History: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 5

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The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened on 15 September 1830, was the world's first inter-city railway. It was the first to use only steam locomotives, with no horse-drawn traffic, and the first to run entirely to a timetable. It cut the journey between the two cities to about two hours.

Merchants in Liverpool's port and Manchester's cotton mills wanted a cheaper, faster link than the canals, whose owners they felt were overcharging for carrying cotton. To choose their locomotives, the directors held the Rainhill Trials in October 1829, won by George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket. The line was also the first to be double-tracked all the way, to have a signalling system, run by policemen with flags, and to carry mail. Its passenger service was a great success, and most stagecoach companies on the route soon closed. The opening day was overshadowed when William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, was struck by Rocket and died. The line's success helped set off the 'railway mania' of the 1840s, a boom in railway building across Britain.

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StillnessHistory

The phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was coined by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1839 play Richelieu, where the French cardinal says it. The idea that words beat weapons is far older, but this wording is his, and within a few years it had become a stock saying.

Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy opened at the Covent Garden Theatre in London on 7 March 1839, with the famous actor William Charles Macready as Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII of France. In Act 2 the cardinal says that under the rule of truly great men the pen is mightier than the sword: in a master's hand it can stop emperors in their tracks, and a state can be saved without any sword at all. Others had said something similar long before. A copy of the teachings of the Assyrian sage Ahiqar from about 500 BC says that the word is mightier than the sword, and a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet says that many who wear swords are afraid of goose-quill pens. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) also gave English ‘the great unwashed’, a sneering name for the masses, and the novel opening ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.

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StillnessHistory

‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ is often credited to Thomas Jefferson, but it has never been found in his writings. The saying goes back to the Irish lawyer John Philpot Curran, who said in a 1790 speech in Dublin that liberty is given to people on condition of eternal vigilance.

Curran spoke in 1790 in a dispute over the right to elect the Lord Mayor of Dublin. He warned that the idle usually see their rights taken by the active, and that God gives liberty on condition of eternal vigilance: break that condition, and servitude follows as both result and punishment. The short modern form was used by the American anti-slavery campaigner Wendell Phillips in a speech in Boston on 28 January 1852. In 1879 Phillips himself wrote that the line had been credited to Jefferson but that no one had found it in his works, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs his home at Monticello, lists it as spurious. Curran (1750–1817) was an Irish barrister and member of the Irish Parliament, famous for defending people accused of rebellion against the Crown.

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WonderHistory

The Great Wall of China is not one wall built at once. Rival states began building walls in the 7th century BC, China's first emperor linked several of them after 221 BC, and later dynasties kept rebuilding. Most of what visitors see today dates from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

The first walls were built by the rival states of ancient China to guard their borders. After Qin Shi Huang united China in 221 BC, he had the walls between the old states torn down and linked those facing the nomadic peoples of the northern steppe. The Han and later dynasties repaired and extended the system. Early walls were mostly rammed earth, soil pounded hard between wooden boards, with stone in the mountains; the Ming used brick and stone and added thousands of watchtowers against Mongol raids. A Chinese government survey in 2012 put the combined length of all its surviving walls and trenches at about 21,196 km, some 8,850 km of it from the Ming. The Great Wall became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

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WonderHistory

Julius Caesar was never Roman emperor. He ruled as dictator, and soon after being named dictator for life he was assassinated, on 15 March 44 BC. The first emperor was his adopted heir Octavian, who took the name Augustus in 27 BC.

In Caesar's time Rome was still a republic, run by elected magistrates and the Senate. A dictator was an emergency office, normally held for six months; Caesar held it again and again, and early in 44 BC he was named dictator for life. Fearing that he meant to make himself king, a group of senators killed him on 15 March, the Ides of March. In his will Caesar adopted his great-nephew Octavian, who won the civil wars that followed. In 27 BC the Senate gave Octavian the name Augustus. He avoided the title of king and called himself princeps, ‘first citizen’, but he ruled alone until AD 14. Caesar's family name later became a title for rulers: Kaiser in German, tsar in Russian, and Kayser-i Rûm, ‘Caesar of Rome’, used by Mehmed II after he took Constantinople in 1453.

