Amazing historical factoids

[Magical Realist]

"Butterflies used to be called Flutterbys. The word "butterfly" comes from the Old English word "buttorfleoge," which is a combination of the words for "butter" and "fly." The reasons for the name are obscure. ... The insects were sometimes believed to be witches disguised as butterflies."---The Internet

[Magical Realist]

"In 1913, at the roulette wheel at the Casino de Monte-Carlo, the ball dropped into a black slot 26 times in succession. Fortunes were lost as players bet huge amounts on red in the erroneous belief that the law of probabilities dictated the ball would not drop on black again. The odds against 26 blacks in a row are about 66 million to one against; however, previous results have absolutely no effect on subsequent ones. The odds of red or black are 50:50 with each spin of the wheel."--The Internet

[Magical Realist]

"It’s been around a while, so maybe you’ve already seen it… but I just heard about the BBC documentary called Dangerous Knowledge. According to the summary, it’s about “four brilliant mathematicians — Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing — whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide”. And now you can see it on YouTube.

It sounds fun, or at least fun to complain about. Did Cantor really commit suicide? I thought he died of a heart attack. Was Ludwig Boltzmann a mathematician? I thought he was a physicist. And did Alan Turing commit suicide because his genius drove him insane? I thought it had something to do with the British government convicting him for homosexuality and punishing him by forcing him to take estrogen, which made him grow breasts.

But the documentary is more fun than the summary. I’m watching it right now."----
https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/200...ledge.html

[Magical Realist]

"June has long been recognized as LGBTQ Pride Month, in honor of the Stonewall riots, which took place in New York City in June 1969. During Pride Month, it is not uncommon to see the rainbow flag being proudly displayed as a symbol for the LGBTQ rights movement. But how did that flag become a symbol of LGBTQ pride?

It goes back to 1978, when the artist Gilbert Baker, an openly gay man and a drag queen, designed the first rainbow flag. Baker later revealed that he was urged by Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S., to create a symbol of pride for the gay community. Baker decided to make that symbol a flag because he saw flags as the most powerful symbol of pride. As he later said in an interview, “Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible, to live in the truth, as I say, to get out of the lie. A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility or saying, ‘This is who I am!’” Baker saw the rainbow as a natural flag from the sky, so he adopted eight colors for the stripes, each color with its own meaning (hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit)."--- https://www.britannica.com/story/how-did...0community.

[Magical Realist]

"Do you know Gary Larson? He does those neat Far Side cartoons. Larson has a marvelous eye for dark absurdity: Two spiders have spun a web across the bottom of a child's slide. One says to the other, "If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings."

So I did a double take when I saw one about a caveman carving a piano out of a rock. A small side note said the piano was actually invented in 1709. That seemed far too early, but Larson has all the instincts of a scholar, and he's a good jazz musician to boot.

Anyone who listens to much classical music knows the early pianoforte was the instrument of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven in the late 18th century. And the greatest harpsichord composer, Domenico Scarlatti, died in 1757 -- a half century after Larson's date. Still, if you can't trust Gary Larson, whom can you trust?

When I went looking, I found a surprising story about technological change. Starting in 1698, Bartolomeo Cristofori, keeper of the Medici musical instruments, began work on a machine that would combine features of the harpsichord and the clavichord.

When you press a harpsichord key, a mechanism plucks a string. Cristofori created a complex mechanism that would hammer the string instead, then damp the sound. That advantage would forever change the character of keyboard music. For now you could play both loudly and softly, depending on how you touched the key. Hence the new name pianoforte, which literally means soft and loud.

Cristofori's mechanism was a mechanical marvel. It all but eliminated any time delay in the hammers, and it kept the hammers from bouncing back to hit the string a second time. But his marvel didn't travel very far. And composers like Scarlatti kept right on writing for harpsichords.

European makers eventually began looking for a loud-soft keyboard instrument. When they did, they had to reinvent much of Cristofori's piano. Pianofortes didn't come into general use until composers felt the need for new and larger sounds. Mozart eventually wrote both for the new clarinet and for the new pianofortes. But that was long after Cristofori. Beethoven's music reflected the evolution of the piano into its near-modern form, with double and triple strings exerting eighteen-ton loads on massive steel frames.

The piano was thus invented and then laid aside until we were ready for its grander sound. Mozart may've contributed to the process when he pioneered the listener subscription concert. Music had to move out of Medici palaces into large public halls where a harpsichord is useless. Users are part of any invention, and it took them until the Industrial Revolution to lay claim on the modern industrial-strength piano that we all know."--- https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/1551

[Magical Realist]

"The Oklahoma City sonic boom tests, also known as Operation Bongo II, refer to a controversial experiment, organized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), in which 1,253 sonic booms were generated over Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, over a period of six months starting in February 1964. The experiment was intended to quantify the effects of transcontinental supersonic transport (SST) aircraft on a city, to measure the booms' effect on structures and public attitude, and to develop standards for boom prediction and insurance data.

