POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/31/2009
On October 30th 1938, a martian “cylinder” landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, heralding the beginning of a Martian invasion that created mass panic and caused immense damage throughout the world.
Luckily for us, it was only a radio broadcast.
In 1938, CBS was running a radio series named “Mercury Theatre,” narrated by Orson Welles. On October 30th of that year, Orson Welles ran a program based on H.G. Wells’ book, The War of the Worlds. It ran without commercial breaks and the first part was made up of mock news and public service broadcasts.
The broadcast caused panic and confusion among listeners as large numbers of them tuned into the show after it had started and believed it was a real report of an actual Martian invasion.
A recording of the original broadcast can be found on Mercury Theatre Online and makes good listening for Halloween.
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POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/28/2009
Every Halloween,, front porches across the United States are invaded by carved, candle lit pumpkins. Yet, as common as Jack-o-Lanterns are, it seems an odd tradition to carve faces on pumpkins. Of course, there is a reason for the tradition, and it starts in Ireland.
According to Irish legend, a man named Stingy Jack twice tricked the devil into promising to not claim his soul when he died. Needless to say, making deals with the devil isn’t something God would be too happy about, and when it came time for Jack to die, God refused him entrance to heaven. The devil, as promised, also refused to take him. So Jack was given a piece of glowing coal and sent to wander the Earth for all eternity. He placed this coal in a hollowed out turnip and thus the Jack-o-Lantern was born.
Carved turnips (mostly without candles) existed in the British Isles for centuries, but it wasn’t until the Irish began immigrating to North America that the tradition turned to pumpkins, a fruit native to this continent.
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POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/24/2009
Tonic water is a liquid that it often used as a mix in for alcoholic drinks, but did you know that it was originally used to prevent malaria? As the European powers colonized South Asia and and Africa, they began encountering new diseases such as malaria that caused much pain and suffering.
One of the solutions to the malaria epidemics was quinine, which was known to help ease the symptoms. However, quinine is extremely bitter and so it was diluted in water to create tonic water. In modern times, tonic water isn’t used as a cure or prevention of malaria, but that is how it began, as a medicine to prevent malaria.
An interesting note: tonic water glows blue under a black light, due to the quinine in it.
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POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/22/2009
In 1628 the Swedish navy sent their newest warship out on her maiden voyage. Upon leaving the harbor, the ship promptly heeled over and and sank to the ocean floor taking 30 to 50 of her sailors with her.
The reason for the sinking of the Vasa was her extremely unstable design. She was built too narrow with too little ballast and too much weight on the top. The instability of the design was quite obvious during stability tests of the new ship, but no one was willing to point it out to the king, thus allowing the ship to sail when it was obvious that she shouldn’t.
After a few attempts at raising her, the location of the Vasa was lost and she was not rediscovered until 1956. Finally, in 1961, the Vasa was raised and placed in the Vasa Museum in Sweden where she can be visited by the general public.
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POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/21/2009
Papyrus is one of the first forms of paper ever used. It is made from strips cut from the papyrus reed that have been laid out and hammered together. This formed a bonded sheet of papyrus paper that could be used for writing. Papyrus quickly became popular and was the primary writing medium across the ancient world for centuries. Over time, papyrus feel into disuse as more durable alternatives were introduced.
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POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/19/2009
So this past weekend, I went to visit my sister in Santa Cruz (thus I missed a few posts). While I was up there, my dad and I went to the Roaring Camp railroad to ride the train. This was the first time I had ever seen a geared locomotive up close and operating. n light of this, I decided to write a post about the type of locomotive I saw.
In the 19th century, as industrial logging became more prevalent in the west, there came a need for locomotives that were capable of operating on light, uneven and often steep track. The normal locomotive design just could not handle the grades, curves and cheap construction of the logging railroads and as such a new design was desperately needed. In 1877, Ephraim Shay came up with the solution: The Shay locomotive.
Shays take the original design of a steam locomotive and reconfigure it. Instead of having horizontal cylinders, they have vertical cylinders on the right side of the locomotive that are connected to a drive shaft down its side. The drive shaft connects all the axles through a series of slip joints and bevel gears. This design allows for a very flexible wheelbase that could handle the tight curves and rough track of the time. The design also created a high shaft to wheel turn ratio, thus boosting the power of the locomotive.
There were two other types of geared locomotives designed: the Heisler and the Climax.
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POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/14/2009
Between 200BC and 600AD a group of people created a series of huge line drawings in the ground. The drawings are so big that they can only be fully seen from the air. Even today, more than 1500 years after their creation, no one has yet discovered what their purpose is.
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POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/11/2009
Nitroglycerin is extremely dangerous to work with, it explodes from even small physical shocks, and over time it becomes even more unstable.
In 1867, Alfred Nobel combined Nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth to create a mixture known as dynamite. In addition to being used for mining and construction purposes, dynamite became a widely used tool of death and destruction.
In 1888, a french newspaper incorrectly printed a obituary about Nobel, who hadn’t yet died. The article harshly condemned him for creating a more efficient method of killing. This article had such an effect on Nobel that when he died he established the Nobel Prize to honor those who have made significant contributions to science.
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POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/09/2009
…On the Moon. At the end of the Apollo 15 mission, immediately prior to returning to their spacecraft, astronauts David Scott and James Irwin performed a short experiment to prove that Galileo Galilei was correct in his theory that objects in a vacuum fall at the same rate regardless of their mass.
The experiment involved dropping a geology hammer and a falcon feather at the same time and seeing which one hit the surface first. On earth the hammer will always hit the ground first, but on the moon, where the atmosphere is all but nonexistent, both hit the ground at the same time. The actual cause for the disparity on earth is air resistance, not a difference in mass. Linked is a video of the experiment taken from the surface of the moon.
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POSTED by: Scott McKittrick on 10/08/2009
Early on the morning of June 30th, 1908, a huge explosion rocked the Siberian forest. The explosion was so strong that it felled trees in a 850 square mile area around the blast site.
100 years later the cause of the explosion is still a mystery. The prevailing theory states that a meteorite or comet about 120 feet across entered the atmosphere above the Siberian forest and exploded at an altitude of 6-10 km above the ground. It released about 185 times the energy released by the detonation of the bomb over Hiroshima. The resulting shock wave stripped the branches and bark off the trees immediately below the air burst, felled the trees for tens of kilometers around and blasted a large amount of debris into the atmosphere.
There wasn’t a scientific expedition to the site of the explosion until 19 years after it happened.
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