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WonderHistory

After William of Normandy won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, French became the language of England's kings and nobles for about three centuries. Thousands of French words entered English, which is why it often has two words for one thing, such as ‘begin’ and ‘commence’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’.

After the Norman Conquest, England used three languages: French at court and among the nobility, Latin in the Church and in official records, and English among ordinary people. Every king after the Conquest spoke French as his first language until Henry IV, who took the throne in 1399 and was the first whose mother tongue was English. French borrowing peaked between 1250 and 1400, and about a third of English vocabulary is now estimated to come from French, including crown, justice, parliament and marriage. The famous story that English peasants kept ‘cows’ and ‘pigs’ while Norman lords ate ‘beef’ and ‘pork’ is largely a myth, popularised by Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe in 1819: for centuries the French words were used for the live animals as well as the meat.

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WonderHistory

Christopher Columbus never set foot on the mainland of what is now the United States. On four voyages between 1492 and 1504 he reached the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands, the coast of Venezuela in South America, and Central America from Honduras to Panama.

Columbus, a sailor from Genoa, sailed for the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, hoping to reach Asia by going west. He made landfall on 12 October 1492 on an island in the Bahamas that its people called Guanahani. On his second voyage, in November 1493, his fleet stopped at St Croix and Puerto Rico, both now US territories but not states. In 1498 his men landed on the Paria Peninsula in Venezuela, the first recorded European landing on the South American mainland. Even so, he never clearly gave up the belief that he had reached the edge of Asia, and he called the people he met ‘Indians’. He died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506. Florida was reached in 1513 by Juan Ponce de León, who had sailed on Columbus's second voyage.

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WonderHistory

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 set off the chain of events that led to World War I.

Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, which had annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. On 28 June 1914 he and his wife Sophie were shot in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb student. Princip belonged to a group of young conspirators, helped by a secret Serbian nationalist society called the Black Hand, who wanted to free Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian rule and unite the South Slavs in one state. Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia and declared war on it on 28 July. Because the great powers were bound by alliances, the war spread within days: Germany declared war on Russia and France, and Britain entered on 4 August after Germany invaded Belgium. The Ottoman Empire joined that autumn on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

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WonderHistory

In August 1947 British rule in India ended and the land was divided along religious lines into two countries: India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. Between 12 and 20 million people had to leave their homes, in one of the largest migrations in history.

Pakistan became independent on 14 August 1947 and India on 15 August. Pakistan was made of two separate parts with India in between; the eastern part broke away in 1971 and became Bangladesh. Two large provinces with mixed populations, Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east, were split between the new states. The border was drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never been to India and was given about five weeks for the task. It was published only on 17 August, two days after independence, so on independence day many people in the border districts did not know which country they were in. Hindus and Sikhs moved towards India and Muslims towards Pakistan, many on foot or in packed trains. There was terrible violence on both sides; estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to two million.

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WonderHistory

On 10 December 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 30 articles setting out the rights and freedoms that belong to every person. It has since been translated into more than 500 languages, and Guinness World Records lists it as the most translated document in the world.

The declaration was written just after the Second World War, when the new United Nations wanted a common standard of rights for all peoples and nations. A commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prepared it. The Canadian legal scholar John Humphrey drew up the first draft, and the French jurist René Cassin, the Chinese diplomat P. C. Chang and the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik helped shape the final text. The UN General Assembly adopted it at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris: 48 countries voted in favour, Turkey among them, none voted against and eight abstained. It is not a treaty, so it does not bind countries by law, but many later treaties and national constitutions build on it. The UN's collection of translations passed 500 in 2016, and 10 December is marked every year as Human Rights Day.

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WonderHistory

In October 1962 American spy planes photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites being built in Cuba, whose coast lies about 150 kilometres from Florida. For 13 days the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war, until Moscow agreed to take the missiles away.

