If you’re looking for a (documented) example of an occasion when Professor Wright encountered Professor Wrong, then your search is over. One such event happened somewhere around March 1921, at the University of Toronto Winter Short Course for farmers. Here’s an account, in Volume XXI of the University of Toronto Monthly, March 1921, No. 6. […]
Tag: history
Correcting the speed of light
Greg Ross reports, on the Futility Closet blog: “Light crosses space with the prodigious velocity of 6,000 leagues per second.” – La Science Populaire, April 28, 1881 “A typographical error slipped into our last issue that it is important to correct: the speed of light is 76,000 leagues per hour — and not 6,000.” – […]
One way to tell a story: drunkenness + Tesla + Franklin
The folks behind the video series Drunk History honed a particular way to tell a story, using drunkenness as a frame that makes the picture more interesting. In these episodes, they tell the basic story of Nicola Tesla:
“doesn’t know his patronyms from his epithets”
Historians, most of them, agonize over how much to trust the work of earlier historians. The Got Medieval blog writes of one terrible bout of agonizing: … Indeed, a reputation as a bungler who doesn’t know his patronyms (son of the horrible one/Uther) from his epithets (horrible son) is about the best that Geoffrey could […]
A (or an) historian muses about history and the Ig Nobel Prizes
Historian William G. Pooley, in his blog, muses about history and the Ig Nobel Prizes: Who cares about the funny little people you spend your time researching? What do you think people really learn from studying the family lives, emotions, or sexuality of our ancestors, beyond soft ideas of cultural relativity or platitudes about the importance […]
Old pictures of jetpacks strapped to cats and doves
“Researcher baffled by document written by artillery master Franz Helm featuring pictures of jetpacks strapped to cats and doves” is the subheadline on an Associated Press article in The Guardian. It tells of a discovery made by University of Pennsylvania scholar Mitch Frass [pictured here, right]. Here’s the cat/dove picture (you can see it and […]
The Fashionable Diseases Conference
Fashionable scholars will flock to The Fashionable Diseases Conference this coming July 3-5, hosted jointly by Newcastle and Northumbria Universities, sponsored by the often-fashionable Leverhulme Trust. The most fashionable diseases, for purposes of the gathering, are the ones suffered, diagnosed, discussed, and flaunted between the years 1660 and 1832. That timespan, evidently, saw the height of fashion […]
The quest for the elusive tooth worm(s)
The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice blog discusses “the battle of the tooth worm“: This is a depiction of the infamous tooth worm believed by many people in the past to bore holes in human teeth and cause toothaches….Tooth worms have a long history, first appearing in a Sumerian text around 5,000 BC. References to tooth worms […]
A Brief History of Fridge Magnets [video]
The Tripe Marketing Board presents A Brief History of Fridge Magnets: BONUS: The history continues past that point, of course. Part of it is documented in this study: “Design, manufacture, and test of an adiabatic demagnetization Refrigerator Magnet for use in space,” Steve Milward, Stephen Harrison, Robin Stafford Allen, Ian D. Hepburn, Christine Brockley-Blatt [pictured […]
An old, not-quite-dead question about sushi and death
Eating dead live fish has long inspired some people to some speculation about some incidents. This is further speculation about one of those incidents: “Bad Sushi or Bad Merchant? The ‘Dead Fish Poisoning Incident’ of 1852,” Hiraku Shimoda [pictured here], Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, July 2001, pp 513-531. The author, then at […]