If you lived two or three centuries ago, you mostly lived in the dark. I don’t mean metaphorically; candles don’t produce much illumination, and in those days they were pretty expensive. There weren’t very many alternatives, either. Luckily for people who liked to stay up late or read at night, William Murdoch was born on… Continue reading

It might be a bit unusual for someone to be remembered for centuries for events in just a brief period of their life. In the case of Henry Every, who was (probably) born August 20, 1656, (probably) in an English village a bit north of Devon. He may have been related to the Every family… Continue reading

If you’ve ever watched television — and it would be a rare individual nowadays who hasn’t — make a note that today, August 19, is the birthday of Philo Farnsworth, who invented the first all-electronic television system (including a camera) in the 1930s. Farnsworth was born in 1906 in Utah, in the US. When he… Continue reading

A professional historian has said “we know less than 1% of what really happened five hundred years ago, and two thirds of that is wrong.” So how do we know anything at all about the past? One source, at least in the European tradition, is writers who recorded events in their lives and their impressions… Continue reading

In the US, there’s a huge amount of mythology around the “frontier.” It really wasn’t that long ago, mythologically speaking, but it’s a big blob of lore, some of it fictional, in American minds. Since the frontier era lasted until just a little more than a century ago, many of the heroic characters are based… Continue reading

You might have a globe in your office, or remember one from a school classroom. If this has reminded you that you’d like to have a globe, they’re easily available and not particular expensive, since they’re mass produced, small enough to easily ship, and relatively popular. You can even get an inflatable one.  None of… Continue reading

Canada doesn’t get enough credit for all the things that have been invented there. For instance, the electric wheelchair, the surgical stapler, skis for airplanes landing in snow, early all-terrain vehicles (the “Weasel” was his design; it’s also amphibious), the first nuclear reactor built outside the US (and to a new and unique design), and… Continue reading

The history of science is pretty interesting; all sorts of discoveries — and entire fields of study — have flourished, only to be eventually disproven. This is still going on; just look at the news in the past few weeks about a “room-temperature superconductor,” or think back a few years to “cold fusion.” Charlotte Fowler… Continue reading

If you enjoy alternating-current electricity in your home or business, and you get the power from “the grid,” paying the utility company for the amount you use, and if you can rely on the power from your electrical outlets being pretty consistent, and if you have any devices that use AC electric motors, you can… Continue reading

Do you enjoy board games? Before you pass Go or pay your rent make a note that Charles Darrow was born August 10 in 1889, and is the person who brought the game Monopoly to the market.  Darrow didn’t start out as a game designer. He was born in Philadelphia, in the US, and was… Continue reading