A U-2 spy plane photographed the first site on 14 October, and President John F. Kennedy was shown the pictures on 16 October, the first of the thirteen days. Instead of bombing the sites, he ordered a naval 'quarantine', a blockade to stop Soviet ships bringing more weapons. Tension peaked on 27 October, when an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, was killed. The next day the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced that the missiles would be removed. In public the United States promised not to invade Cuba; in secret it also agreed to withdraw its Jupiter nuclear missiles from five sites near Izmir in Turkey, which were gone by April 1963. In August 1963 the two powers opened a direct Moscow–Washington hotline, a teleprinter link rather than the red telephone of legend.

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WonderHistory

In April 2003 the Human Genome Project, an international effort begun in 1990, announced that it had read the human genome, the full set of genetic instructions in our cells. About 8% was still missing, in long repetitive stretches. The Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium filled the last gaps in 2022 and 2023.

The genome is written in four chemical letters, A, C, G and T, about 3.1 billion of them, and sequencing means reading them in order. The project was led by the United States with the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany and China, and cost about 2.7 billion dollars; Bill Clinton and Tony Blair announced a rough draft in June 2000. The machines of the time read DNA in short pieces, which were then fitted together like a jigsaw. Where the same letters repeat over and over, the pieces could not be placed, so those regions stayed blank. A telomere is the tip of a chromosome, and the consortium's name means 'from one end to the other'. Using newer machines that read much longer pieces, it published a gapless sequence of every chromosome except the Y in the journal Science in 2022; the Y followed in 2023.

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WonderHistory

The Black Death, the plague that killed an estimated third or more of Europe's people in the late 1340s and early 1350s, most likely began in Central Asia. It travelled west along trade routes and reached Sicily on Genoese ships in October 1347.

The strongest evidence comes from a 2022 study in the journal Nature. Researchers examined two medieval cemeteries in the Chüy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, in today's Kyrgyzstan, where gravestones dated 1338 and 1339 record deaths from 'pestilence'. DNA from the teeth of people buried there contained Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, and the strain proved to be the direct ancestor of those that later swept Europe. Plague usually spreads through the bites of fleas carried by rats and other animals. By 1346 it had struck the Mongol army besieging Caffa, a Genoese trading port in Crimea on the Black Sea, and merchant ships carried it on into the Mediterranean. Estimates of Europe's losses range from a quarter to about 60 per cent of the population.

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WonderHistory

Around 1455 in Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg's workshop finished printing a Latin Bible with movable metal type: single letters cast in metal that could be arranged into pages, printed and reused. It was Europe's first major printed book, and within 50 years presses were at work across the continent.

Printing of the Bible began around 1452. It was a huge undertaking: each copy ran to nearly 1,300 pages, usually bound in two large volumes, and between 160 and 185 copies were printed. At least some sold for 30 florins, about three years' wages for a clerk. Gutenberg had borrowed 1,600 guilders for his press and the Bible from Johann Fust, a wealthy Mainz financier. In 1455 Fust took him to court to recover the money; the ruling apparently went Fust's way, and he took over the Bible workshop, leaving Gutenberg in heavy debt. Fust and his partner Peter Schöffer carried on printing, and their Mainz Psalter of 1457 was the first book to give its printers' names and a printed date. It did not mention Gutenberg. No complete Gutenberg Bible has been sold since 1978, when one fetched 2.2 million dollars.

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WonderLanguage

English 'salary' comes from Latin salarium, a word built on sal, 'salt'. The popular story that Roman soldiers were paid in salt has no good evidence behind it: they received a regular wage in coin.

