American geologist Bruce Heezer and oceanic cartographer Marie Tharp were researchers at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, New York. In the 1950s, they expedited with a crew across the Atlantic to gather data about the ocean floor from the ocean surface. The observations proved that there was in fact a chain of mountains, as high as halfway till the surface, under the …
Eminent physicist Albert Einstein was born in the year 1879. Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace, was born in 1869 and Adolf Hitler, the epitome of terror, in 1889. Hence the expression that Einstein was born between peace and terror. Einstein admired Mahatma Gandhi. He even expressed this admiration in a letter written in 1931 addressed to the Indian …
The Black Death, also known as Black Plague, is one of world’s worst pandemics. The disease entered European lands in around 1343 through Crimea, passing the Silk Route and beginning from Central Asia. One of the main causes is believed to be rat fleas hosted by black rats. Between the years 1346–53, plague had claimed around 200 …
Peter Henlein, a 16th-century locksmith and clockmaker from Nuremberg, Germany, is considered to be the architect of the first ‘watch’. Devices for reading time, like sundials, obelisks, and hourglasses were used to measure the passage of time since ancient ages. He was one of the first craftsmen to fashion small ornamental clocks that one could …
The word ‘limey’ refers to a British person, in general, and a British sailor, in particular. It originated in the 19th century and was a derogatory name for sailors in the Royal Navy. In the 17th and 18th centuries, British sailors who were at sea for more than a month often suffered from a disease called scurvy. Dr James Lind, …
Cotton gets its name from the Arabic word ‘qutun’, which means fine textile or fabric. Archaeologists have found samples of cotton fabric, as old as 7000 years, at the sites of ancient civilizations, such as Mohenjo-daro, Egypt, and Mexico. Nonetheless, it is difficult to determine the exact period or place when cotton was first used for …
