Ludwig was working on the third and most famous and ambitious of his castles, Neuschwanstein, the hilltop castle shown here. The castle, which was planned by a theatrical set designer, was begun in 1869 and finished 17 years later.
Though the castle didn't make the Bavarian government happy, it has made millions of others happy since that time. Neuschwanstein is one of Germany's top tourist attractions and is the model for the castle in the movie "Sleeping Beauty," and the Disneyland castle in California.
Ludwig only spent 102 days in his dream castle. Before it was finished he was confined to the grounds of the modest Castle Berg near the waters of his beloved Starnbergersee, where he had spent his summers as a boy. But two days after his confinement, he and the doctor attending him were found drowned in the lake under circumstances that are still mysterious today.$Newton's New Universe
1687 AD
LONDON, ENGLAND
Though he was bright, Isaac Newton was at the bottom of his class in Grantham, England. At least he was until one morning a bully beat him up.
Newton was so angry he fought the boy again after school. He won, but wasn't satisfied with proving he was a better fighter. He decided to be a better student as well, and rose to the top of his class.
Eventually Newton's mother took him out of school to help on the farm, but he never could concentrate on his work.
Then his uncle came to visit one day and found Newton by a hedge working a math problem. Where the sheep he was watching had gone to was anybody's guess. Newton's uncle told his mother she was wasting her time trying to make him into a farmer, and suggested sending him to Cambridge University.
Newton found a home at Cambridge. While there he discovered a method for calculating the area of curved objects or the volume of curved solids. (This process is now called calculus, the term used by Gottfried Leibniz, who discovered the process independently.)
Newton also found that light does not pick up colors from the objects it strikes, as was commonly believed, but already has all colors in it.
Newton went home to Woolsthorpe in 1665 to escape the Black Plague. While he was there, one story goes, he saw an apple fall from a tree and wondered why it fell straight down and not off to the side, or even up. Perhaps, he decided, the earth attracts the apple and the apple attracts the earth.
His final explanation of this principle is in his greatest work, "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica," or just "Principia," published in 1687. This book explains that gravity holds the planets and suns in their orbits. It was the accepted explanation for the working of the universe for 200 years, until Albert Einstein introduced a new concept.
In 1689 Newton was elected to Parliament, though he never spoke except to ask a porter to close a window.
Then, in 1705, Queen Anne visited Cambridge and made Newton a Knight of the Realm. Since then, he has always been known as Sir Isaac Newton.╘ Nietzche: The Superman
1885 AD
BERN, SWITZERLAND
One day while walking on the streets, philosopher Freidrich Nietzche saw a man whipping a horse because it wouldn't move. The beast was clearly unable to move, and Nietzsche threw himself between the horse and its tormentor -- and fainted. When he awoke, he was never the same again.
Most people would applaud his kindness to the horse, but not Nietzche. In his eyes he had betrayed his own principles by stooping to pity, a common emotion he believed the enlightened man should avoid.
He apparently understood at that moment that he was not the Superman he preached, and though he was temporarily more energetic and healthy than he had been his entire adult life, it was an energy mixed with insanity as he wrote letters to national leaders claiming to be the world's savior. Soon he degenerated, mindlessly staring and mumbling, and died 11 years later.
Nietzche was brilliant but often misunderstood because he used brief, pointed comments called aphorisms that were intended to jolt people and make them think. If taken at face value many of these aphorisms seem hard and cruel. Perhaps for this reason Nietzche was a popular philosopher in Nazi Germany, where he was used to justify the Nazis' actions.
One advantage of his aphoristic style, however, is that it is easy to read. Compared with the almost-incomprehensible works of some other philosophers, Nietzsche's writing is direct, and often funny, especially in "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (1885), his most famous work.
Nietzche's philosophy is based on two themes: God doesn't exist and people are driven only by the desire to obtain power.
Despite all the talk about morals, he argued, morals don't exist and we shouldn't pretend they do. Morals are just a facade to cover up people's real motivation: the desire to control other people and prevent other people from controlling them. He called this the "Will to Power" and claimed that all attempts to construct societies without realizing the centrality of this will to power are doomed.
And since God didn't exist, he argued, Christianity was just a ploy to keep power in the hands of the majority who resented the few who were more suited to rule.
Another of Nietzche's concepts is that of the "Superman." People, he argued, stop short of their potential by needing to be comfortable, or by feeling sorry for themselves. This is why he disliked democracy: it gave power to those who hadn't proven themselves fit to govern. Man, he said, should become Superman by overcoming his fears, comforts and petty concerns.
Though Nietzche has been used as justification by totalitarians, he was also an inspiration to Sigmund Freud and Jean Paul Sartre. Nietzche argued that people's expressed reasons for their actions are not their real motivation, and that people can make something of themselves by an act of the will. Freud picked up on the idea of real reasons behind stated reasons to develop psychoanalysis, and Sartre picked up on Nietzche's idea that man becomes something as he acts.·Notre Dame: On a Pagan Spot
1163 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
Like a great many of the churches in Europe, the cathedral of Notre Dame is built on a spot that was formerly used as a pagan temple devoted to the Roman god Jupiter. In the fifth century, after Catholicism had taken hold in Paris, a church was built at the east end of the area occupied by the current cathedral.
In 1163, construction began on Notre Dame. It took until 1345 -- over 180 years, or nine generations, to complete the building. Imagine the selflessness required to start building such a structure when everyone working on it knew that they would be dead long before it could be finished. Could such a building be constructed today with people's intense need for immediate gratification?
Part of the beauty of this cathedral comes from its use of flying buttresses. A buttress is simply a prop or brace used to offset outward pressure on walls. A flying buttress "flies" because its base is at a distance from the wall, and joins itself and the wall by a thin "flying" support beam.
Entering the church immediately shows the value of these supports. They make possible the towering columns which support the lofty ceiling above. High up the wall, the stained glass window throws unearthly beams of colored light to the wide eyed people below.Old and Newspapers
1878 AD
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Though now eclipsed by radio and television, news\papers were once the main source of news for people in the industrialized world.
The earliest known news\paper was Acta Diurna (Daily Events), a hand\written Roman news\paper that was posted in a public place. The first printed news\paper was called Ti-pao, a Chinese news\paper printed with wooden blocks around 700 AD.
News\papers boomed following the invention of the Linotype by Ottmar Mer\gen\thal\er in 1878. His invention cast lead into rows of letters much more quickly than they could be set by hand. The price of news\papers dropped and the circulation rose.
In the late 1800s many papers tried to outdo each other in printing lurid details of crimes, disasters and scandals, a formula called "yellow journalism."
Since then, newspapers have become more responsible, but today, with heavy competition, most news\papers no longer publish an afternoon edition, others have combined with competitors and some have gone out of business.
Though most major US newspapers no longer practice yellow journalism, it is still wise to be cautious about accepting everything they say, particularly on controversial topics. In addition to the pressures of producing stories on a daily basis, writers and editors have viewpoints on the news events they write about and may consciously or subconsciously include or exclude information that supports that view. Reading a variety of publications can give you different views and help you make up your own mind on a topic.¡
Water, Water Everywhere
MID-ATLANTIC
Since we live on land and usually only look at the ocean from the seashore, it is easy to forget what a huge part of our world is actually covered with water.
The volume of water in the world is 14 times greater than the volume of land above sea level. Seven-tenths of the earth is covered by water. If the earth's surface was exactly level, our planet would be entirely covered with two miles of water.
Not only are the oceans important for their size, but they are also the main source for the water that evaporates to become clouds and water the earth. In addition, they are the great transportation ways of international trade; the fish and plants of the sea are a major source of food; and sea plants provide much of the oxygen in our atmosphere.
The biggest of the world's three main oceans is the Pacific. It is almost as large as the Atlantic and Indian oceans combined. Ferdinand Magellan named the Pacific after crossing the rough Atlantic. He thought it was much more peaceful, or "pacific."
The Atlantic, the second largest ocean, was named after Atlantis, a legendary country supposedly located there. The Greek philosopher Plato said Atlantis sank beneath the ocean.
The Indian Ocean is named after the subcontinent of India, which juts far out into the ocean.
The first attempt to systematically study the ocean was undertaken in 1768 by Captain James Cook. Cook took an astronomer and biologist on his explorations of the South Pacific.
In 1872 the British surveying ship Challenger embarked on a three-year voyage of 69,000 miles. The report from the journey filled 50 volumes and added more to man's knowledge of the sea than all that had been learned before.
Though scientists have found life even at great depths, most sea life is near the surface, especially along the continental shelves. These shelves are wide, gently sloping areas next to the continents. At the edge of the shelf, the water suddenly increases in depth, dropping two or three miles in depth to another flat area, often called the Plain of the Abyss. Only in a few trenches in the ocean floor is the water deeper than this plain.
The ocean's water is constantly in motion. There are actually rivers of water flowing through the oceans that are much larger than any rivers on land. The biggest of these is the Gulf Stream, which flows out of the Gulf of Mexico, north along the East Coast of the United States, then divides to warm Iceland and the west coast of Europe. The Gulf Stream is 90 miles wide and a half mile deep.
The ocean is also moved by the moon and sun. Their gravity causes the water to rise and fall in certain spots. Because the moon is much closer to the earth, the tides it causes are much higher.
ùOil: Black Gold
1859 AD
SAUDI ARABIA
Two thousand years ago the Greeks burned oil in their lamps and the Chinese and Egyptians heated their homes with it, but the day of oil's real importance didn't begin until the middle 1800s.
In 1859 a group of investors near Titusville, Pennsylvania, got tired of just collecting the little bit of oil that rose to the surface of the earth, so they hired Edwin Drake to find a better way to get at it.
Drake drilled a hole into the ground, and first try, hit oil. The world has not been the same since.
From oil we get fuel for all types of vehicles, as well as thousands of by-products such as asphalt, plastics, paints, medicines, lubricants, etc.
Scientists believe the world's oil supply was formed when tiny, ancient plants and animals died and were subjected to tremendous pressures under tons of rock. This downward pressure tended to force the oil up until it was trapped under a solid rock barrier.
Currently, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have the greatest known oil reserves, with the Soviet Union in third place.
With its vast number of petroleum-powered vehicles, the industrialized world imports huge amounts of this oil, which has both advantages and disadvantages.
On the one hand, there are mutually beneficial economic ties created between the industrial world (which gets a relatively inexpensive source of energy) and oil producers (who receive great wealth by selling their oil). But on the other hand, burning oil causes pollution and may make the industrialized world too dependent on unstable parts of the world. And for the producing countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the influx of wealth and foreigners may disrupt traditional social structures.8O'Keeffe's Blooming Art
1949 AD
ABIQUIU, NEW MEXICO
Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the best known of 20th Century American artists, had a passion for remoteness and nature that is reflected in her paintings.
O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and taught school in Amarillo, Texas. She studied art in New York City and married Alfred Stieglitz, famous for establishing photography as a legitimate art form. In 1949, three years after his death, she moved to Ghost Ranch, her home in Abiquiu, a town in northern New Mexico.
Though she had painted in New England, in the Southwest her art blossomed -- literally. She drew giant vivid flowers and leaves that appear somewhat mystical and even menacing. She captured the feeling of the desert in strong images of red rock and bleached bones painted in a precise, orderly and intentionally simple style.
└
The Olympic Ideal
776 BC
OLYMPIA, GREECE
They survived 1,200 years of invasions, natural disasters, wars and even the loss of Greek independence. No matter what else was going on in ancient Greece, every four years the "Call to the Games" was sounded, a "Truce of God" was declared and the Olympics Games began.
That kind of record cannot be boasted in modern times. Since they were reestablished in 1896, the Olympics have been suspended during two world wars and have been marred by violence and political controversy.
But both the ancient games and their modern heirs are dedicated to the ideals of sportsmanship, bringing athletes from around the world together in competition, and striving for excellence.
The origin of the games in Olympia, Greece, is shrouded in myth. The first definitive record of victors' names dates to 776 BC and stretches without interruption to 394 AD, when Roman emperor Theodosius abolished the games. It is believed that the Olympics began as a one-day religious festival and developed into a seven-day carnival of culture, athletic prowess and religious ceremony.
The early games featured foot races, boxing, chariot races and the five-event pentathlon designed for Spartan warrior/athletes. Kings raced alongside commoners, their only prize an olive wreath, symbolizing the Greek ideal of individual excellence.
That early sense of competition is what Baron Pierre de Coubertin aimed to recapture when he revived the Olympic Games in the late 1800s. The Frenchman insisted that there should be no point score in the games and was against nationalism dominating the competition.
The first modern Olympics was held in 1896 in Athens and included many of the events we now associate with the Summer Olympics, including track and field, cycling, swimming, weight lifting and pistol shooting.
The highlight of those first modern games was the marathon, run over the ancient course from the battlefield of Marathon to the Athens stadium 25 miles away. As the leader burst into the arena, the crowd of 60,000 cheered wildly, recognizing Spiridon Loues, a Greek peasant whose victory established the modern games.
The games have been held many times since that first competition, and in 1924 were split into summer and winter games.
Twice, during World War I and World War II, the games have been suspended. In 1936, the Olympics were held in Berlin under the watchful eye of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. In 1972, Arab terrorists targeted the competition, kidnapping 11 Israeli athletes who were killed during a gun battle between the terrorists and German police.
Politics has also intruded on the games. In 1980, the United States boycotted the Moscow games and the Soviets responded by boycotting the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1984.RBut There's a Hole in the Roof
118 AD
ROME, ITALY
How would you light the inside of a large building if you didn't have electric lights? Why, build it with a hole in the roof to let the sun come in!
That's just what Emperor Hadrian did when he had the Pantheon in Rome remodelled. This temple was designed to be evenly lighted from a 27-foot-wide hole or "oculus" in the center of its huge dome.
When Hadrian decided to significantly enlarge the temple in 118 AD, he took big chances in the design. He decided to make it the first major public building to give the greatest emphasis to its breathtaking marble interior rather than to the outside, as was the case with such earlier temples as the Parthenon, in Greece.
The Pantheon stands more than 140 feet high with a dome 142 feet in diameter. In fact, no building in the world had a dome as large as the Pantheon until the 20th Century. To support the huge dome, the walls are 20 feet thick at the base but become lighter and thinner as they rise toward the center of the dome, which is made of pumice, a very light volcanic rock.
The Pantheon was so named because it was dedicated to all (Pan) the gods (theon). Unlike current American thinking -- which says church and state should remain separate -- to the Romans church was state and state was church. In fact, the title "Pontifex Maximus" (Greatest Bridge Builder) -- which now refers to the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church -- was originally applied to the Roman Emperor in his position as head of the state religion.