The only ancient writer to connect the two words is Pliny the Elder. In his Natural History, from the AD 70s, he says that salt played a part in public offices and military service and that this is where salarium comes from; he never says soldiers were paid in salt. Roman soldiers received a regular wage in coin, the stipendium, and the Greek historian Polybius records a foot soldier's daily pay in the 2nd century BC. Salt mattered to Rome, as the name of the ancient Via Salaria, the 'salt road', shows, but it was cheap. The 'paid in salt' story seems to have grown out of Latin dictionaries of the 1700s and 1800s, which guessed at a 'salt money' allowance that no ancient text mentions. Nor is 'worth one's salt' Roman: the phrase is first recorded in English in 1830.

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WonderLanguage

'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian quarantena, 'forty days'. In the late Middle Ages Venice made ships arriving from plague-hit ports wait forty days before anyone could come ashore, to see whether the disease broke out on board.

The practice began a little earlier, with a shorter wait. In 1377 the Republic of Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik in Croatia, ordered newcomers from plague areas to spend 30 days in isolation, a trentino. Venice opened a permanent isolation hospital, a lazaretto, on an island in its lagoon in 1423, and the forty-day wait became the rule there; the Venetian Senate is usually said to have fixed it in 1448. No one knows for certain why forty was chosen. It may come from the Greek physician Hippocrates's ideas about acute illnesses, those that strike suddenly, or from the forty days Jesus spent in the desert. The word reached Ottoman Turkish from Venetian: karantina already appears in 1721, in the embassy report of Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, the Ottoman envoy to Paris.

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WonderTechnology

On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain, meaning anyone could use, copy or change it without paying or asking permission. That decision helped the web grow from a tool for physicists into something the whole world uses.

The timing mattered. Earlier that year the University of Minnesota had announced licence fees for its Gopher software, a rival system for finding documents online, and many developers turned to the web instead. Early in 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois released Mosaic, an easy-to-use browser that showed pictures alongside text, and versions for ordinary PCs and Macs soon followed. By late 1993 there were more than 500 known web servers, carrying about 1% of internet traffic. By the end of 1994 there were 10,000 servers and some 10 million users. That year Berners-Lee left CERN to found the World Wide Web Consortium, which works to keep the web's standards open and free for everyone to use.

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WonderScience

Marie Curie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for research on radioactivity and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, for discovering the elements polonium and radium. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and she is still the only one to win in two different sciences.

She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, when Poland was under Russian rule and women could not study at university there, so in 1891 she moved to Paris. With her husband, Pierre, she found that uranium ore gave off more radiation than its uranium alone could explain, and traced the extra to two new elements. She named the first polonium, after Poland. The 1903 prize was shared with Henri Becquerel, who had discovered radioactivity. The committee first planned to honour only the two men, until the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler alerted Pierre, who insisted that Marie be included. After Pierre was run over by a horse-drawn wagon in Paris in 1906, she took over his post and became the first woman professor at the University of Paris. Her daughter Irène won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935.

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WonderTechnology

On 17 December 1903 near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew the Wright Flyer for 12 seconds and 120 feet (37 metres): the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered aeroplane. The brothers made three more flights that day; the longest, by Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet (260 metres).

The brothers had tried three days earlier. On 14 December they tossed a coin, Wilbur won, and he stalled the Flyer after three and a half seconds. On the 17th, after repairs, they laid their launching rail on level ground facing a wind of more than 30 km/h (20 mph), which gave the aircraft enough airspeed to lift off. Five local people watched, and one of them, John Daniels of the nearby lifesaving station, took the famous photograph of Orville's flight. All four flights were straight and no more than about 3 metres high. The 12-horsepower engine had been built by the brothers' mechanic, Charlie Taylor. Minutes after the last flight a gust tumbled the Flyer over and wrecked it. The brothers telegraphed their father and asked him to tell the press, but the Dayton Journal decided the flights were too short to be news.

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WonderScience

During the First World War Marie Curie fitted cars with X-ray equipment and took them to field hospitals near the front, sometimes at the wheel herself, so surgeons could see bullets, shell fragments and broken bones inside wounded soldiers. The cars became known as 'petites Curies', little Curies.

