in celebration of AOLOL, a look at version 4 which still kinda works
Tag: history
Medieval Robots
In 807 the caliph in Baghdad sent Charlemagne a gift the like of which had never been seen in the Christian empire: a brass water clock. It chimed the hours by dropping small metal balls into a bowl. Instead of a numbered dial, the clock displayed the time with 12 mechanical horsemen that popped out of small windows, rather like an Advent calendar
Buzzfeed isn’t new
- 7 types of drunkard: The Anatomy of Drunkenness (1834)
- 18 accounts of taking Laughing Gas in 1799: Researches, chemical and philosophical chiefly concerning nitrous oxide, or diphlogisticated nitrous air, and its respiration (1800)
- 162 recorded sightings of sea serpents from 1522 – 1890: The Great Sea-serpent: An historical and critical treatise (1892)
Fedex war stories
You mean the time FedEx towed one of its airplanes to the other side of a hanger to keep it out of sight of a sheriff with a lock and a chain sent to lock down the airplane as collateral for unpaid fuel bills?
You mean when some angry union people showed up objecting to FedEx pilots handling packages?
You mean the time 2 barrels of liquids in the shop got confused and maybe some bad stuff got pumped by mistake into the hydraulic systems of some unknown number of airplanes?
Arabic ring in Viking grave
the 13th warrior is real
A finger ring discovered in Birka in the grave of a woman dating to around 850 A.D is the only ring with an Arabic inscription ever found at a Scandinavian archaeological site.
The first market state
It was at this moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional corporation, trading and silks and spices, and became something much more unusual. Within a few years, 250 company clerks backed by the military force of 20K locally recruited Indian soldiers had become the effective rulers of Bengal. An international corporation was transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power.
8 ka trade
Stone Age Britons imported wheat 8 ka ago in a surprising sign of sophistication for primitive hunter-gatherers long viewed as isolated from European agriculture
The way of the dodo
Starting as a ‘rewind boy’ at his local cinema in east London in the days when film prints had to be reset by hand, Ümit Mesut has since made it his mission to keep celluloid alive. He’s converted his shop Ümit and Son – once a video and general store – into a haven for likeminded cinephiles on the lookout for old and rare prints and projectors, and he tirelessly scours conventions for films to add to his collection. Ümit’s love for film is contagious and gets at something fundamental about collecting – those who dedicate themselves to preserving what the rest of us might overlook are keeping our history and memories alive.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
The book explores the origins of Indo-European languages (now spoken by 3B people) in the context of the domestication of the horse and invention of the wheel in the Eurasian Grass-Steppe
History is Chemistry
coffee, sugar, chocolate and tobacco allowed people to modulate their own body chemistry, resulting in profound social and economic change