The Pantheon is the only building of its time that is still complete and in use. It is used today as a church and museum.eCommons Takes Charge
1909 AD
LONDON, ENGLAND
Theoretically, Great Britain's government is made up of the monarch and two branches of Parliament, which are the House of Commons and the House of Lords. But today, only the House of Commons has any real power.
The king was the first to lose his authority. Parliament, which was at first a council of nobles and church officials who advised the kings of England, demanded more power. Its struggles with the king resulted in a civil war that gave Parliament virtually complete authority over the government. By 1700 the monarch was a figurehead.
Then, in 1909, the House of Lords vetoed a budget approved by the House of Commons, so Commons turned around and took away the House of Lords' veto power, leaving it as just an advisory body.
Today, the government is headed by a prime minister, the leader of the majority party in the House of Commons.{Parthenon: Beauty in Ruins
447 to 432 BC
ATHENS, GREECE
Probably the only structure that has been blown up and yet remains one of the world's most beautiful buildings is the Parthenon on Acropolis hill overlooking Athens.
The rectangular structure -- built in 447-432 BC of white marble from Mt. Pentelicus, 11 miles from Athens -- is 237 feet long by 110 feet wide by 60 feet high. In the middle of the building was once a two-room enclosure. One room housed an ivory and gold statue of Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, and the other was the treasury. The building was designed by Ictinus and Callicrates, Greek architects, and was embellished with sculpture by Phidias.
When Greece became Christian, the Parthenon became a church. When the Turks captured the city in the mid 1400s, it was made into a mosque.
Then the Venetians attacked Athens in 1687, and unfortunately the Turks had been using the Parthenon to store gunpowder. It exploded, destroying the central section.
The Parthenon is an excellent example of the "column and lintel" construction method invented by the Egyptians and improved upon by the Greeks. The columns are the posts, and the lintels are the horizontal blocks that fit across the top of the columns.
Column and lintel construction allowed designers to create huge, awe-inspiring covered structures, but the need for many columns could make the interior of these buildings look almost like forests.
The Greeks most notable addition to this construction method was artistic. They created three decorative column "capitals," or tops, the simple Doric, the more slender and decorative Ionic and the highly ornate Corinthian. The Parthenon uses Doric capitals.
Pasteur the Germ Killer
1822 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
The parents of 9-year-old Joseph Meister were desperate. Their son had been bitten by a rabid dog and they knew he would soon come down with rabies and die.
In 1885, they brought the boy to the home of French microbiologist Louis Pasteur and franticly pleaded that he administer his new vaccine on their son.
Though Pasteur was reluctant to try the untested vaccine on a human subject, he understood his vaccine was the parents' only hope. He began the treatment and on July 6, 1885 declared a major breakthrough: After several anxious weeks, little Joseph did not come down with rabies. He was cured!
Although it may have been his most famous discovery, the rabies vaccine was certainly not the first major medical breakthrough for Pasteur. In fact, over the course of a lifetime, Pasteur created a veritable scientific revolution. Applications of many of his discoveries saved countless lives.
Pasteur was born on Dec. 27, 1822 in Dole, France, and showed a talent for art as a young boy. His father, one in a long line of Pasteur tanners, sent the boy to the Ecole Normale in 1842. He was elected to the Academie des Sciences in 1862 and elected to the Academie Francaise in 1882.
Pasteur married Marie Laurent in 1849 and they had five children, only two of whom survived childhood. Pasteur devoted most of his money to laboratory equipment or supplies, and often his wife, with a practical eye toward their children's future, had to beg him to take out patents on the processes he discovered.
Pasteur's "germ theory" of disease led to the practice of antiseptic surgery, which was pioneered by Pasteur's friend, British surgeon Sir Joseph Lister.
His study of the fermentation of wine, beer and milk led to the process of pasteurization -- using heat to kill the bacteria that causes food and drink to spoil.
From his study of fermentation, Pasteur concluded that the "infinitely little" organisms that caused wine to sour might also be the tiny creatures responsible for causing disease in the human body.
From then on he devoted himself to the study of contagious diseases and was credited with saving the silk worm industry in France by isolating the diseases that were killing silk worms. He developed the process of vaccination to wipe out anthrax, a widespread epidemic in France's sheep and cattle, in 1881, and went on to pioneer the rabies vaccine.
Although partially paralyzed by a brain stroke in 1868, he continued to work, founding the Pasteur Institute in 1888 and serving as its director until his death on Sept. 28, 1895.DPenguins: Always Dressed Up
ANTARCTIC COAST
Though penguins always look very formal in their black-and-white or gray-and-white evening attire, their appearance quickly changes from staid and conservative to humorous as they waddle across the ground.
Though these birds are not very fast on their feet and can't fly at all, penguins can swim like fish, speeding up to 30 miles an hour in the icy Antarctic waters, using their wings as flippers.
Though most penguins live together in rookeries in the harsh Antarctic, catching shrimp-like krill from the surrounding waters, some penguins live as far north as the Galapagos Islands, near the equator.
There are about 17 species of penguins, ranging from the giant Emperor, which grows to four feet tall and up to 60 pounds, down to the Adelie, which is about one-and-a-half feet tall and weighs about 12 pounds.
0Sir Fleming's Moldy Dish
1928
LONDON, ENGLAND
If Sir Alexander Fleming hadn't been paying close attention, he might have washed out his moldy lab dish and gone on with his work. But if he had done that, thousands of people would not be alive today.
While working in the lab in 1928, the British scientist saw that mold had contaminated his dish of staphylococcus bacteria, but he also noticed a ring of dead bacteria around the mold. Fascinated, he investigated further and called his discovery "penicillin."
In the late 1930s British scientists extracted penicillin from the mold and in 1941 cured a policeman with blood poisoning.
Penicillin came just in time to save thousands of lives during World War II, and additional thousands thereafter. And while it is still widely used, many strains of bacteria have grown resistant to the drug.
BA New Perspective on Reality
1425 AD
FLORENCE, ITALY
How can you make things which have length, width and height look real when you paint them on a flat surface? This is just the problem that the ancient Egyptians and Greeks had. Their paintings look strange and flat to us because they did not discover the science of perspective.
No doubt you have noticed that things appear smaller the farther away they are. You can reproduce this effect in a painting simply by drawing distant objects smaller than nearer objects. But how do you draw objects that are both near and far at the same time, such as a road or a long building?
Here's where two concepts come in: "horizon" and "vanishing point." First, a horizon is an imaginary line that goes across a scene. If you go to the seashore it is easy to see a real horizon. It is the horizontal line created where the water and sky meet.
To understand what a vanishing point is, imagine an unusual floating road starting on the seashore and going straight over the ocean to the horizon. It would seem that the road actually vanished at the horizon. The point where the road -- or any other object -- disappears on the horizon is the vanishing point.
If you draw the road on paper, the lines showing the edges of the road would be wide apart at the start of the road and would come to a point at the horizon. If there are several objects on the paper, all of the lines showing depth would be directed toward the same vanishing point, though the lines might not extend all the way to the horizon.
Interestingly, the principles of perspective were not discovered by scientists, but by artists who were passionately searching for more realistic ways to represent their world. The mathematical rules of angles and distances came to be understood in the early 1400's by Renaissance painters and architects in Florence, Italy. An excellent example of perspective is in Leonardo Da Vinci's painting, "The Last Supper," where all the implied lines of perspective lead to an imaginary vanishing point at Christ's head. By using perspective in this way, Da Vinci encouraged the viewer's eyes to focus on Jesus.Ouch! The Phonograph
1877 AD
MENLO PARK, NEW JERSEY
As Thomas Edison was experimenting with the telephone in 1877, he happened to place his hand on the back of the microphone while he was speaking into it. As he spoke into the device, the vibrations of his voice caused a metal piece to vibrate and prick his finger.
If the sound of his voice could hurt his finger, Edison thought, maybe it could do some practical work as well. Perhaps, he thought, a vibrating needle could make a groove in tin foil wrapped around a cylinder, then by rubbing the needle back over the groove, perhaps it would recreate the same sound.
When his skeptical engineer, John Kruesi, brought the just-completed device to him, Edison wrapped the cylinder in tin foil, turned the crank and sang "Mary had a Little Lamb" into the speaker. Then he played it back and the men crowding around the device heard Edison's voice faintly singing the children's song.
Then the astonished Kruesi spoke German into the device and turned the crank to play back the sound. Sure enough, Edison's phonograph spoke German as well!
In 1885, U.S. scientists Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter improved on Edison's invention by making their recordings on wax-covered cardboard cylinders. In 1887, Emile Berliner, a German immigrant to the United States, invented the gramophone, which used the same principle but played from a shellac disk instead of from cylinders.
But the most revolutionary change in sound recording didn't come until about 1978 with the advent of digital recording.
Until that time all recordings, both records and tapes, were analog. This means they have the same kind of wiggles in them that Thomas Edison's first recording had, though in the case of tape recording these "wiggles" are magnetic.
But records and tapes have problems. There is always unwanted surface noise and sound distortion.
With compact disc recordings, however, these problems disappear.
On compact disks, the music is recorded mathematically and when it is replayed, it has much greater fidelity to the original sound.eBartolommeo's New Instrument
1709 AD
FLORENCE, ITALY
If you like piano pieces such as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, remember Bartolommeo Cristofori.
Cristofori, an Italian harpsichord maker living in Florence, designed a new musical instrument in about 1709 in which the strings were struck by little hammers operated by the musician. It came to be known as the "pianoforte" or simply, "piano."
Unlike the harpsichord before it, the piano allows you to play with much greater feeling. If you strike a key softly, you get a soft note. If you hit it harder, you get a stronger sound. If you hold the key for a longer or shorter period of time, you get a longer or shorter note. Mozart and Beethoven took full advantage of these new capabilities in their great piano pieces.
But the early pianos were not without problems. For example, if the numerous metal strings were tightened too much they would bend or break the wooden frame. Therefore, the piano's sound was not very loud. This problem was later solved by making cast-iron frames.
Though invented in Italy, piano-making soon spread to Germany and then to England."Pieta: Hard but Soft
1501 AD
VATICAN, ROME, ITALY
In this close-up of Jesus in Michelangelo's Pietà, you can see the great artist's skill in representing limpness out of what might seem a most unpromising material -- hard stone.
Notice also the smooth, beautiful finish that Michelangelo has imparted to Jesus' face.òPieta: Sorrow in Stone
1501 AD
VATICAN, ROME, ITALY
In the Pietà, 23-year-old sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti created what is probably the best known and loved statue in the Western world.
In this quiet but powerful sculpture, Jesus lies in his mother's lap, limp in a death from which he will soon arise. Mary's face reflects her loss, but also shows her serenity in knowing Jesus' death was ordained by God.
Shortly after it was unveiled in 1501, Michelangelo overheard people attributing the masterpiece to someone else. So after they left, he came back with his tools and carved his name across the band on Mary's cloak. It was the only time he ever put his name on any of his works.jPisa: Who Dropped the Ball?
1174 AD
PISA, ITALY
Almost from the moment it was started in 1172, the bell tower for the Pisa Cathedral began to lean. A weak foundation only seven feet deep, coupled with sandy soil and seeping water from the nearby Arno River all contribute to the Leaning Tower of Pisa's tilting tendency.
Though already leaning, Giovanni di Simone coordinated the completion of the tower between 1275 and 1303. In this early period of architecture, leaning towers were not uncommon. No doubt, part of the reason the tower still stands after 800 years is that di Simone used methods and materials known to him (but lost to us) to compensate for the tilt.
It is said that while a professor at the University of Pisa, in Italy, Galileo demonstrated from this tower that bodies of the same material, but different weights, fall with equal speed. If he did perform this experiment, it was probably done less in the interests of science than to discredit his opponents, professors who followed Aristotle's view of physics.
Whether Galileo dropped anything over the edge of the tower, it is well documented that in 1612, a competing professor dropped balls of unequal weight from the tower. Surprisingly, the balls did NOT hit the ground at the same time. Indeed, the smaller ball hit the ground while the larger ball still had a few inches to go. This caused Galileo considerable embarrassment, though we now understand that air resistance was greater for the larger object, making it fall more slowly.
On average, the Leaning Tower of Pisa tilts an additional millimeter per year, though in 1989 it only moved .2 millimeters. At one millimeter per year, the tower has another 100 to 150 years before it falls.
Every few years, Italian authorities propose renovations to prevent the tower's collapse. These proposals inevitably produce an outcry from architects and politicians who are afraid repairs might cause more damage, and from local businessmen who worry that they will lose money if the tower is closed for an extended period.
If the tower had never leaned, do you think it would attract over 1,500 visitors a day? Maybe it's not so bad to be a little off center.VPlato's Curious Republic
c375 BC
ATHENS, GREECE
Plato left Athens in a hurry. His beloved teacher, Socrates, had been condemned to death, and as one of his supporters, his life was also in danger.
He lived abroad for 12 years, then returned to Athens when he was 40 years old to found an academy, the world's first recorded university. Under Plato's leadership it became the ancient world's authority on law and mathematics.
Plato's produced 30 works, but perhaps his greatest is "The Republic," written about 375 BC, which sketches what he regards as an ideal society, though it is a very authoritarian society that we would not consider to be a republic.
This strictly-regulated society would be based on education and ruled by what he called "philosopher rulers."
Education would be universal until age 20. Then, those who were not qualified to continue their education would be workers. After 10 years, there would be a second test and those not qualified to continue their education would be soldiers and police. The remainder, who would study philosophy, would rule.
One of the most famous passages in "The Republic" is Plato's parable of the cave, which illustrates his idea that everyday reality is a shadowy copy of perfect reality.
In the illustration he compares humanity to a group of prisoners who have been chained for all their lives inside a cave facing a blank wall. Outside the cave is a bonfire and between the bonfire and the mouth of the cave are people carrying various objects. The shadows of those objects fall on the wall of the cave, and with rare exceptions, the prisoners think the shadows are all there is of reality.╧
Pluto and Right-Wrong Math
February 18, 1930
NINTH PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM
After discovering Neptune through variations in the orbit of Uranus, Neptune's co-discoverer, Urbain Leverrier, said: "After 30 or 40 years of observing the new planet, we will be able to use it in turn for the discovery of the one that follows it in order of distance from the sun."
And that is how it turned out -- sort of.
In 1905, astronomer Percival Lowell began a serious search for a ninth planet, which he dubbed "Planet X." Until his death in 1916 he and the staff at Lowell Observatory searched for this "trans Neptunian" planet. They made repeated calculations and numerous sky surveys -- all in vain. Thomas Gill even photographed the faint planet in 1915, but it was hidden among more than 1,200 other objects. Planet X went unnoticed.
