History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Sir Isaac’s secretary has left us an engaging portrait of a kindly genius, the absent-minded professor of our fancy.
In 1685, Sir Isaac Newton engaged a secretary to help him with his increasing workload, a Mr Humphrey Newton who was, it seems, no relation of the great mathematician. Many years later John Conduitt, Newton’s successor as Master of the Mint and also the great man’s nephew by marriage, asked Humphrey to supply him with his recollections of Sir Isaac.
When Archimedes discovered the principle of displacement, he was hot on the trail of a clever fraud.
Hiero II (?308 BC – 215 BC), ruler of Syracuse in Sicily (an ancient Greek colony), made a present of a golden crown to a temple in honour of the gods. The crown was commissioned and duly delivered, but Hiero suspected that the craftsman had kept some of the gold and mixed in some lesser metal. So he turned to a relative of his, the mathematican Archimedes, and asked him to do some detective work.
French travel writer Pierre-Jean Grosley toured Georgian London just in time to witness a culinary revolution: the sandwich.
In 1770, Frenchman Pierre-Jean Grosley delighted French readers with his account of a visit to London and of the habits of its citizens high and low. Two years later, Thomas Nugent translated it, and Grosley’s impressions found an equally delighted audience on this side of the Channel. It is to this work that we are indebted for an eyewitness account of the ‘sandwich’ and its ... spread.
A loyal dog shows his initiative in recovering his master’s property, though his timing might have been better.
In 1815, at a time when Sir Humphry Davy was popularising chemistry with his famous Royal Institution Lectures, a little handbook was published providing a light-hearted introduction to British zoology. Of course there was a lengthy section devoted to the Dog, and following some remarkable incidences of loyalty, devotion and even acting ability, the authors turned to examples of canine initiative.
In 64, Nero watched on with fascination as Rome was consumed by fire — the Emperor’s idea of performance art.
The expression ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ is used today of those who are idle in a crisis. It derives from the Great Fire of Rome in 64, during the reign of Emperor Nero, though the Emperor did not ‘fiddle’ (play the violin) while a week-long fire consumed two-thirds of the imperial capital, nor was he exactly idle. No indeed: he dressed up and sang a musical melodrama he had composed himself.
It was during the troubled reign of Charles I that the very first bananas seen in Britain went on display.
The runaway success of Alicia Amherst’s History of Gardening in England (1895) surprised nobody more than its modest author. Plenty of horticultural manuals offered practical advice but Amherst and her contemporary Gertrude Jekyll helped put gardening into its wider social context. In this passage, she records the first appearance of a much-loved fruit but also gives us a glimpse of a courageous man.