Oklahoma City's population was perceived to be relatively tolerant of such an experiment, as it had an economic dependency on the nearby Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center and Tinker Air Force Base; and, in fact, the local Chamber of Commerce threw a celebratory dinner when Oklahoma was selected.[1]

Despite this the testing was stopped early, in the wake of damage complaints, and although the final report said that "the overwhelming majority felt they could learn to live with the numbers and kinds of booms experienced", the FAA's poor handling of complaints led to a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government. The negative publicity associated with the tests partially influenced the 1971 cancellation of the Boeing 2707 project and the United States' complete withdrawal from SST design."---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_C...%20F%2D106.

[Magical Realist]

"On June 6, 1966, a group of US Army scientists made their way into the Seventh and Eighth Avenue lines of the New York City subway. Some carried air sampling machines in boxes and on belts; others carried light bulbs.

The light bulbs were packed with about 175 grams of Bacillus subtilis bacteria, then known as Bacillus globigii — approximately 87 trillion organisms in each. The plan was to shatter them and then use the sampling machines to see how they spread through the subway tunnels and trains.

This test was one of at least 239 experiments conducted by the military in a 20-year "germ warfare testing program" that went on from 1949 to 1969. These experiments that used bacteria to simulate biological weapons were conducted on civilians without their knowledge or consent. That stands in direct violation of the Nuremberg Code, which stipulates that "voluntary, informed consent" is required for research participants.

And while the people who conducted these experiments did so under the belief that the bacterial species they used were harmless, it has since been revealed that they can cause health problems.

"They're all considered pathogens now," says Leonard Cole, the director of the Terror Medicine and Security Program at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, who documented these experiments in his book "Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas."----
https://www.businessinsider.com/biologic...ay-2015-11

[Magical Realist]

"In 1896, Thomas Edison, the great inventor of the electric bulb, was working on a car design when he learned that a young man in his company had created an experimental car. Edison met this young man, Henry Ford, at a company party in New York and was thoroughly impressed by his gasoline-powered car idea. Edison, who had been considering electricity as a power source, enthusiastically encouraged Ford, saying, "Young man, that's the thing! You have it! I think you are on to something! I encourage you to continue your pursuits!"

Encouraged by the respected inventor, Henry Ford continued his work, eventually inventing a car that made him wealthy.

On December 9, 1914, Edison's laboratory and factory were destroyed by fire. At 67 years old, the damage was too extensive for insurance to cover. Before the ashes were cold, Henry Ford handed Edison a check for $750,000 with a note saying Edison could have more if needed.

In 1916, Ford relocated his home next to Edison's. When Edison was later confined to a wheelchair, Ford also got a wheelchair so they could race each other.

Thomas Edison made Henry Ford believe in himself, creating a friendship for life.

[Magical Realist]

"A Vitrified fort is a 'hill-fort' with stone ramparts/walls which shows evidence of having been subjected to extreme heats (over 1000˚C), causing the rocks to melt and fuse together. Although in some cases, this may have occurred accidentally, but there are several factors which indicate that it was a deliberate act.

How does Vitrification occur?

There is still some debate over the exact method whereby such high temperatures were achieved outdoors, but in principle, it is generally accepted that burning was the method of causing vitrification.

Experiments carried out in the 1930s by the famous archaeologist V. Gordon Childe and his colleague Wallace Thorneycroft showed that forts could be set on fire and generate enough heat to vitrify the stone. In 1934, these two designed a test wall that was 12 feet long, six feet wide and six feet high, which was built for them at Plean Colliery in Stirlingshire. They used old fireclay bricks for the faces and pit props as timber, and filled the cavity between the walls with small cubes of basalt rubble. They covered the top with turf and then piled about four tons of scrap timber and brushwood against the walls and set fire to them. Because of a snowstorm in progress, a strong wind fanned the blazing mixture of wood and stone so that the inner core did attain some vitrification of the rock

Deliberate Vitrification:

The analysis of vitrified forts has provided us with enough evidence to show that vitrification, in most cases at least, was a deliberate act. The following examples demonstrate.

There are some forts which have been placed on practically infusible rock, such as the quartzose conglomerates of the Old Red Sandstone, as at Craig Phadraic, and on the limestones of Dun Mac Uisneachain. In these examples, pieces of fusible rocks have been selected and carried to the top from a considerable distance demonstrating that the act of vitrification was deliberate.

The vitrified walls of the Scottish forts are invariably formed of small stones which could be easily acted upon by fire, whereas the outer ramparts where used, are not vitrified and are built of large blocks. Many of the continental forts are so constructed that the fire must have been applied internally, and at the time when the structure was being erected. Daubr�e, in an analysis which he made on vitrified materials taken from four French forts, and which he submitted to the Academy of Paris� in February 1881, found the presence of natron in such great abundance that he inferred that sea-salt was used to facilitate fusion again suggesting that it was a deliberate act."---
http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/vitrified.htm

[Magical Realist]

"Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week."---
https://thepremierdaily.com/why-536-a-d-...mbk=cshmkr