Then, in 1929, Clyde Tombaugh, a 22-year-old amateur astronomer, was invited to be an assistant at the observatory. On April 6, 1929 he began a painstaking search for Planet X. For 10 months, he examined photographs of millions of stellar objects, often for three to six hours at a time. Then, on Feb. 18, 1930, Tombaugh found an object that had moved across the starry background. After checking earlier photographs of the same region for confirmation, he announced his discovery to his colleagues. The planet was near where Percival Lowell predicted in 1915.
The Lowell Observatory called the planet "Pluto," so its symbol became PL, which conveniently honored Percival Lowell (P.L.).
However, further study shows that Pluto is too small to cause the variations in Uranus' and Neptune's orbits. Lowell's calculations were wrong. Thus, Tombaugh and others were looking in about the right place, but for the wrong reason. It wasn't Lowell's calculations that found Pluto, but his faith, and Clyde Tombaugh's dogged persistence.
In 1978, James Christy of the U.S. Naval Observatory, examined a photograph of Pluto that was marked "POOR" because of a streak on Pluto's side. But he noticed other photos of Pluto also had bulgy streaks. In fact, the bulge appeared on both sides of Pluto. These weren't POOR photos; the streaks showed a moon! Christy named it Charon after the boatman who ferried the dead to the realm of the god Pluto. It was also no coincidence that his wife's nickname was Char (Charlene).
Pluto was not visited by the Voyager spacecraft, so we still know little about it -- but we still have a chance. On Sept. 12, 1989, Pluto came within 2.75 billion miles of the sun, the closest approach in its orbit. But by 1999 it will again replace Neptune as the most distant planet in the solar system. Pluto takes 248 years to orbit the sun, so if we don't send a Voyager-like craft to visit it soon, we will have to wait several more generations for another opportunity.ΓPoe: Once Upon a Midnight
1809 AD
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
"Once upon a midnight dreary,
While I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore --
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door --
Only this and nothing more."
In this stanza, the opening of his famous poem, "The Raven," American author Edgar Allan Poe develops the weird and morbid mood for which he is famous, and which was, perhaps, drawn from his own unhappy life.
Poe was born in 1809 in Boston of parents who were actors. When his father died, and then his mother, he was only three. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and was given a good education. But he never got along well with his adopted father.
At the University of Virginia, Poe gambled and lost more money than he had. Allan refused to pay his debts. Eventually Poe joined the army and attended West Point Military Academy, but was expelled. Allan disowned him.
Poe's break came when he won $50 for his entry in a writing contest sponsored by the magazine "Saturday Visitor." His "MS. Found in Bottle" won first prize.
That success led to jobs on various magazines, but none of them lasted very long. Apparently because of alcoholism he would either quit or be fired.
In 1836 Poe married Virginia Clemm, and when she died in 1847 his health and alcoholism grew worse and he may have begun taking drugs. He wrote, "I became insane, with intervals of horrible sanity."
Despite his anguished life, Poe wrote many successful stories, and pioneered detective fiction in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter." Like Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (who came later), Poe's French detective Dupin made amazing logical deductions.
Though an excellent detective writer, Poe is best remembered for his nightmarish stories of death, crime and horror. Some of these are: "Fall of the House of Usher," "Red Death," "Cask of Amontillado" and "Tell-Tale Heart."WPollock's Drippy Painting
1951 AD
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
In the 1950s Jackson Pollock created a stir in the art world by pioneering a radically new method of painting. Instead of touching the brush to the canvas, he placed the canvas on the floor, stood over it and dripped paint onto it, often making sweeping, circular patterns. And these "drippings" were not small -- they were wall sized.
Pollock said, "I don't work from drawings or sketches. My painting is direct. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them." By putting the canvas on the floor, he said, he could also see the painting from all angles, even from inside it.
Of course, not everybody appreciated Pollock's drip technique. Time magazine, for example, called him "Jack the Dripper."
Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, studied art in New York, and died in an automobile crash there in 1956.&Pompeii: Tragedy to Treasure
August 24, 79 AD
POMPEII, ITALY
Probably August 24, 79 AD started out much like any other day for the prosperous and sunny town of Pompeii, Italy. But looming 4,000 feet high, just a mile away from town, was the volcano Vesuvius. Though Vesuvius hadn't erupted in hundreds of years, it did so abruptly on that day.
The Roman historian Pliny described the explosion. He said "a black and dreadful cloud now and again yawned open to reveal long fantastic flames."
The sudden eruption destroyed the towns of Herculaneum and Stabiae, but covered Pompeii with a soft 30-foot layer of volcanic ash.
Though the disaster was a tragedy for the people of Pompeii, of whom about 2,000 died, it has been a boon for archaeologists.
Pompeii, located near present-day Naples, was wonderfully preserved, giving historians a clear glimpse into the everyday life of the Roman people.
When it was destroyed, Pompeii was still being rebuilt from an earthquake in 63 AD. It was a thriving town laid out in a standard grid pattern, with two theaters, luxurious baths, and a large forum surrounded by temples and municipal buildings.
Private houses were generally low, of no more than two stories, the second floor generally reserved for slaves. Wealthier homes on main streets often had shops built into the walls on the street level. Archaeologists have found shops representing many trades, from sculptors and surgeons to fishermen and bakers.
A systematic excavation of Pompeii began in 1763, more than 160 years after architect Domenico Fontana rediscovered it while building an underground aqueduct.εPteranadon: Soaring Dinosaur
70 million BC
MIDWEST NORTH AMERICA
While most dinosaurs lived on the land or in the sea, the Pteranadon's element was the sky.
This huge bird-like creature had leathery wings that grew to as much as 23 feet wide, a sharp beak with no teeth, and a lightweight bony structure protruding from the rear of its head, whose purpose is still not fully understood, though some scientists think it may have been decorative and useful for attracting a mate, while others think it may have been a rudder to steady pteranadon in flight.
Scientists believe pteranadon soared at speeds up to 23 miles-per hour over the ocean in what is now Kansas and Texas, feeding on fish and mollusks. Perhaps, they believe, pteranadon had a pelican-like throat sack to carry its catch.
Fully-Equipped Tombs
c2500 BC
GIZA, EGYPT
The Great Pyramids at Giza are colossal tombs for Egyptian kings, made of limestone quarried near the building sites along the Nile River.
This sacred work was not performed by slaves but by peasants during the flood season when they could not work in their fields. The finished tombs were equipped with everything the Egyptians believed that the mummified pharaoh would need in the next life--the same things needed in this life, including the king's wife, high officials, and servants.
The afterlife was perceived as similar to life on Earth, but better. Initially, it was open only to pharaohs, but later it was considered to be open to all.
The Egyptians practiced mummification because they believed the soul was able to return to the body after death.
The Earthquake that Roared
April 18, 1906 AD
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
On April 18, 1906, a little after 5 a.m. in San Francisco, California, there occurred a noise that one resident described as being "like the roar of ten thousand lions." And the ground began to shake.
The glass-domed Palace Hotel rained glass and singer Enrico Caruso ran out into the street, said, "Give me Vesuvius" and after indicating his preference for Italy's volcano, left San Francisco forever.
By the time the shaking and resulting fire were over, 500 people had been killed and 3,000 acres in the downtown area had been destroyed.
While earthquakes as bad as the one that hit San Francisco are relatively rare in the United States, there are actually earthquakes almost all the time, perhaps as many as a million a year, but most are too mild to feel.
Earthquakes are caused when the giant plates that make up the earth's crust rub against one another. The energy released by a large earthquake can be tremendous, scientists say, as much as 10,000 times the energy released by the first atomic bomb.¥Radio: Messages by Air
1895 AD
BOLOGNA, ITALY
Some scientists work all their lives on a problem without solving it, but not Marchese Guglielmo Marconi.
In 1894 he began experimenting at his father's estate in Italy, trying to build a working radio. Just one year later he succeeded.
He approached the Italian government with his development, but it wasn't interested, so he went to the British government, which decided to equip three of its warships with Marconi's device.
Soon radio proved its value. In 1909 it helped save the lives of passengers when the steamship Republic sank, and again when the Titanic sank in 1912.
During the 1940s, radio stations broadcast dramas, comedies, and variety shows, functions that have been largely taken over by television.
Today, radio is used for all sorts of communication, from baby monitors to car telephones, to satellite navigation, military communications, and -- of course -- commercial broadcasting.╤If Redwoods Could Talk
c1500 BC
REDWOOD NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA
When Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt over 3,000 years ago, some of the redwood trees growing today had already been alive for hundreds of years.
Along the foggy West Coast of the United States from Central California to southern Oregon are stands of these majestic and ancient Coastal Redwood trees. One of these giants, called The Tall Tree, stands 368 feet tall and is the tallest tree in the world.
Further inland in California are the giant Sequoias, which are not as tall as the Coastal Redwoods, but are much thicker. One of these, the General Sherman tree, is the largest living thing in the world.
Redwood is a popular wood for fences and other exterior uses because it is highly resistant to disease, decay and insects. Many environmentalists feel that while this may be nice for builders, it is a tragedy for the redwoods.
They are concerned that heavy logging is eliminating many of the most beautiful of the ancient trees.bThe Little Reef Builders
30 Million BC
GREAT BARRIER REEF, AUSTRALIA
Consider the Mad\re\por\ar\ia, a small marine animal with big ambitions and a lot of patience.
During its lifetime, the Mad\re\por\ar\ia secretes a skeleton of lime which is anchored to the sea floor. Over the years, the skeletons of these Madreporaria can build up into huge reefs, the largest of which is the Great Barrier Reef along the continental shelf on the north side of Australia.
The Great Barrier Reef is from 20 to 70 miles from the shore and stretches from New Guinea down the east side of Australia, about 1,250 miles.
The growing face of the reef is a riot of color and animal life. Bright tropical fish, sea-urchins, giant clams, star fish and oysters inhabit it.
Some of the coral forms circles which fill up with sand and become cays, which then become homes to many types of salt-resistant plants and sea birds.îRembrandt: Portraits and Pain
1642 AD
AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
One of the greatest paintings of Rembrandt Harmens Van Rijn was "The Night Watch" (1642). Ironically, it was also the one that virtually ended his portrait painting business.
At the request of 16 members of the civic guards (the Dutch army), Rembrandt painted "The Night Watch." It showed a dramatic scene with 29 life-sized civic guards coming out of their clubhouse. The only problem was that of the 16 guards paying for the picture, only two could recognize themselves in the painting.
Rembrandt was a master of portraits. He could capture the texture of skin, fur, cloth, the likeness of a person and the character behind the face. But after the uproar over "The Night Watch," Rembrandt got few more orders for portraits.
The picture that led to his success as a portrait painter was "The Anatomy lesson of Dr. Tulp" (1632), which shows Tulp lifting a red strand of muscle from a corpse while his students look on in fascination. As with many of his paintings, the background is dark, but the faces -- each one a masterpiece -- are light.
That Rembrandt didn't get many orders after "The Night Watch" didn't really concern him. All four of his daughters died in infancy, then his beloved wife Saskia had died in 1642. He was not really interested in portraits any more. Instead, his art took a quieter, sadder direction.
Though he had always favored biblical scenes, he began to do them more frequently, but not using the idealized figures and settings of the Renaissance. For example, he put Mary and Jesus in a simple carpenter's shop, and in "Christ with the Sick Around Him" he took as models broken people from the poor sections of Amsterdam.
Unfortunately, Rembrandt had added to his problems by spending money freely. By 1656 he was bankrupt and all his possessions were sold. He lived in a poor part of town until he died in poverty in 1699, a year after the death of his only son, Titus.
The Redeemer of Rio
1560 AD
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL
He fades in and out of the mists, welcoming arms outstretched, with a halo of birds circling overhead. Standing 120 feet tall, the famous statute of Christ the Redeemer serenely presides over the sun worshippers of Copacabana, the din of traffic and the eternal beat of samba music that is the city of Rio de Janeiro.
The statue, perched 2,400 feet above sea level on the summit of Corcovado Peak (also known as Hunchback Mountain) has dominated Rio's skyline since it was completed in 1931.
Constructed of reinforced concrete covered with soapstone, "Cristo Redentor" weighs more than 1,000 tons. It was commissioned in 1921 to mark the centennial of Brazilian independence and was paid for by donations from Brazilian churches.
From the observation deck on which the statue stands, visitors can take in a spectacular view of Rio -- from Ipanema Beach and Sugarloaf Mountain on the edge of the Atlantic to the dense tropical rain forest that creeps to the edge of the city on the west.
About 10 million Brazilians call Rio home. They describe their city, which is sunny year-round and boasts 75 miles of coastline, as "Cidade Maravilhosa," the Marvelous City.
Rio de Janeiro was established on the Bay of Guanabara in 1560 by the Portuguese, but was a backwater town until the early 1800s when the Portuguese royal family set up court in Rio after being driven from Europe by Napoleon.
Since then Rio has been known for its cafe society and subtropical climate. Though the country's most powerful and largest city is Sao Paolo, Brazilians often boast that God made the world in six days and spent the seventh creating Rio.
Every year, tourists from around the world flock to the city for Carnaval, the pre-Lenten ritual of parades and partying that goes on around the clock for a week.TWhat's The Thinker Thinking?
1910 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
He sits pondering, pondering, but what is he thinking about? The problems of mankind? Where he left his keys?
You may not be able to guess what he is thinking, but it is clear that sculptor Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" is deep in thought. And for that reason "The Thinker" (1910) is a success, for Rodin was attempting to solve the problem of how to portray something you can't see, in this case, "thought."
The statue -- originally planned as one of a group of figures -- is of a husky man who looks as if he would be better using his muscles than his brain, so his effort at thinking is all the more obvious and intense. Rodin has given him a rough finish, perhaps so as not to distract the eye from his all-important pose.
Many of Rodin's figures have this rough finish. Though he was influenced by Michelangelo's realistic work he was also interested in the work of the impressionists, who lived in Paris with him. His "Walking Man" statue shows this impressionist influence. Because he wanted to emphasize the act of walking in the sculpture, Rodin figured the head and arms were unimportant, so he left them off.
While Rodin's works are not always smoothly finished, that was not his object. Like the impressionists, he tried to capture a moment in time. For Rodin, it was the pose or action that expressed the character of his subject.
Rodin's other great works include the "Portal of Hell," showing the suffering of those in Hell; "The Kiss," a smooth-finished sculpture depicting a man and woman embracing; and "Balzac," a roughly finished and imposing statue of the great French novelist.⌐ Roosevelt: Alone in Cuba?
1898 AD
SAN JUAN HILL, CUBA
When Theodore Roosevelt was having trouble getting on a wild horse at his ranch, one of his men offered to help. "Cowboy," Roosevelt replied, "I know you can ride him. What I want to find out is if I can ride him."
