ᐅᓪᓛᓯᐊᑦᓯᐊᕆᑦ! That’s “Good morning!” in one of the most obscure languages I could find on the Google Translate list: Inukitut. It probably wouldn’t have been a problem for Emil Krebs, though. He was born November 15, 1867 in Germany, and was (to put it mildly) an excellent student of languages. He learned to write and… Continue reading

The question you have to ask yourself today is how do you feel about plastic? It’s incredibly useful and versatile, of course, and has made a lot of things we depend on both possible and affordable. On the other hand, when you take your car to the shop because of a suspicious noise in the… Continue reading

We don’t hear much from Montenegro, which is a small nation in southeastern Europe. It’s on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, directly across from Italy. It’s quite a new country; it became independent, along with Serbia, just in 2006. There wasn’t any sort of revolution or anything; the people who live there just voted. … Continue reading

Ever wonder why batteries are marked with a “+” and a “-”? There isn’t really anything exactly “positive” or “negative” about electricity; it’s just a convention to describe the directionality of electric charge. When early researchers noticed the directionality, about three centuries ago, they had to call it something, and it was John Bevis, who… Continue reading

Most historical figures are known for things you can assume they were personally familiar with. Authors scribbled their books and poems, inventors whacked together their thingamajigs, and painters were intimately involved with smearing their smears. Astronomers nowadays, of course, are different — they rely on imaging from radio, x-ray, and even gravitational detectors to chart… Continue reading

The Mexican Revolution was a ten-year conflict (about 1910 to about 1920) that ended in the creation of the modern Mexican government, which is based on the Constitution of Mexico. It was more of a series of regional conflicts than a single, centralized war, but was nevertheless destructive, costing about two million people their lives.… Continue reading

We’ve recently presented some historical figures known by their given names and a descriptor, like Louis the Stammerer and Charles the Bald, but not everybody’s descriptor was even vaguely critical. At the top of the heap is a chap born November 6, 1494 in Trabzon, an area that’s now part of Turkey. His given name… Continue reading

Walker Evans was an American photographer born October 3, 1903. His best known work is from the Great Depression of the 1930s, when he was part of the US government-funded project to send writers and photographers around the country to chronicle and document life in the nation.  Evans wasn’t a street photographer; he used an… Continue reading

More often than you’d think, an important and useful thing is invented more than once. There’s often an idea floating around, and any number of people work on it — and more than one succeeds. It’s less common, though, for a device to be invented twice, fifty years apart.  John Loud was born in Weymouth,… Continue reading