When the war began in 1914, X-ray machines were found mainly in city hospitals, far from where soldiers were wounded. Curie studied radiology, anatomy and car mechanics, learned to drive, and gathered X-ray equipment, vehicles and generators. As director of the Red Cross radiology service she equipped 20 mobile units and oversaw about 200 fixed X-ray rooms in field hospitals. Her 17-year-old daughter Irène worked beside her, and Curie trained 150 women to operate the machines. More than a million wounded soldiers are estimated to have been X-rayed during the war, yet the French government never formally recognised her work. Years of exposure to radiation, in the laboratory and at the front, are thought to have caused the aplastic anaemia, a failure of the bone marrow to make blood cells, that killed her in 1934.

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WonderArt

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a master of counterpoint: writing several independent melodies that sound at the same time and fit together. In a fugue, one short theme enters again and again in different voices, following strict rules. That precision is why his music can sound mathematical, while it still moves listeners.

Bach's rules could be very strict. In his Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, an opening aria is followed by 30 variations, and every third one is a canon, in which a second voice repeats the first a little later. The gap in pitch between the two voices grows by one step each time, from the same note in variation 3 to nine notes apart in variation 27. In The Art of Fugue, left unfinished at his death, the last fugue brings in a theme that spells his own name in German note letters: B flat, A, C and B natural, written B, A, C, H. After he died his style was thought old-fashioned, yet composers kept studying it; Mozart and Beethoven both learned from his Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, starting a wider Bach revival.

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WonderHistory

The Rosetta Stone is a broken slab carved with a decree issued in 196 BC by a council of Egyptian priests at Memphis. It honours the 13-year-old King Ptolemy V, whose Greek-speaking family ruled Egypt as pharaohs. The text appears three times: in hieroglyphs, in everyday Demotic script and in Greek.

The decree thanks the king for cutting the taxes owed by temples and priests, and orders a statue of him to be set up and honoured in every temple in Egypt, with celebrations on his birthday. The stone is a fragment of a larger inscribed slab, called a stele, and fragments of three other copies of the decree have since been found. Centuries later it was broken and reused as building material. In July 1799, during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, French soldiers found it in the wall of a fort near the port of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta. When the British defeated the French, it passed to them under the surrender terms of 1801, and it has been on display at the British Museum in London almost continuously since 1802. Made of granodiorite, a dark granite-like rock, it is the museum's most visited single object.

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WonderHistory

The Great Pyramid of Giza, built for the pharaoh Khufu about 4,500 years ago, is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing. It was also the oldest of them: already more than 2,000 years old when Greek writers drew up their lists of the world's great sights.

The Greeks called such places theamata, ‘sights’ worth a traveller's visit. One of the earliest surviving lists is a poem by Antipater of Sidon from the 2nd century BC; it named the walls of Babylon where later lists put the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Besides the pyramid, today's list has the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Two stood in what is now Turkey: the temple near Selçuk and the Mausoleum in Bodrum. The Colossus fell in an earthquake in 226 BC, so all seven stood together for less than 60 years. The Hanging Gardens may never have existed; no firm evidence has been found. The fixed list of seven used today comes from a series of prints by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck, published in 1572.

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WonderHistory

When it was finished about 4,500 years ago, the Great Pyramid of Giza stood 146.6 m tall. For more than 3,800 years nothing built by people rose higher, until the timber spires of medieval English cathedrals overtook it.

The pyramid was built for the pharaoh Khufu from an estimated 2.3 million blocks of stone and faced with polished white limestone brought by boat from Tura, across the Nile. In the Middle Ages most of that casing was stripped away and reused in Cairo, and the top is missing, so today it stands about 138.5 m. Sources disagree about which building beat it first. Some point to Old St Paul's Cathedral in London, completed in the 13th century; others to Lincoln Cathedral, whose central spire is said to have reached about 160 m in the early 14th century. Both spires were made of wood covered with lead, and both are gone: Lincoln's blew down in a storm in 1548, and St Paul's burned after a lightning strike in 1561.

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