That determination made "Teddy" Roosevelt the man he was. Though he could barely see without thick glasses, he became an excellent marksman; though he was sickly, he became a fine athlete; though as a boy he was timid, he became a strong leader, and eventually, president of the United States.
But sometimes his courage led Roosevelt to extremes. In the New York Assembly, he often considered opponents absolutely wrong and himself absolutely right. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy he recklessly advocated war with Mexico, Germany, England, Spain, Chile and Canada.
But it was this same courage that made him so effective as police commissioner in cleaning up the New York Police Department, and as a commander in the Spanish-American War, and later as president.
During the 1898 war with Spain, Roosevelt raised a regiment of cavalry called the "Rough Riders," which participated in the United States capture of Santiago, Cuba. With Roosevelt recklessly leading (with the men on foot since there was no room for horses on the boats), the regiment captured Kettle Hill in the San Juan highlands, but suffered heavily.
In his book, "The Rough Riders," Roosevelt talked so much about himself that humorist Finley Dunne suggested the book be called, "Alone in Cuba." Amused, Roosevelt wrote to Dunnne to say that -- to his regret -- his family and friends were delighted by the title Dunne had suggested.
After the war Roosevelt became governor of New York, where his reforms antagonized the Republican party leadership, so they pushed him to run for vice-president, hoping to get him elected to a position of little power.
He and running-mate William McKinley won the election, but President McKinley was shot and killed. So, in 1901, at 42 years old, Roosevelt became president.
As president he was called the "Trust Buster" for his efforts to break up businesses he felt were monopolistic. He also set up the nation's park system, helped negotiate a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, and helped establish the Panama Canal.
But the canal also hurt Roosevelt's reputation. At the time, Panama was part of Colombia, but after the Colombian senate refused to ratify a treaty with the United States that would allow the canal to be built, Panama rebelled against Colombia. United States warships prevented the Colombian military from suppressing the rebellion, allowing the United States to make a treaty with the new nation of Panama.
After his presidency, Roosevelt went hunting in Africa (J.P. Morgan, a businessman Roosevelt had offended, reportedly said the first lion Roosevelt met should "do his duty"). The lion didn't and Roosevelt ended his trip by accepting the Nobel Peace prize for his part in ending the Russo-Japanese War.
Disappointed in William Taft's presidency, Roosevelt tried for the Republican nomination for president in 1912, but lost. He then ran as president for the Progressive Party, but just divided the Republican Party, helping Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win.⌡A Little Parade that Grew
1889 AD
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
It started out more than 100 years ago as a way to attract a few tourists to the little resort town of Pasadena, California. But from that first New Year's Day in 1889 it grew...and grew...and grew. Today, the Tournament of Roses, including the Rose Parade, features more than 100 elaborate flower-covered floats from around the world, marching bands, equestrian groups and international television coverage.
Charles F. Holder, president of the town's Valley Hunt Club, came up with the idea of a parade to be followed by an afternoon of games. He wanted the event to celebrate the ripening of the oranges, of which the city at that time had many.
The first year the event included a parade of flower-covered carriages and an afternoon of games in the open field.
Early Tournaments of Roses featured egg and spoon relays, foot races and hurdles, plus a game called a tournament of rings, a Spanish jousting game in which horsemen with lances try to spear rings. From the name of this game eventually came the official title for New Year's Day event.
By 1895 the event had outgrown the Valley Hunt Club, so the Tournament of Roses Association formed to continue the event. By the end of the century the Rose Parade had become a major tourist attraction.
Though now the event is associated with football, it wasn't always that way. In 1902 there was a football game, but in 1904 the Tournament featured chariot races. It wasn't until 1916 that football became a permanent part of the day-long event.╙Recovering a Lost Civilization
196 BC
ROSETTA, EGYPT
For almost 1600 years, the entire history of ancient Egypt was unknown because no one could read a picture language called hieroglyphics. If it weren't for a "hard copy" called the Rosetta Stone, the language would still be lost, and we would know almost nothing of the first major civilization and world power on Earth.
Written in 196 BC, the stone is a record of the priestly honors and economic privileges given to Ptolemy V for the services he performed for Egypt.
In 1799 soldiers in Napoleon's army were breaking down a wall in an old fort in Rosetta, Egypt. Suddenly, they came across a black slab of stone divided into three horizontal bands. Each band was covered with carved writing. The bottom band was in ancient Greek, the middle band in Demotic, an Egyptian "peoples" language, and the top band contained hieroglyphics, the language which literally covers the sacred temples and statues of ancient Egypt.
Fortunately, ancient Greek is still well understood by scholars. When translators examined the last two lines in the Greek section, they found that the stone carried the same message in the three languages. By comparing the known Greek section with the characters in the hieroglyphic section, it became possible to decipher the hieroglyphic symbols.
In September 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion uncovered the techniques which led to our current understanding of hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone is now located at the British Museum in London, England.╛A Stained-Glass Storybook
1163 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
Notre Dame Cathedral's three famous rose windows were originally from the 13th and 14th centuries. They were covered with small images composed primarily of reds, blues, and purples that were not painted, but actually dyed into the glass. Later, the process for making thinner glass was refined, so that the glass could transmit more light. Additionally, compounds were created for the mixing of bright green and yellow paints.
It might not occur to the modern visitor to ask why so many biblical scenes were represented on these stained windows. It's good to keep in mind that at the time these windows were erected, the great majority of people, including many in the upper classes, were unable to read. So, it was convenient to provide a sort of comic book approach to conveying the story of the Bible, and other religious themes.
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel provided a similar picture-book account of the Bible for the people of Rome.╝ Rousseau: Let the People Rule
1749 AD
DIJON, FRANCE
"Has the progress of sciences and arts contributed to corrupt or purify morality?" That question, posed in 1749 by the Academy of Dijon, in France, was the opportunity Jean Jacques Rousseau was waiting for, and his answer made him famous.
Rousseau was born and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, then roamed Europe as a vagabond, eventually settling in Paris, where he tried his hand at the theater, opera, music, and poetry before being inspired by the Academy's challenge to write on social philosophy.
In his response, "A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences," Rousseau argued that humanity had been badly harmed by science and the arts. Though his view was not commonly held, the Academy awarded him first prize.
Rousseau said that people in their natural state are far superior to people in a civilized state. He imagined an early era when people lived in the forest happy and healthy, with no desire for social bonds. Civilization, he said, is a hopeless attempt to find cures for the problems it causes.
But because civilization had become a fact and a necessity, Rousseau dreamed of a society in which the individual had maximum freedom. It was a radical idea in the age of monarchy when he wrote.
In "The Social Contract," his most influential and original work, Rousseau imagined a society in which the people ruled completely. If the people made the laws and agreed to abide by them, he said, they would be free. By contrast, in a monarchy -- where the laws are imposed without the people's consent -- people are not free.
If this social system sounds familiar, it should. Rousseau's ideas have had a profound impact on the world. The opening words of the United States Constitution, "We the people...," echo his thoughts.
But Rousseau imagined a society without brakes. His faith in people's goodness as members of a free society was profound, so his imagined society had no restraints on the people's will, such as an independent court system or a president with veto power.
However, people are not always good, even in a free society, as the world found out with the coming of the French Revolution. Under the French Revolutionary government people were slaughtered by the cartload simply because of their social class.
But Rousseau's idea of direct rule by the people -- when combined with the restraining influence of governmental departments that are not directly under their control -- has become a major success throughout the world.─Rubens' Painting Factory
1611 AD
ANTWERP, BELGIUM
Whether you wanted a peace treaty or a painting, Peter Paul Rubens was your man.
At age 23 Rubens traveled from his home in Flanders (now part of Belgium) to Italy to study the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian, but the Duke of Mantua was so impressed with his art that he invited him to be his court painter.
And when the duke discovered Rubens' courtly manners and language skills, he made the painter his ambassador to the King of Spain. Later, Rubens would negotiate a peace treaty between England and Spain and be given titles of nobility from both countries.
When his mother died, he returned home from Italy and settled in a magnificent mansion in Antwerp which he furnished with antiques and statues.
Rubens loved huge, ornate, energetic paintings. In fact, the bigger the better. "My talent is such," he boasted, "that no undertaking however vast in size... has ever surpassed my courage."
His giant pictures featured biblical and mythological scenes with beautiful groupings of strong active figures.
One of his most famous works is "Descent from the Cross" (1611-1614), depicting the removal of the dead Jesus from the cross.
Though his paintings were large, he produced a vast number of them. About 2,000 paintings have been attributed to his studio. One of the reasons he was able to produce so many is that he employed numerous assistants, some talented in painting animals, or background scenery. Often he would give his helpers a sketch and let them paint the picture in its basic form, then would finish it with his special touch.
Though employing assistants was nothing new, the size of Rubens operation caused some critics to accuse him of running a painting factory.
ΣMt. Rushmore: No Greek Sandals
1927 AD
BLACK HILLS, SOUTH DAKOTA
Frankly, South Dakota's economy was not in great shape, but Doane Robinson had an idea.
In 1923, Robinson, the director of the South Dakota Historical Society, suggested carving a gigantic sculpture of some kind in the state's beautiful Black Hills.
He may have been inspired by the sheer grandeur of the idea, but in selling his plan, he emphasized the economic benefit to the state of increased tourism.
Robinson gathered support for his project and then persuaded sculptor Gutzon Borglum to design and supervise the project.
Borglum, who had been carving a giant memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia, fell in love with the idea, and proposed carving into the granite face of Mt. Rushmore the heads of four great American presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
Robinson would have preferred just Washington, but there was no arguing with Borglum, who hated being crossed and seemed to consider life to be one long argument.
But still, he was talented, and appropriately, was fascinated by massive sculpture. He was also one of America's leading sculptors, having studied art at the Julian Academy in Paris. But despite his European art education, he was drawn to Western themes and looked down at European art. He sneered that Americans' interest in European art meant they would refuse to look at anything "unless it wears a helmet or Greek sandals."
Borglum began work on Mt. Rushmore in 1927. The work took only about six-and-a-half years, but because of lack of funding and bad weather, the entire project wasn't finished until 14 years later. The federal government ended up paying for 84 percent of the project.
Borglum died in 1941, shortly before the statues were completed. His son, Lincoln, finished the project.
Each face of the massive sculpture is about 60-feet from chin to forehead, twice as tall as the head of the Great Sphinx of Giza, and, as Robinson predicted, Mt. Rushmore has become a major tourist attraction.ⁿSaturn's Braided Rings
1980 AD
SATURN ORBIT
Scientists discovered centuries ago that the planet Saturn was circled by a ring, but little did they expect how many rings there were, or how strange some of those beautiful rings would turn out to be upon close examination.
In November 1980, the spacecraft Voyager 1 flew by Saturn and discovered that it has at least seven separate ring systems. Unexpectedly, it found that some of them were intertwined or "braided."
These rings, which may have been formed when the planet itself was formed or could have been created when an ancient moon strayed too close to Saturn's gravity and was ripped apart, are made of ice and dust fragments as small as sand or as large as a small house. The larger pieces tend to collide with one another and break into ever smaller pieces.
Whatever their origin, the discovery of braided rings around Saturn is a good illustration of how close examination often shows us how much more complex our physical world is than our initial observations would lead us to believe.Saturn has Ears?
1610 AD
SIXTH PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM
Today you can walk into any toy store and buy a telescope for under five dollars that can magnify objects 40 times (40-power). That is more magnification than Galileo's telescope, a 32-power device that he used to make a curious discovery.
In 1610 Galileo turned his priceless instrument -- the best in the world at that time -- toward Saturn. He saw what appeared to be two small planets on either side of the main planet and concluded that "Saturn is not one alone, but is composed of three, which almost touch one another."
Later, Johannes Hevelius reported that Saturn seemed to have two fuzzy handles sticking out from its sides like ears.
While we might chuckle that scientists thought that Saturn might have ears, that is precisely what the ring system looked like with low-powered telescopes.
Progress in knowledge is sometimes dependent not on brilliant minds, but on precision instruments. Better telescopes and the Voyager spacecraft have been just such instruments to free our minds of foolish "facts." But, what "facts" of today will be the nonsense of the future?
In the case of Saturn, it was not until Christiaan Huygens invented a new method for grinding lenses that telescopes became powerful and accurate enough to present the true picture. By 1659, Huygens reported that "Saturn is surrounded by a thin, flat ring."
Actually, when Voyager 1 passed by the planet, it discovered that there are several rings, some in interesting shapes.
Saturn is larger than 800 Earths, and, like Jupiter, is made mostly of hydrogen. It is 889 million miles from the sun and takes 30 years to go once around the sun, but spins on its axis twice as fast as Earth. Because of its rapid rotation and low density, Saturn swells outward at its equator like a lump of pizza dough expands when tossed up and twirled. Though far from Earth, Saturn is not lonely. It has at least 23 moons, the largest of which is Titan.
Until 1781, when Uranus was discovered, Saturn was believed to be the last planet at the edge of the solar system.
τSewing's Not So Simple
1846 AD
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
On first thought, sewing machines don't look too complicated. A needle goes up and down sewing pieces of cloth together. But if you think about it, if it just went up and down, the thread would just come right back out of the hole each time the needle came up.
That was the problem sewing machine inventors had to face, and the best solution belonged to Elias Howe, of Massachusetts, who patented his sewing machine in 1846.
Howe's machine used a needle with an eye at the point and two spools of thread, one under the cloth called a bobbin. When the needle brought the upper thread through the cloth, a rotating hook caught it and looped it completely around the bobbin. Then, as the upper thread was pulled up by the needle, it caught the lower thread, which trailed from the bobbin, creating a tight lock stitch.
In 1851 Isaac Singer added to Howe's invention a presser foot to hold the fabric down, and in 1854 Alan Wilson introduced an automatic cloth feed mechanism.FWhere Am I? The Sextant Knows
1735 AD
LONDON, ENGLAND
When everything is sea in all directions, how do you tell where you are? That was the problem navigators faced when ships first strayed far from land.
But in 1735 John Hadley invented a device that let navigators tell their exact latitude (north-south position). His creation is now called a sextant, Latin for "sixth of a circle," a name taken from its curved shape.
To use the sextant, the navigator aims it at both the horizon and the sun (or a star at night). Using the sextant's mirror apparatus, he aligns the two in his sighting telescope. The scale on the rim of the sextant then shows the altitude of the sun or star above the horizon.
The navigator can determine his latitude from this because the sun appears lower in the sky toward the earth's poles and higher toward the equator.
To tell his longitude (east-west position), he determines the local, or sun-time, then refers to the ship's clock, called a chronometer, which is set to the time in Greenwich, England. By comparing local time to Greenwich time, he can find his distance east or west of Greenwich.■The Poacher's Plays
1564-1616
STRATFORD-ON-AVON, ENGLAND
If William Shake\speare's poaching had gone undetected, the world might have been deprived of some of the greatest plays ever written.
