"Beating the Bounds" | JSTOR Daily
“And when they came to a boundary-stone, the children would be flipped upside down, to have their heads knocked against it. In some spots, though, more pleasant memories would be created, by pausing for a glass of beer or a snack of bread and cheese. Finally, they would finish with a party on the village green.
The most practical reason for this tradition was to create a living record of the parish’s boundaries, which could serve as evidence in disputes.”
Put A Propeller On It: the Golden Age of Tinkering | The Appendix
“Alberto Santos-Dumont is beloved in Brazil as the inventor of the airplane (his heart is even preserved in formaldehyde at Rio de Janeiro’s Air and Space Museum). But it was in Paris, the global capital of ballooning, that the debonair Brazilian made his name. In 1898 he decided that he was not satisfied with the haphazard nature of navigation in his balloon. So he put an engine and a propeller on it. Soon, he was the only man in the world flying a dirigible—even winning a prize for maneuvering around the Eiffel Tower.”
Britain and America’s Theatrical War | History Today
“Theatre-going in the United States in the mid-19th century more closely resembled Elizabethan than Victorian London. All classes of people attended the same theatres, co-existing in a shaky peace. The readiness to riot empowered the rough-and-tumble, self-styled ‘common man’ to rule the theatre. When an actor or manager did something to elicit their displeasure, criticism might include harsh words and chants as well as various missiles like eggs, vegetables and, on occasion, animal carcasses or furniture.”
The Nurse Who Introduced Gloves to the Operating Room | Distillations/Science History Institute
“We’re still reaping the benefits of these innovations today, of course, benefits that have been made all the more obvious during our current pandemic. And for this we can thank a brilliant, drug-addled surgeon who fell for his whip-smart nurse.”
Science History: Nathaniel Kleitman Helps us Rest Easier | COSMOS Magazine
“When Kleitman died in California on 13 August 1999, aged 104, a University of Chicago obituary described him as “the world's first scholar to concentrate entirely on sleep” and “universally recognised as the father of sleep research”.
It says that before him, “few scientists had systematically investigated the intricacies of sleep, which had previously been dismissed as a state of quiescence”.
“Invisible Little Worms” Athanasius Kircher’s Study of the Plague | The Public Domain Review
“Although the epidemic continued for more than a year, many of these tactics did help prevent the spread of the disease. The effects of the plague in Rome were much less devastating than in Naples — only about fifteen thousand people died. But living through it was frightening. One figure who did: the fairly eccentric, extremely prolific Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher.”
A Complete History of Pandemics | The MIT Press Reader
“As far as unpredictable discontinuities are concerned, only one somatic threat trumps all of this: we remain highly vulnerable to another episode of viral pandemic. “
The Chloroquine Chronicles: A History of the Drug That Conquered the World | PRI
“Looking for a treatment for the disease, priests from the Jesuit Roman Catholic order set out on a scientific expedition and mission, traveling as far as the Andean region of South America. It was there that they found the cinchona plant. “
The Dual Legacies of Henry Moseley | Science History Institute
“In the spring of 1914 Moseley was invited to share his research at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held that year in Australia. When war broke out in the summer, Moseley cut the trip short and rushed back to England, where he volunteered as a signaling officer, responsible for sending communications in Morse code and semaphore. After training at a military base in the town of Aldershot, he shipped out with his unit to Gallipoli on June 13, 1915.”
The Food That Could Las 2,000 Years | BBC Future
“Even in their emaciated condition, the botanists at the institute defended the stores with their lives. They feared desperate people would storm the gene bank and eat their way through their life’s work, or invading forces would destroy the building to prevent its contents being used.
When the Red Army of the Soviet Union finally managed to lift the siege on 18 January 1943, almost two and a half years after it began, the seed bank was still intact.”
Made in Taiwan? How a Frenchman Fooled 18th-Century London | The Public Domain Review
“With the rise of novels posing as travel accounts in the latter decades of the seventeenth century (most famously Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels), the lines between actual traveler and literary impostor blurred even further. In a world without a reliable method of transmitting information, ordinary people found it difficult to distinguish between actual long-distance travelers — like Michael Shen Fu Tsung, the Qing aristocrat who toured Europe as a Catholic convert — and charlatans whose impostures now strike us as painfully obvious.”
Poor Rats! How One Radical Woman Protested Paris’s War on Rats | Ladyscience.com
“In the autumn of 1920, as Parisians caught plague and went to war with rats and when public discussions turned to criminalizing, stigmatizing, and dehumanizing vulnerable groups in the city, Fanny Clar’s writings rang out in protest. While Paris writers were filling their pages with vitriol for rats, immigrants, people of color, criminals, and the poor, Clar punctured the hate by frankly rooting for the rats. “
Bugs and Beasts Before the Law | The Public Domain Review
“But, as we have seen with Chassenée's rats, the outcome of these trials was not inevitable. In doubtful cases the courts appear in general to have been lenient, on the principle of "innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt". In 1587, a gang of weevils, accused of damaging a vineyard, were deemed to have been exercising their natural rights to eat - and, in compensation, were granted a vineyard of their own.”
The Rise and Fall of Polywater | Science History Institute
“In April 1970 the American Chemical Society held a symposium at Lehigh University, in the steel town of Bethlehem. An entire session focused on water, including anomalous water. A news conference was scheduled to follow. Reporters and the 300 attendees all wanted to better understand the nature of polywater. Passions were high among both skeptics and believers: a fight was simmering.”
The Death of Anton Chekhov, Told in Proteins | Science History Institute
“Chekhov, the author of theatrical masterpieces including The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, and The Three Sisters, had suffered from tuberculosis for two decades before his death in 1904. His biographers suspected he died, at age 44, of tuberculosis-related complications. But it would be 100 years and take the pioneering work of a team of 21st-century chemists to conclusively demonstrate what exactly killed the famed author.”
The Greatest Unknown Intellectual of the 19th Century | The MIT Press Reader
“Emil du Bois-Reymond proclaimed the mystery of consciousness, championed the theory of natural selection, and revolutionized the study of the nervous system. Today, he is all but forgotten.”
George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) | The Public Domain Review
“We have known about the origins of our disaster for longer than we like to imagine. More than 150 years ago, George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) published Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action — a study of how human action modifies the physical world, from the crust of the earth to the atmosphere.”
The Sensitive Plant | Lapham's Quarterly
“Sometime around the late eighteenth century, the French botanist René-Louiche Desfontaines took a plant on an outing around Paris in a horse-drawn carriage. At the time, botany was just emerging as an independent science separate from medicine and herbalism. Desfontaines, who’d been elected to the Académie des Sciences at the age of thirty-three and appointed professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes a few years later, was a leading practitioner in the new field.”
Throwback Thursday | John Wheeler's H-Bomb Blues | Physics Today
“In 1953, as a political battle raged over the US’s nuclear future, the eminent physicist lost a classified document, about the hydrogen bomb, on an overnight train from Philadelphia to Washington, DC.”
The Accidental Experiment That Changed Men’s Lives | The Atlantic
“Now, 50 years later, the Vietnam draft lotteries have become the drosophila of the social sciences: the model organism for researchers to discern how a life-changing intervention carries implications for the individuals who experienced it, versus those who escaped it by chance.”