But in 1584, when he was about 20, Shake\speare was caught and had to leave his home of Stratford-\on-\Avon. He drifted around and ended up in London, where he took a menial job in the theater.
There, however, Shake\speare found his place in life and by 1592 he had become a well-known playwright.
During his life he wrote about 40 plays, ranging from humor ("The Comedy of Errors," "The Taming of the Shrew," "Much Ado About Nothing," "A Mid\summer Night's Dream") to tragedy ("Romeo and Juliet," "Julius Caesar," "Macbeth," "King Lear" and "Othello") to tragi\comedy ("Two Gentlemen of Verona" and "Merchant of Venice").
As his life progressed, Shakespeare's work became more pessimistic, hitting bottom with "Timon of Athens." Then something must have changed in his life and his last plays ("Cymbeline" and "The Tempest") became idyllic and romantic.vThe Shuttle: Airplanes in Space
April 12, 1981 AD
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA
The maiden voyage of the space shuttle Columbia marked an epoch in space travel, for Columbia -- launched April 12, 1981 -- was rocket, spaceship and airplane all in one.
Mission commander John Young and pilot Bob Crippen were the first astronauts who could bring their craft back from space and land on a runway. The Columbia is also the first space shuttle to have reusable boosters.
But just when the space shuttle missions started to become routine, the program was dealt a setback by the Challenger disaster, in which seven crew members died when one of the ship's booster rockets exploded 73 seconds into the mission. Among those who died was Christa McAuliffe, who was to have been the first teacher in space.
Just before the explosion, astronaut Michael J. Smith realized something had gone wrong. His last words over the radio were simply, "Uh-oh."eThe Face of Adam
1508 AD
ROME, ITALY
In this close-up view of Adam, notice the expectant expression Michelangelo has put on Adam's face as he looks out toward his Creator.
This picture is just a small part of one of the paintings that cover the Sistine Chapel ceiling, many of which are of equal quality, and all of which now shine even brighter following their recent cleaning.
∞The Creation of Adam
1508 AD
ROME, ITALY
Pope Julius wanted Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with figures of Jesus' 12 disciples, but Michelangelo had a far more complex design in mind. He proposed painting scenes from the Bible book of Genesis that would contain hundreds of figures.
He began work on the ceiling in 1508 with several assistants, whom he soon dismissed. He did the rest of the painting himself, using assistants only for menial tasks.
The task took four and a half years. During that time Michelangelo not only had to endure the extreme physical hardship of lying on his back and reaching upward while painting, but he also had to endure complaining and much delayed payments. In September 1510 quit working until January 1511 because he had not been paid.
But despite the problems, when he was finished he had created a masterpiece.
Michelangelo painted six large ceiling panels in which he depicted: God's creation of light and darkness; the creation of the sun, moon and stars; the creation of the waters; the creation of Adam, the first man; the creation of Eve; and Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In addition, he painted three smaller panels showing the sacrifice of Noah; the Flood; and the drunkenness of Noah.
The most famous and fascinating of these panels is the "Creation of Adam." In the picture, it appears that God is giving something to Adam. Perhaps God is giving him life, or a soul, or a blessing. Perhaps Michelangelo also meant to suggest that if man reaches out to God, God will reach out to man.
The ceiling had until recently been covered with the grime of centuries of candles and oil lamps, but a thorough cleaning completed in 1989 has removed the dirt and the colors now shine with their original intensity.v
Adam Smith's Economy
1776 AD
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND
Though his book changed the world, few people even noticed when Adam Smith's, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" was first published in 1776.
Smith was born and raised near Edinburgh, Scotland, and though he initially wanted to become an Episcopal clergyman, he ended up as a university professor.
Later Smith took a job as tutor to the teenage step-son of a prominent politician, a position that took him to France for three years and gave him time to start his book (usually referred to by its short title, "Wealth of Nations").
In "Wealth of Nations" Smith argued that a country's wealth comes from the ability of its people to make things, and that the more efficiently they make things, the wealthier the nation will become.
Building on that thought, he added that people become more efficient as they specialize and get to know one task extremely well, and as they use specialized machinery.
But for people to specialize, he said, there must be a large demand for the product they are making. For example, it would be impossible to earn a living just making pin heads if there were only a few hundred people to sell pins to. And for the same reason, nobody would invent a pin-head making machine unless there was a large demand for pins.
To ensure a large market, Smith favored trade between individuals and nations with the least possible government regulation.
He denied that regulation was necessary to prevent some from becoming wealthy at the expense of others. This doesn't happen, he said, because both parties must benefit from trading. If they don't benefit, he said, they won't make the trade.
For the same reason, he also opposed the common practice of limiting imports to help home-country manufacturers. By doing this, he said, a government might help its manufacturers, but only at the expense of its consumers, who will have to pay for the higher-priced product.
Smith also described the law of supply and demand, which simply says that when the supply of a product or service is plentiful, the price drops, and when the supply is scarce, the price goes up.
Today, Smith is particularly respected by capitalist economists, also called "free-market" economists. These economists say that the best economy is the one with the least government involvement. In whole or partial opposition to Smith are socialist and Marxist economists, who promote an active -- or in extreme cases, complete -- government role in the economy.
The capitalist system Smith describes has also been accused of turning people (such as his hypothetical pin-head maker) from being craftsmen to mere cogs in giant machines.áSocrates the Pest
399 BC
ATHENS, GREECE
Early one morning while he was serving in the Athenian army, a problem occurred to Socrates. So he stood still to think about it.
But it was difficult, so he just kept standing and thinking. By noon, people began to wonder what he was thinking about. After dinner, some of the other soldiers brought their bedding outside so they could relax and see how long he would stand there. Finally, at dawn the next day, Socrates prayed to the sun and walked away.
Socrates was one of the greatest of the Greek philosophers and was particularly interested in the nature of man and government.
He considered himself to be a gadfly, someone who pesters people into thinking by constantly asking them questions.
It was this criticism of the Athenian government and Socrates' contempt for Greek mythological religious ideas that led to his arrest.
He was tried and found guilty, and when given the opportunity to suggest a his own penalty, he suggested a tiny fine of 30 minas. The court was furious and condemned him to death.
"I am not angry with you, my judges," Socrates said. "You have done me no harm, although you did not mean to do me any good. The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways, I to die and you to live. Which of these is better, only God knows."
In 399 BC, at age 70, Socrates calmly drank a cup of deadly hemlock, walked around the cell until his legs began to feel heavy, then laid down and died.CFitting a Circle on a Square
532-537 AD
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
One of the problems of building with domes is fitting them neatly on top of square buildings.
The Romans mostly just didn't do it, though sometimes they used devices called "squinches," blocks that went across the upper corners of square buildings to make an octagonal surface on which the dome could lay. But squinches are ugly; they interrupt the smooth rise of the walls to the top of the dome.
Finally the Byzantines (or perhaps the Syrians) found the solution. It is called the "pendentive" and is based on the principle of the arch. Simply put, it smoothly bends and rounds the corners of a square building inward toward the top in order to form a round base for the dome.
The best example of a pendentive dome is Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom" in Greek) Church in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). The church was built in 532-537 AD by Emperor Justinian to replace a wooden roofed church that burned down in January 532 AD.
Architects Isadorus, Miletus and Anthemius built a remarkable structure about as tall as the Arc de Triumph in France. Around the base of the huge dome are 40 windows that almost make it appear (from the inside) that the dome is floating on air. Around the main dome are several partial domes giving it support.
When it was finished, Emperor Justinian supposedly claimed it was more beautiful than the temple built by Solomon in Israel. "Solomon," he said, "I have surpassed you."
Hagia Sophia was made into a mosque in 1453 AD when the Muslim Turks conquered Constantinople. The minarets (towers) you see in the picture were added by the Turks.¥Hagia Sofia: Once Spectacular
532-537 AD
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Though Hagia Sofia is interesting from the outside, it is impressive from the inside, and once it was spectacular.
Before Constantinople was conquered by the Turks, Hagia Sofia was a church. The huge domed interior was covered with brightly colored and polished mosaics, topped with golden domes, and decorated with colorful curtains, polished marble and stonework, some from as far away as the Atlantic coast of France.
During the daytime the sunlight shown through the windows ringing the great dome. At night the interior of the church blazed with thousands of candelabra and lamps whose light reflected off the polished surfaces.
When Constantinople was taken over by the Turks, Sultan Muhammed II converted the church into a mosque, replacing the cross with a crescent and removing other Christian symbols.
For a while the mosaics remained exposed, but eventually they were covered with whitewash.█So Large and So Small
4.5 Billion BC
RURAL MILKY WAY
To send a spacecraft to the outer reaches of our solar system takes years, but a beam of light can cross the entire solar system in less than a day.
To us the solar system is vast, but compared to our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it is microscopic, almost lost among the Milky Way's 100 billion other stars. The beam of light that crosses our solar system in less than a day would take a hundred thousand years to cross the Milky Way.
The solar system is composed of the sun and all the objects that travel around it: mainly planets, asteroids, and comets.
Most important of these orbiting bodies are the planets. From nearest the sun, they are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
There have been different theories about how the solar system was formed, but today most scientists believe it was formed about 4.5 billion years ago out of a disc of hydrogen gas and heavier materials that slowly condensed into the sun and planets. The Head in the Sand
2,500 BC
GIZA, EGYPT
As the soldiers of Napoleon's army marched across the sands to Giza, Egypt, in 1799, they suddenly came upon an astonishing sight, the giant head of a man sticking up out of the sand. Awestruck, the men stopped and stared in amazement.
The head was all that remained exposed of one of the largest and oldest statues in the world, the Great Sphinx, which was carved about 4,500 years ago.
A sphinx was a mythological being known to the Egyptians and Greeks. In Egypt they were a symbol of protection and often lined paths to temples. They had a lion's body and the head of a man, falcon or ram.
Archaeologists believe that because the Great Sphinx is located near the pyramid of King Khafre and wears a royal headdress that it is his face on the statue.
The statue is 240-feet long and 66 feet high with a face more than 13 feet wide. The head and body are carved of a single block of limestone with the legs and paws built of separate blocks of stone. The statue was apparently carved from a mound of rock that was left over when the pyramid was finished.
Over the ages the sand has again and again threatened to bury the Sphinx. When just the head was exposed around 1400 BC, Thutmos IV cleared it away, saying he dreamed the god Horus asked him to do it.
The sand was again removed in 1818, 1886, 1926 and 1938. Wind, sand and rain have worn away at the Sphinx and at one time or another it may have been used as a target for gun practice. Since the 1970s scientists have been treating it with chemicals to preserve it.
Like much Egyptian sculpture, the Sphinx seems stiff and lifeless. In general, Egyptian statues show people posed and expressionless, while paintings show them in a very awkward position, with their heads facing forward, chest facing the side, and legs facing forward. Try that in front of a mirror!
It wasn't that the Egyptians were incapable of lifelike statues. We know this because Pharaoh Akhenaten tried to break centuries of tradition and have statues carved in lifelike fashion. The statue head of Akhenaten shows a man with a long jaw and heavy lips. But the painted limestone bust of his wife, Nefertiti, which was also carved about 1360 BC in the same lifelike manner, shows a beautiful woman.
Despite Akhenaten's efforts, the old style prevailed again when he died.╬Hotfoot to Heliostat
c200 BC
BARSTOW, CALIFORNIA
One somewhat doubtful story says that in about 200 BC the Greek mathematician Archimedes set fire to Roman ships besieging his home town of Syracuse by focusing sunlight on them with mirrors.
Though that may have been one early use for solar energy, it was far more common to use the sun for such simple tasks as drying fruit or evaporating water to obtain salt from the sea. But today solar energy is also used for heating, cooling and generating electricity.
Actually, almost all our energy is solar energy, though it often comes to us indirectly. For example, wood, coal and oil were once plants, which grew because of the sun; windmills are powered by winds caused by the sun; and we can harness rivers because the sun evaporates water from lakes and seas, which then falls as rain and powers hydroelectric plants.
Though we use solar energy indirectly in many ways, there are just two methods of using solar energy directly: passively and actively.
To use solar energy passively, architects design buildings to collect the maximum amount of heat on cold winter days and to avoid collecting heat in the summer. On the other hand, active solar systems use collecting devices to convert sunlight into electricity or to heat water which is circulated through a building to warm it.
Most solar devices have been developed for individual buildings, but some experimental large scale projects, such as one near the desert town of Barstow, California, are designed to feed electricity into the regular power grid.
Like Archimedes' system, these devices use hundreds of mirrors, called heliostats, to focus the sun's rays on a boiler at the top of a tower. The vaporized liquid from the boiler then powers a generator.gIs Earth Recycled Suns?
4.5 billion BC
OUTER RIM, MILKY WAY GALAXY
Is our solar system made up of the debris of old burned-out suns? One popular theory says it is.
Most scientists think that when some ancient stars died, they collapsed, creating many of the elements we have on Earth today. Then they exploded as supernovas, blowing matter across space.
In some areas, this debris swirled together with vast amounts of hydrogen and helium.
These turning gas clouds slowly flattened into disks. And as gravity pulled the gases together the pressure became so intense at the center of the cloud that a nuclear fire erupted, which -- in our solar system -- became the sun. Approximately 99% of all matter in our solar system is part of the sun.
Scientists think that some of the heavier atoms remaining in the cloud gradually pulled together to become Earth and the other eight planets of our solar system.
▒Steam Power on the Water
1807 AD
NEW YORK
The Age of Steam had already come to the land, but on the sea the sailing ship was still supreme. But American engineer Robert Fulton was soon to change that.
Fulton had studied in Great Britain and was acquainted with steam-engine pioneer James Watt and William Symington, who had built a steam-powered canal tug boat.
Upon returning to the United States, he and American statesman Robert Livingston built the steam-powered Clermont, which began sailing between New York and Albany on the Hudson River in 1807.
While there had been earlier experiments using steam engines to propel boats, Fulton's Clermont was the first commercially successful steamship.
In 1814-15, Fulton built the first steam-powered warship, called the Fulton, for the United States government.
Fulton's pioneering work eventually led to the construction of such great ocean-going liners as the Queen Mary, shown here at its home in Long Beach, California.Stegosaurus: The Hedgehog
140 million BC
MIDWEST NORTH AMERICA
Though not always able to outrun its carnivorous foes, the 21-foot-long stegosaurus always had a final line of defense -- its bony-plated back and spiny tail.
If cornered or unable to outrun a larger enemy, the stegosaurus' back plates afforded some protection while the four to eight spikes on the end of its tail (which grew as long as four feet) made it dangerous for a foe to approach too carelessly.
Scientists still don't agree about the placement of the vertical plates along the stegosaurus' back. The plates are not attached to bone, but were imbedded in the dinosaur's back, which makes it difficult to tell if they were in a single row, double row or a combination of the two.
Many scientists believe the verticle plates also served as warming or cooling fins, picking up heat from the sun when the weather was cool to warm the stegosaurus, or giving off heat when it was too hot.
Stegosaurus bones have been found in Colorado and Wyoming, and are believed to have lived primarily in western North America.,Of Steinbeck and Poverty
1935-1939 AD
SALINAS, CALIFORNIA
To be a poor worker during the Great Depression of the 1930s was a miserable experience, an experience that American novelist John Ernst Steinbeck captured in his touching novels, several of which were set in Central California where he was born and raised.
Steinbeck, who was born in 1902 in Salinas, was struck by the painful life suffered by poor laborers due to grinding economic and social conditions. This theme was strongly developed in some of his best known and respected novels, "Tortilla Flat" (1935), "Of Mice and Men" (1937), and "Grapes of Wrath" (1939).
"East of Eden" (1952), one of the best of his later novels, dealt with the need for understanding and love among people, while his "Travels With Charley" (1962) described a trip across the United States with his poodle.┘A Four Million Pound Clock
2800 BC
SALISBURY PLAIN, ENGLAND
Imagine visiting Stonehenge just before sunrise on June 21, 2000 BC. As the sun begins to rise, its rays shine down the main avenue, through the entrance of the circle of giant stones. If you were standing at the center of the Sarcen Circle, your body would be bathed in sunlight. This marvel of astronomical timing would be useful to a farming people who needed to mark the passing of times and seasons.
Stonehenge, situated near the city of Salisbury in Southern England, probably provided other astronomical timings, but over the years, souvenir hunters and scavengers looking for building material have chipped and carried away many of the smaller stones. For this reason, it is impossible to verify various theories concerning Stonehenge's use as an observatory.
Today, major public buildings take months to build using heavy machinery. In 2000 BC, it would have taken a thousand men several years just to move the large stones the 20 miles to Stonehenge from the mountains where they were mined!
The familiar outer circle of large upright stones, known as the Sarcen Circle, is about 100 ft. in diameter. The average weight of the stones in the circle is about 50,000 pounds, but one stone is over 100,000 pounds. Each of these massive stones was shaped with nothing more than stone hammers. The top of each upright stone is slightly indented so that cap stones rest on top of them securely. The Sarcen Circle was originally topped by 30 stones each weighing 14,000 pounds.
Stonehenge's surrounding bank and ditch -- along with a few large stones -- were set in place about 2800 BC. Over time, other elements were added, such as a half circle of small stones in about 2100 BC, and the major circle of capped stones, which was finished 100 years later. About 1,300 years after it was begun, Stonehenge was finally completed. It was still 1,500 years before Christ.
Some have speculated that a group of priests called Druids built Stonehenge. The Druids lived around the time of Julius Caesar in the first century BC. Since this was many hundreds of years after Stonehenge had been completed, they obviously could not have build it. In addition, the Druids did not use temples, but conducted their ceremonies in forest clearings.δRaining Cats and Dogs
EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE
It is unlikely you will ever see the sky rain real cats and dogs, but it could happen.
In the midwestern United States, tornadoes sometimes pick up and drop some of the strangest things.
Tornadoes develop when a whirlpool of air forms in a thundercloud. These "twisters" are funnel-shaped and about 350 yards wide with winds up to 400 miles an hour and brilliant lightning flashes. They explode houses, lift cars, herds of cattle and train engines. They can even drive straws through fence posts. So it is not surprising that twisters have also vacuumed frogs and fish from ponds and dropped them over towns.
Lightning storms can also be extremely damaging. One lightning bolt can discharge a trillion watts of electricity, easily destroying a building. But lightning is attracted to the highest object in an area, which gave Benjamin Franklin the idea for the lightning rod, a metal rod that sticks out above a building and leads to the ground. Because the rod is higher than the building, the lightning strikes it instead of the building, then flows harmlessly into the ground.
Another type of violent storm is the hurricane, such as the one pictured here. Hurricanes form in tropical oceans when east and west trade winds curl around each other to form a spiral. If conditions are right, warm air rises in the spiral, making the winds go faster and faster.
Hurricanes average 400 miles across with winds from 75 to 125 miles per hour. In the middle of a hurricane is a circular "eye" about 15 miles across that is nearly windless. When the eye passes overhead it can fool people into thinking the storm is over when they are really right in the middle of it! The winds and storm tides from hurricanes can cause major damage to seaside areas.
ï Little Lady Starts Big War
1852 AD
HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT
Harriet Beecher Stowe had poured her heart into her anti-slavery book, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." But neither she or her first publisher thought it would be a big success. The publisher was so doubtful he wanted her to split the publishing costs with him, and all she hoped was that it would make enough money for her to buy a new silk dress.
But when the first 5,000 copies were printed in 1852, they sold out in two days. In a year the book had sold 300,000 copies in the United States and 150,000 in England. For a while it outsold every book in the world except the Bible.
Within six months of its release a play was made from the book which ran 350 performances in New York and remained America's most popular play for 80 years.
It might appear that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was universally popular, but this was certainly not true. Many people during those pre-Civil War days -- particularly defenders of the slavery system -- condemned it as false propaganda and poorly written melodrama.
Harriet did have strong religious views against slavery (When asked how she came to write the book, she replied: "God wrote it."), and she tried to convince people slavery was wrong, so perhaps the book could be considered propaganda. But if so, it was true propaganda, in that it accurately depicted the evils of slavery.
Though she was born in Connecticut in 1832, as a young woman she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, when her father accepted the presidency of newly-founded Lane Theological Seminary. Ohio was a free state, but just across the Ohio River in Kentucky, Harriet saw slavery in action.
She lived 18 years in Cincinnati, marrying a professor at the college, Calvin Stowe. In 1850 they moved to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin taught religion.
Then, in 1851, despite her busyness as a mother, Harriet Beecher Stowe began her book.
Its vast influence strengthened the anti-slavery movement and antagonized defenders of the slave system. Some think it helped bring on the American Civil War.
In fact, when Abraham Lincoln met Harriet at the White House during the Civil War, he said, "So, this is the little lady who started this big war."
Stowe continued her anti-slavery writings through such publications as the "Atlantic Monthly," and "Christian Union," and in 1853 published a "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," which gave the sources showing the authenticity of the horrors she described in the book."
St. Peter: Trouble and Triumph
1506-1626 AD
VATICAN CITY, ROME, ITALY
In his rush to escape the crush of the crowd, Pope Julius II laid the cornerstone crooked for the new Church of Saint Peter. That little incident on April 18, 1506 was just the first of many problems to come, but the final result would be an awe-inspiring structure that is the foremost church in the Roman Catholic religion.
Architect Donato Bramante had designed a church in the shape of a Greek Cross (each arm of equal length) with a dome at the center and four smaller domes at the sides, but a year before he died in 1514 the new pope, Leo X, named Raphael, Baldassare, Peruzzi and Giuliano da Sangallo to oversee the construction. The four couldn't decide whether to go with a Greek cross or a Latin cross (a cross with one arm longer than the others), but they did add a series of monuments and chapels to the building that weren't in the original plan.
Then came an uproar in Germany. The Augustinian monk Martin Luther began teaching against the church's collection of indulgences, which were being used in part to finance the rebuilding of the church. Luther's resistance eventually led to a deep split in the church.
Then, in 1534, Pope Paul III asked Michelangelo to take over the project. But Pope Julius had been so slow in paying him for his work on the Sistine Chapel that Michelangelo was not anxious for the job, but fortunately he was persuaded.
It was a difficult working situation, with Michelangelo repeatedly called upon to justify his changes. Nevertheless, he managed to remodel all the plans for St. Peters in an attempt to unify the many elements that had been added over the years. He lived to see construction begin on the lower portion of the great central dome he designed, which is the most notable feature of the building, but after his death, the body of the church was again redesigned.
The final element was added to the church by Pope Paul V, who lengthened one of the arms of the cross to make the church in the shape of a Latin cross. Then, on Nov. 18, 1626, 120 years after it was begun, Saint Peter was consecrated by Pope Urban VIII.
The wide, oval piazza in front of the church was designed in the mid 17th Century by Gianiorenzo Bernini in a understated Baroque style. At the center of the piazza is an Egyptian-style obelisk and around the edges is a triple row of columns that taper toward the top, making them appear even taller and more inspiring.
Though Baroque is usually highly adorned, Bernini wisely left the columns of his colonnade undecorated so as not to distract from Michelangelo's magnificent dome.âSailing Under the Water
1620 AD
NORTH POLE
Alexander the Great is said to have explored under the Mediterranean Sea in a glass barrel and Leonardo da Vinci actually designed a submarine, but the first real underwater ship was invented in 1620 AD by Cornelius Van Drebel, a Dutchman serving King James I of England.
This curious boat had a crew of 12, who rowed the vessel along the Thames River -- 15 feet under water.
David Bushnell's one-man submarine, Turtle, was the first to be used in warfare. During the American Revolution the sub's pilot tried to sink the English warship Eagle by driving a screw into the side of the ship to hold an explosive charge. But the Eagle's copper plating kept the screw from attaching. The first successful military use of a submarine came during the American Civil War when the Confederate submarine Hunley sank the warship USS Housatonic, though the little ship was also sunk by the explosion.
During World War I and World War II, German submarines sank so many ships bringing supplies to Great Britain that they almost won those wars.
In 1954, the United States launched the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus. It broke all previous endurance and underwater speed records, and in 1954 it was the first submarine to sail under the North Pole.
In 1960, the USS Triton was the first submarine to sail around the world completely underwater.
Submarines dive or rise by moving water in or out of special compartments. When enough water is taken in, the submarine becomes heavy enough to dive. To return to the surface, the sub pumps the water out and fills the compartments with air, making the submarine light enough to rise to the surface.ΦThe Sun: Our Favorite Star
4.5 billion BC
CENTER, SOLAR SYSTEM
If you were to stand in another part of our galaxy and look toward home, it would be difficult to pick out our sun from a myriad of other stars. Though it is about 100 times the diameter of the earth and more than a million times its volume, it is actually a rather ordinary size star.
But for us, it is just right. If it were much larger or smaller, Earth would be too hot or cold for life.
The heat and light we rely upon from this erupting ball of hydrogen and helium is the result of a nuclear fusion reaction at the sun's core, where gases are compressed to 12 times the density of lead and the temperature reaches 14 million degrees Celsius, compared with a relatively balmy 5,500 degrees Celsius on the surface.
1Sydney Opera: Sails by the Sea
1973 AD
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
In 1956 Danish architect Jorn Utzon won a competition to design a new opera house in Sydney, Australia, on a choice sliver of land jutting into Sydney's harbor previously used as a streetcar depot.
Utzon's design was a dramatic change from the past, incorporating 230-foot-high sail-like shells to focus and reflect the music from symphony and opera performances, and to fit in with the numerous sailboats plying the harbor.
Utzon worked on the project from 1956 until 1966. Costs were initially estimated at $12 million, but after 17 years, the building ended up costing more than $100 million dollars. After working on the project for 10 years, Utzon resigned in disgust because of repeated construction difficulties, incessant delays and cost escalations.
Despite these difficulties, the Opera House opened in 1973. Since then it has become an internationally recognized symbol of Australia and serves as the cultural focus for Sydney's opera, symphony, drama, and ballet. It is host to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and has two museums, a library and several art galleries.
On Sunday afternoons, you can hear free performances on the outer walks of the complex and if you go there in January, you will find a month-long arts festival. The phone number for events at the Opera House is 01102-250-7111.cTaj Mahal: As Beautiful as She
1632-1650 AD
AGRA, INDIA
When emperor Shah Jahan's favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died in childbirth in 1631, the heartbroken Indian emperor decided she must have a memorial as beautiful as she.
So he ordered the construction of the Taj Mahal, a white marble memorial believed to have been designed by a Persian or Turkish architect named Ustad Isa Afandi. Afandi drew from many cultures in designing the symmetrical complex: the concept of the ornate garden tomb came from Afghanistan, the decorative motifs from Shiraz, the domes from Turkey, and the use of pools of water as mirrors from Kashmir.
Shah Jahan called in workers from India, Asia and as far away as Europe. They worked for 22 years in the city of Agra creating the mausoleum. Later, the emperor was buried in the memorial alongside his wife.
Today the Taj Mahal is one of the main tourist attractions of India.
\The Power of Television
1920s AD
LONDON, ENGLAND
One of the most powerful forms of mass communication in today's world is television. With sound and moving pictures it gives audiences the illusion of being direct observers of news or entertainment events.
The technical principles of television were developed in the 1920s and television programs were first broadcast by the British in 1937, but only during the 1950s did TV sets become part of most US households, where they have remained ever since.
With its color, sound and movement, television is more dramatic than newspapers or radio, and as television watching increased, many people spend less time reading newspapers and books. This may be nice for broadcasters, but it is bad news for young people who need to improve their reading but are tempted away by the television.
Until recently, three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, had a lockhold on most US television viewers. But the advent of video cassette players, cable and satellite television, and the rise of UHF broadcasting has cut into the networks' audiences by providing viewers with more choices.
Though networks may be having problems, television as a technology is just beginning. In addition to cable television, some experts are now predicting interactive television, which will allow viewers to participate in a program by making choices at critical junctures in the show.±Nicola Who?
1888 AD
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO
One of the least known but most fascinating of American inventors was a young immigrant from Yugoslavia named Nicola Tesla.
Probably Tesla's most important invention was the alternating current (AC) motor, which he patented in 1888. He designed it after seeing the wasteful sparking of direct current (DC) motors. Today virtually all electric motors are descendents of Tesla's design, from the fan in your computer to the giant motors of industry.
But Tesla had a hard time persuading people to use AC, since Tesla's one-time employer Thomas Edison favored DC and said AC was dangerous.
His most dramatic achievement was the Tesla coil. As part of experiments in transmitting power through the air, Tesla built a coil near Colorado Springs, Colorado, that sent sparks 100 feet long into the sky from a metal ball atop a 200-foot-high tower.
In his successful efforts to persuade people that alternating current was safe, he held dramatic demonstrations with his coils. Though alternating current -- such as that from a wall socket, can be deadly -- the current from Tesla's coils had a very low amperage, so he could casually stand among the sparks and let a million volts of high-frequency current pass harmlessly through his body.═The Unsinkable Titanic
April 15, 1912
NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
The Titanic was the largest ship afloat in 1912, a wonder of modern technology with many safety features. It was "the world's safest liner;" it was "unsinkable;" it was so safe that one deckhand even said, "God Himself couldn't sink this ship."
The giant White Star luxury liner set sail from England April 10, 1912 for its first transatlantic voyage. Despite iceberg warnings, captain E.T. Smith plunged ahead at 22 knots. He wanted to set a new transatlantic speed record.
Then, on the night of April 15, Seaman Frederick Fleet reported an iceberg ahead, but his warning was too late and the Titanic collided with it. Though the passengers and crew just felt a slight bump and heard a scraping sound, the iceberg had ripped a 300-foot gash along the side of the ship.
Then the watertight compartments failed and the ship began to settle. Women and children were ordered into lifeboats. But there had been no lifeboat training and some lifeboats left the ship half empty. In addition, there were only enough lifeboats for a third of the people.
At 2:20 a.m., with its lights still ablaze and the remaining passengers singing a hymn, the Titanic's stern suddenly rose vertically in the clear, starry night and with a roar, everything movable plunged toward the submerged bow and the Titanic slid beneath the sea.
Seven hundred and eleven people survived the disaster, but as many as 2,224 died.
The disaster led to strict new standards for nautical safety.vTrains Build Nations
1804 AD
ILLOGAN, CORNWALL, ENGLAND
During much of the last century, it didn't matter if the clocks in New York were set at a somewhat different time than the clocks in Trenton, New Jersey. After all, why would a New Yorker care what time it was in Trenton?
That all changed with the coming of the train. For train schedules to make sense, there had to be standard times. This eventually led to the creation of a worldwide system of time zones.
But Standard Time was just one of the changes caused by English engineer Richard Trevithick when he built the first steam locomotive in 1804.
On his train's first trip, the little one-cylinder locomotive pulled 70 men in five wagons for 10 miles at a slow two-and-a-half miles an hour. It was a small beginning, but a big advance in the steam revolution begun by James Watt.
Trevithick's invention caused tremendous social and economic changes. Before the railroads, nations were collections of semi-independent towns and villages, but the trains tied them together and strengthened nationalism.
Also, trains lowered the cost of transporting goods, so businesses could sell their products over much larger areas. This led to the growth of huge corporations.
Of course, not everybody was pleased with the coming of the trains. The Bavarian College of Physicians in Germany, for example, predicted that the rapid movement of trains would cause brain disease, both for train travelers and onlookers.
Though there is no evidence that trains cause brain disease, trains -- like other modern transportation methods -- gave people the ability to quickly move far from home, thereby hurting family and community ties.jTransistor: Smaller Is Better
1948 AD
MURRAY HILL, NEW JERSEY
Once computers were as big as buildings. Once there was no such thing as a portable radio or television. Before the days of the transistor, all these electronic devices depended upon a bulky, undependable and energy-hungry device called a vacuum tube.
The transistor, like the vacuum tube, is a way of electronically controlling the flow of electricity in a circuit. Transistors are made of silicon, a substance that can be made more or less conductive by passing a weak current through it. American scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the devices in 1948.
But the transistor was only the beginning. In the 1960s, scientists began putting entire "integrated circuits" on a single chip of silicon. This led directly to the development of pocket calculators and later to the desktop and laptop computers of today.bThe Largest Triumphal Arch
1836 AD
PARIS, FRANCE
After his great victory at Austerlitz in 1806, Napoleon decided to build a huge triumphal arch in Paris.
But by 1810, the giant arch at the Neuilly toll-gate (now the Place de l'Etoile) was still just a foundation, so the designers created a full-scale replica for the conqueror, first building a wooden frame, then covering it with painted paper. Napoleon's entry into the city was celebrated with fireworks throughout Paris.
The real Arc de Triomphe was finally opened in 1836, years after Napoleon's death. It is the largest triumphal arch in the world, measuring 162 feet high by 147 feet wide.
The arch is a memorial to the wars of the French Revolution and to those of the French Empire under Napoleon. A large frieze around the base of the arch shows a procession of conquerors more than 6 feet tall bringing home treasures from conquered nations.
In 1852, Napoleon III put Paris financier George Haussmann in charge of much of the city. In 1853 Haussmann began improving the avenues leading to the arch and added others, so now 12 avenues radiate out from the arch like spokes of a giant wheel.ñ45 Oxen for a Tulip Bulb
1634 AD
AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
Once upon a time in Holland (which is how to start a story that is so much like a fairy tale) a tulip bulb could buy a herd of cattle.
"Tulipmania" started slowly. First wealthy people began raising tulips, a new flower from Constantinople. As interest grew, rare varieties began bringing high prices. Then the middle class joined the scramble and by 1634 regular work was neglected in the frenzy over tulips. Some bulbs went for as much as 5,500 florins.
It is told that a sailor who had been given a fish dinner by his host noticed an "onion" on the counter. He liked onions, so he cut it up to add to his fish. Except it wasn't an onion; it was a tulip bulb worth 3,000 florins. By contrast, you could buy four fat oxen for 448 florins, or a bed for 100 florins.
Eventually this speculative bubble popped. Prices dipped, then plummeted. Many of those owning tulips when the market crashed were ruined.h Twain's Mississippi
1885 AD
HANNIBAL, MISSOURI
A red-haired boy named Sam Clemens stood on the deck of a ferryboat in the Mississippi River when his hat blew off. So he jumped into the stormy river after it. By the time he had swum two or three miles and retrieved it, the entire town of Hannibal, Missouri, had gathered on the wharf to look at where Sam was last seen.
At least this was the story he wrote to a friend many years later. But by that time Clemens was well-known for writing true stories with a lot of imagination in them and imaginary stories with a lot of truth in them.
Every author writes best about what he knows best, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens was no exception. His three stories about life along the great river -- "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876); "Life on the Mississippi" (1883); and his masterpiece, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1885) -- are still his most widely read books.
They were based on his memories of growing up in a sleepy little river town when his greatest ambition was to become the pilot of a steamboat. Clemens even took his pen name from Mississippi River life. "Mark Twain" was a river term that indicated the water was deep enough for large boats. It means two fathoms, or twelve feet.
In "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" Twain brought to life the imaginary town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, which was a lot like his home town of Hannibal, but nicer. The character Tom Sawyer is a mix of Twain himself and a few other boys he knew while growing up. "Huckleberry Finn" is about the adventures of a friend of Tom's. Huck is the 13-year-old son of the town drunkard who runs away to escape his father's cruelty and the efforts of some good women of the town to civilize him.
There were many adventure stories written before this book, but "Huckleberry Finn" was unique. In it, Mark Twain allowed Huck to tell his story in his own language and from his own point of view. Because Huck's rough language seemed vulgar, some critics in Twain's day called the book trash, but today it is considered an American masterpiece that introduced a new way of writing.
Twain lived life as one long adventure. He roamed the world and made his living as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, Civil War soldier, Western miner, reporter-at-large, travel writer, lecturer, editor, inventor, and publisher. Yet he never met anyone, he said, whom he had not met before on the Mississippi River.ƒTyranosaurus the Tyrant
67 million BC
MIDWEST NORTH AMERICA
One of the most ferocious of the dinosaurs was the terrible seven-ton meat-eating tyrannosaurus rex, which literally means "king of the tyrant lizards."
Tyrannosaurus was the largest predator ever. It stood almost 20 feet tall on its rear legs, had a massive tail, puny front legs, powerful jaws and sharp seven-inch-long saw-edged teeth for tearing its prey, such as the plant-eating triceratops. From nose to tail tyrannosaurus was about 39 feet long. Its skull alone is more than four feet long. Though powerful in many ways, tyrannosaurus' front legs were very short and must have had very minimal use since he couldn't even use them to bring food to his mouth.
Though some scientists believe tyrannosaurus was a scavenger, most believe he was a terrible hunter, swift on his back feet and ferocious in battle.
Tyrannosaurus skeletons have been found in Western North America, Mongolia and China.;Uranus: The Planet George
March 13, 1781 AD
SEVENTH PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM
William Herschel could not find a telescope as good as he wanted, so he decided to learn how to build them himself. As he learned to grind lenses for telescopes, he became so good at it that he built the best telescope in the world for its time.
While gazing through his telescope on March 13, 1781, Herschel found a star that wasn't supposed to be there. Also, it didn't seem like a star because it had a disk shape. After watching for several nights, it was clear the thing was moving! At first, he thought it might be a comet -- but comets appear fuzzy at the edges and this object was very clean and crisp.
Herschel, an Englishman, had discovered the first planet that could not be seen from Earth with the naked eye.
The French, who were great competitors to English scientists, generously suggested that the planet be named Herschel. The English Royal Society, and Herschel himself, called the planet "The Georgian," after King George the III.
Most other countries, however, were not inclined to have a planet named George. Since it was the next planet past Saturn, they named it Uranus, after the father of the Roman god Saturn. The discovery of Uranus caused the known solar system to double in size.
Like Saturn, pale blue-green Uranus is composed mostly of gas. It is about 1-3/4 billion miles from the sun and it takes 84 Earth years for Uranus to circle the sun. On January 24th, 1986, the Voyager II spacecraft had its nearest approach to Uranus. While there, it confirmed that Uranus lays on its side with one of its poles pointing directly at the sun. Voyager also discovered two new rings to add to the planet's previously known nine rings.
Over time, astronomers were able to precisely calculate what Uranus' orbit should be based on the new laws of gravity and motion discovered by Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. By 1821 Alexis Bouvard compared Uranus' actual orbit against the projections based on Newton's laws. They didn't agree! Hmm, how confusing.
Perhaps, some thought, there is yet another planet beyond Uranus that is affecting its orbit...ïVan Gogh's Violent Visions
1888 AD
ARLES, FRANCE
It would seem to be hard for a painter to create anything but a peaceful picture when he takes as his subject a clear, starry night or a quiet, sunny wheat field, but in the hands of Vincent Van Gogh, paintings of those subjects assume an intensity that is almost violent.
Though often tormented and unhappy, Van Gogh rejoiced in color, using it thick and pure to paint wild scenes of sunlit fields, trees, flowers, self portraits, or renditions of his simple room and chair.
Van Gogh was born in Holland and worked at various jobs before becoming a theology student in Amsterdam. Then, wanting to "comfort the humble," he went to live and work in a mining community.
But he found himself increasingly drawn to art, and in 1880 moved first to Brussels and then to Antwerp to study painting.
In 1886 he joined his brother, Théo, in Paris. There -- under the influence of impressionism -- he brightened his colors and began to use nature as inspiration, rather than something to be carefully copied.
Then, in 1888, with Théo's help, he moved south to Arles, where he produced some of his greatest works.
At his invitation, Gauguin, a fellow-painter, also came to Arles. They worked together for a while, but in a moment of anger Van Gogh threatened his friend with a knife. Then, in anguish, Van Gogh cut off his own ear with a razor and painted a self-portrait of himself wearing the bandage. From that time he fought a loosing battle with insanity, and on July 29, 1890 he shot himself.
Though he is now recognized as a great artist, during Van Gogh's lifetime his work was scorned. The only one who really believed in it was his faithful brother Théo.░Venus Escapes the Flames
110-88 BC
MILOS, GREECE
Venus de Milo (a statue of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty) was almost lost forever. In 1820 a man passing a lime kiln on the Greek island of Milos noticed the statue lying on the ground about to be broken up and burned into lime.
The owner saw no beauty in the old statue and parted with her readily. Eventually the Venus de Milo was placed in the Louvre in Paris, where it is one of the museum's most valuable treasures.
The Venus de Milo is larger than life and is made in two parts, which join together unnoticed at the clothing line.
She stands gracefully, looking calm and quiet and seemingly unaware that people are looking at her.
Like most Greek statues -- but unlike most Greeks -- Venus de Milo has a Greek nose, a nose that extends in a straight line down from the forehead. The Greeks, who tried to make their statues as beautiful as possible, thought this type of nose was particularly attractive.
Nobody knows who sculpted the Venus de Milo -- though some think she may have been carved by a student of the great sculptor Praxiteles -- and nobody is really certain that it is a statue of Venus, though most people think so.
Many art scholars have also wondered what she was originally doing with her arms, which have never been found. Some think she held a bronze shield on her knee and was looking at her reflection in its polished surface. Others think she held a lance, and others that she held nothing at all.ôVenus: The Shining One
c2000 BC
SECOND PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM
If you look at the western sky just after sunset, or toward the east just before sunrise, you are likely to see what looks like a very bright star. In fact ancient peoples called it "Lucifer," which simply means "Shining One." We now know that this "wandering" star is actually the planet Venus.
The Babylonians, who first mention the planet, named it Ishtar, while the Romans called it Venus. Ishtar and Venus were goddesses of love and beauty so the names fit this shining planet.
Only the sun and moon are brighter than Venus in our sky. In fact, it's so bright that it's often mistaken for a UFO. When Earth and Venus get close to each other as they orbit the sun, the light radiated by this planet is so strong it can cast shadows.
Venus' brilliance results from its closeness to the sun and its covering of white clouds which strongly reflect the sun's light. The amount of light a planet reflects is called its "albedo" (Latin for Whiteness), and Venus' albedo is one of the highest.
In the early 1600s, Galileo saw that Venus passes through phases, just like Mercury and the moon, and that it is veiled in a thick cloud cover. These clouds prevented astronomers from seeing what the surface of the planet was like, so for many years it was thought that there might be life on Venus because it was similar to Earth in size and distance from the sun.
In the early 1950s scientist were able to use microwaves to penetrate the clouds. These microwaves show that Venus acts like a greenhouse. The cloud cover prevents the sun's rays from leaking back to outer space, so the surface temperature stays at 860 degrees -- much too hot for life.
There is a theory that carbon dioxide from car exhaust and industrial pollution is creating a "greenhouse effect" similar to that on Venus. Some are afraid that if we don't stop polluting our air it will get so hot that Earth will become as lifeless as Venus.¡
Verne Shoots for the Moon
1865 AD
NANTES, FRANCE
Do you think you could make an accurate prediction about what amazing things will happen in the next 100 years? It wouldn't be easy, but Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, did a good job of it in his own era.
Before Verne, there had been tales of people flying to the moon and engaging in other incredible adventures, but they were all pure fantasy.
Verne's stories, on the other hand, were based on current research. He had an endless fascination with science, reading the latest books and journals and pumping the scientists he knew for the most recent information. When he hit upon an interesting discovery, he speculated about what could come of it, and from these speculations grew his famous novels.
Verne was born in Nantes, France, in 1828, in an era enthralled with the possibilities of science. He originally studied law, but after meeting a French balloonist, he wrote "Five Weeks in a Balloon" (1862), which described an adventurous balloon trip across Africa.
The book was an immediate success and launched him on a writing career in which he produced almost 100 books, some predicting future events fairly accurately.
For example, Verne wrote "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" in 1869, 30 years before there was a single ocean-going submarine. And the force that powered the Verne's submarine was electricity, at the time a mere laboratory curiosity.
For "20,000 Leagues," Verne researched libraries and aquariums and even took a transatlantic steamship trip. He wrote most of the book on his sailing yacht to make sure he caught the feel of the sea.
Verne also was amazingly accurate with the predictions in his twin books, "From the Earth to the Moon" (published in 1865, more than 100 years before man actually landed on the moon) and "Round the Moon," published in 1870. In the books Verne launched his spacecraft from Florida, just like the real lunar missions; he correctly described the velocity a spacecraft would have to obtain to leave Earth's gravity; he described the effects of weightlessness; and he had his spacecraft land in the ocean, as happened with the real lunar missions.
Of course, he made one tremendous error. A spacecraft couldn't be launched from a gun, as he proposed. It would be going so fast it would instantly burn up as it came out of the gun tube, and even if it survived, the passengers would be turned into jelly by the acceleration.
The predictions in some of his other works, such as "Journey to the Center of the Earth," have also turned out to be badly mistaken. Though it is a fun book, hiking to the middle of the earth is impossible not just because caves don't go that deep, but also because the interior of the earth is molten rock and metal.Was Versailles Fit For a King?
1624 to 1664 AD
VERSAILLES, FRANCE
Louis XIV of France considered himself a glorious king, so he decreed that a glorious palace be built at Versailles, 11 miles southwest of Paris. And while many people consider that he succeeded in his effort, others have said the palace was a miserable place.
The beautiful 1,300-room building is more than a quarter of a mile long, with paintings and sculptures by major European artists, all set in a 250-acre garden-park with pools and plantings and fountains laid out in geometric patterns.
It is built in the Baroque style, which emphasized very free interpretations of classic forms. Baroque buildings were frequently large, loud structures with gaudy decoration.
Work began on the palace in 1624 under the direction of the French architect Louis Le Van. Forty years later it was finished.
Beautiful though it was, the palace was noted for lacking such basic plumbing as toilet and bathing facilities, and for being very badly designed. The kitchen was so far from the dining room that the king's meals often arrived cold.
During the French Revolution in the late 1700s, this symbol of opulence was invaded by mobs, who destroyed or removed many of the art treasures. But at the beginning of the 1900s, the French government began restoring the palace.KThe Vikings Pillage Europe
739 AD
SCANDINAVIA
In 739 AD a storm suddenly broke over Europe.
For reasons still unclear to historians, Danes, Norwegians and some Swedes began an almost 200-year career of cruel raiding and warfare throughout Europe.
In their shallow-draft long boats, these "Vikings" traveled great distances. Beginning with an attack on a church at Lindisfarne, an island off the east coast of England, Viking raids extended from England to Constantinople. They even traveled up-river to attack such inland cities as Paris and London.
Churches throughout Europe prayed, "From the Fury of the Northmen, O Lord, deliver us."
Though Viking battle tactics were not very sophisticated, they made up for their lack of sophistication with their fury. In battle some Vikings basically went crazy, completely ignoring their own safety. These warrior-fanatics were called "berserkr" (from which we get our word "berserk").
The Vikings also had little regard for such concepts as mercy. One warrior was called a "children's man" because he didn't like to toss babies into the air and catch them on the point of his spear.
≡Volta's Shocking Discovery
1800 AD
COMO, ITALY
Every time you shine a flashlight or listen to a portable radio, you can thank Count Alessandro Volta.
Volta, born in 1745 in Como, Italy, was interested in the new discoveries being made about electricity. From studying earlier experiments he believed that dissimilar metals in contact with each other would create electricity, so he stacked discs of copper, zinc, cardboard (soaked in salt water), copper, zinc, cardboard, etc. until he had a tall pile.
When he touched the top and bottom discs of the stack at the same time, Volta had a shocking experience. He had built the first battery, which was called a voltaic pile. He published his findings in 1800.
The "volt," a measurement of electrical current, is named after the count.AThe Voyagers' Grand Tour
1977-1989 AD
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA
Once every 175 years the outer planets of our solar system line up. In 1977, to take advantage of that rare alignment, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched two space probes, called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.
Voyager 1 swung past Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 visited Jupiter and Saturn, plus Uranus and Neptune. The spacecraft took pictures of Jupiter's red spot and moons, Saturn's rings, the cold surface of Uranus and finally, in 1989, Voyager 2 sailed past Neptune and is now on its way towards the edge of our solar system.
Each of the spacecraft has a 12-foot antenna to beam information back to Earth from their cameras and other instruments. Also, each has a gold-plated copper recording of sounds from earth, just in case someone from another planet should happen upon it.Only a Wailing Wall is Left
70 AD
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL
The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem is gone, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD after the Jews rebelled against Roman rule. But outside the Temple Mount, against a retaining wall, Jewish people still gather to pray.
This wall is called the "Wailing Wall" after those who stand before it to lament the loss of the Jewish Temple that once stood nearby, though it is also called the "Western Wall" because it is on the west side of the Temple Mount.
The reason for praying at the wall is that it is believed to be the closest point to the Holy of Holies, an inner most-holy room of the old Temple, the site of which is now occupied by a Muslim mosque.
The tradition of praying there apparently began around 200 or 300 AD when some rabbis taught that the presence of God still lingered at the location of the former Holy of Holies. Often Jews at the wall will write prayers on papers and press them into the cracks of the wall, toward the Holy of Holies.
The wall has unfortunately been the object of dispute between Muslims and Jews for centuries, and with increasing intensity as Jews began moving back to the area in 1800s. It remains a point of discord to this day, though the area has been under Jewish control since Israel captured Jerusalem from Jordan during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.;Joey and the Mob
1850 AD
AUSTRALIA
How does a mother kangaroo tell her baby from the other kangaroo babies? You may not have thought about this before, but it can really be a problem, at least if you're a kangaroo. After all, one kangaroo looks very much like another.
Kangaroos live in groups called "mobs," which usually consist of one adult male and two or three females and their young. If a baby kangaroo gets lost in the crowd, the mother kangaroo can't call it by name because she has no voice and can only make a variety of grunts, coughs and sucking sounds. However, even if she could call her baby by name, it wouldn't help much because all kangaroo babies, male or female, have the same name. They are called joeys.
So what happens when a dangerous dingo, a native Australian dog, is approaching and a joey needs to find his mother quickly? Well, he doesn't bother. He just jumps into the nearest pouch. Even if it's the wrong one, the mother probably won't reject him unless her pouch is already full. A doe who loses her baby will readily accept another joey of approximately the same age.
The animal in this picture is a wallaby, belonging to one of the 47 smaller species of the kangaroo family. All members of the kangaroo family live in Australia and nearby islands, but they do very well in captivity, so you can also see them at the zoo.
Kangaroos are marsupials, or pouched mammals. Unlike human babies, a baby kangaroo looks nothing like his parents when he is born. He is a pink, bean-shaped creature only a few centimeters long with neither eyes nor ears, but with one objective: to make the six-inch journey -- with no help from his parents -- through his mother's fur to her pouch. Once there he attaches himself to a teat and eats and grows without even poking out his head until he is six months old. From eight to ten months, the joey is in and out of the pouch learning about the outside world. Soon, his mother permanently evicts him from the pouch, though he continues to feed there until he is independent at eighteen months.
Then, when the dingo comes along, it's every kangaroo for himself!
±Washington Didn't Want It
1833-1884 AD
WASHINGTON, D.C.
While he was alive, George Washington managed to ward off attempts to create a monument to himself. It would be too expensive, he said.
But like it or not, in 1833 a private organization called the Washington National Monument Society decided to go ahead and build a monument to the United States' first president, so it started soliciting funds and reviewing plans.
Eventually a plan based on a design by Robert Mills was accepted and the cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1848. Then, finding the ground was too soft, the monument was moved to its present location.
In 1876, seeing the project would need more than private support, Congress voted to pay for the project. Work began in 1880 and the monument was finished on Dec. 6, 1884 at a cost of about $1.2 million.
The Washington Monument is patterned after ancient Egyptian obelisks, though several times larger. It is about 555-and-a-half feet tall and covered with white Maryland marble, topped with a small cast-aluminum pyramid.πWatt's Steam Revolution
1769 AD
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND
When James Watt went to work fixing a steam engine in 1764, he probably had no idea how much that repair job would influence the industrial revolution.
The University of Glasgow had asked him to repair a model Newcomen steam engine, but as he was working on it, he was struck by how much fuel it consumed.
After experimenting, the Scottish instrument-maker determined that the Newcomen wasted fuel because its cylinder had to be alternately heated and cooled, which consumed a great amount of energy.
So he built an engine in which the cylinder stayed hot, thereby cutting fuel consumption by 75 percent. He received a patent on the device in 1769.
His first engine was used for pumping water out of mines, and by 1783 Watt's engines had virtually replaced the Newcomen engines.
Watt continued to improve his steam engine, adapting it to run many different kinds of machinery. As a result of his work, steam eventually powered much of the growing industrial revolution.
mWashington Didn't Sleep Here
1792 AD
WASHINGTON, D.C.
It has been through war and fire and renovation to become the symbol of the American presidency.
The home of the United States' president, the White House, was built following an architectural contest won by James Hoban, an Irish architect and builder living in South Carolina.
In 1792 the Commissioners of the Federal City (as Washington D.C. was then called) selected Hoban as winner of the contest. His submission even beat an anonymous plan submitted by someone calling himself "A.Z." -- later discovered to be Thomas Jefferson.
Hoban was awarded a gold medal and the workers started constructing the house he designed, but with the changing tastes of various presidents, including Thomas Jefferson, Hoban's design was repeatedly modified.
The only president never to live in the White House was George Washington. But by the time of the second president, John Adams, the structure was far enough along for him to move in.
In a letter to his wife Abigail, Adams wrote: "I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof."
Later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had that quotation carved on the mantle of the State Dining Room.
The most tragic moment for the White House was undoubtedly its burning by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812. Only a timely thunderstorm prevented its complete destruction.
Another major change came in the 1940s. The walls of the building were found to be so weak that the entire White House had to be gutted. Between 1948 and 1952 the interior was completely rebuilt.ΘAn Answer in the Wind
c150 BC
ARIA, PERSIA
You might think the first wind machines would have been dedicated to some labor saving task, but that may not have been the case. The first known wind machine design wasn't for grinding grain or pumping water, but for playing an organ.
Hero of Alexandria, in Egypt, described a wind-powered organ as early as 150 to 250 BC, but the first place windmills were used for work was apparently Persia. By 1000 AD they were in general use in Europe, and particularly in Holland, which used them so extensively for grinding and pumping water that the windmill became virtually a national emblem.
At the high point in the 19th Century, there were about 9,000 windmills in Holland. Wind power was also used in the Western United States to pump water prior to rural electrification and gasoline engines.
But with the advent of other power sources, wind power fell out of popularity, though since the sharp oil price increases during the 1970s there has been some renewed interest in wind power.ZOrville Learns to Fly
December 17, 1903
KITTY HAWK, NORTH CAROLINA
When they were children, Wilbur and Orville Wright's father gave them a little flying toy. The toy didn't last long in the Wright brothers' hands, but it did leave them with a lasting fascination with flying.
The brothers worked in their bicycle shop and experimented extensively with gliders at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where there is almost always wind. Then they designed a light-weight engine and mounted it on an updated model of one their gliders.
On Dec. 17, 1903, among the dunes of Kitty Hawk, Wilbur and Orville Wright launched the first engine-powered airplane into a 27-mile-an-hour wind. Orville, who was at the controls, flew just 120 feet for 12 seconds. Nevertheless, they were ecstatic. Then Wilbur took his turn, flying the plane 195 feet.
They took three successful flights that day, and began a new era.Writing: A Key to Success
3,200 BC
UR, MESOPOTAMIA
More than 5,000 years ago in what is now Southern Iraq, people began living together in towns and cities. This set the stage for one of the most important advances in civilization: writing!
The Sumerians of Mesopotamia were apparently the first to hit upon the idea of marking clay tablets with a sharp reed pen to help them keep track of important transactions. The invention of writing was an instant success. Soon no one would accept any business deal as genuine unless it was written down.
The first examples of writing are crude drawings of familiar objects. For example, early writers indicated darkness by drawing an arc with several parallel lines beneath it. This suggested the setting sun. As life grew more complex, so did the writing system. Knowing how to read and write became the way to wealth and power.
Even today, skill at making and interpreting black marks on paper remains the way for most people to become successful. And not knowing how to read and write can still mean a life of poverty.┴ Zen: A Decaying Noodle?
1185 AD
JAPAN
"What is Zen?" the disciple asks. "A decaying noodle," the master responds.
"Where were you born?" the master asks. "Kyoto," the disciple responds, but the master whacks him on the head.
"How tall is Mt. Fuji?" the master asks. The disciple burps, a much better answer.
What is the meaning of this curious dialog?
Well, by one method or another (maybe a whack with a stick) the Zen master would let us know that this question has no meaning, but let's avoid the stick and try to answer it anyway.
According to tradition, Zen was founded in India by a monk named Bodhidharma, who sat and stared at a blank wall for nine years. It reached Japan in the late 12th century, where it is still most influential, though in the 20th century it has attracted many Western followers.
Unlike other Buddhists, who believe they must endure many reincarnations to achieve the Buddhist ideal (the notion that self doesn't exist and everything is illusion), Zen adherents believe they can achieve it by a sudden flash of enlightenment, called "satori."
However, Zen can be a very difficult course of study, for it is not easy for people to get rid of the idea that they exist as individuals. Therefore, in the dialog above, it is the disciple's ideas that the Zen master attacked, though he could just as easily have attacked the disciple's desires and feelings, for they also suggest that an individual exists who is desiring or feeling.
The notion that he shouldn't have desires can be troubling for the disciple who desires satori, because as long as he desires it, he can't have it.
Another concern for some is that Zen says good and evil don't exist. In the words of Zen popularizer D.T. Suzuki: "Bad is good, ugly is beautiful, false is true, imperfect is perfect, and also conversely."
Fortunately, in Japan, where Zen is most popular, it is not called upon to make people behave. In this tightly-knit society, social pressure accomplishes that purpose very effectively.
In fact, most Japanese care little for these philosophical speculations and would rather use Zen as a tool. In this everyday variety of Zen, the disciple tries to eliminate all thought so he can act without paying attention to critical thoughts that come up in his mind that say, "I'm not trying hard enough," or "What will my boss or teacher think?"
One way to understand why relaxing your mind might sometimes be helpful is to think about going to sleep. Sometimes the harder you try the more difficult it becomes.
