THE WORLD'S FIRST DYNAMO

Faraday's electromagnetic discovery is a breakthrough in understanding electricity.

pictorial visualation@google image

From Faraday's notebook, on the "Rotation of current experiment,"  @google image

           A year earlier he had been earning the staggering sum of  #1,000 a year as a scientific consultant. Now Michel Faraday was devoting himself exclusively to sum. But the cut in pay was worth it. He had long been convinced that magnetism and electricity were closely related. Already he knew that an electric current could produce magnetism, and on August 24, 1831, during an epoch-making period of nine days of brilliant experimentation of the Royal Society in London, he proved that magnetism could produce electricity. Using very simple equipment ( a magnet, a copper coil, and a basic ammeter), he demonstrated that moving a wire through a magnetic field induces an electric current whose voltage is proportional to the speed of the movement. Here was, in effect of the world's first dynamo. The principle that he has discovered underlies the fundamental operation of most modern-day electrical machines. Faraday was not only a brilliant experimental scientist but also one of the most practical.
            Born in 1791, the son of a poor Yorkshire blacksmith, amazingly, Faraday had little formal education. He was an apprentice to bookbinder before attracting the attention of Sir Humphrey Davy and becoming a dedicated chemist and physicist, and a superb lecturer. He discovered Benzene, invented the system of oxidation numbers, devised an early form of the Bunsen burner, developed the laws of electrolysis, and helped along the birth of nanoscience, as well as giving us the "Faraday cage," the "Faraday constant," and the "Faraday effect."
             More than any other man, Michael Faraday made possible the generation of electricity. It took another generation before his discoveries found full practical expression, but humankind is in his debt.


ref.
^1001 days that shaped the world.@Imulse
^Rotation of current experiment.
  

EARTH SEEN FROM THE MOON

The Earthrise photograph is taken eight months before the first landing on the moon.

       The Apollo8 mission carried astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders, and Jim Lovell into lunar orbit. It was the first occasion on which humans had traveled beyond the gravitational field of Earth to that of another body. Their task was to photograph the lunar surface, but as they rolled the spacecraft and came around the far side of the moon, they saw distant earth rising above the vast, inert surface of the moon. Both Borman, the mission commander, and Anders caught the moment on the film. Borman captured Earth in monochrome just as emerged over the lunar horizon; Anders with it risen a few degrees into the black sky, in color, a swirl of blue and white. The picture showed, for the first time, Earth from distant space, a small planet partly shrouded in darkness: a fragile, fluid, integrated world, fascinating and attractive, in contrast to the monolithic, gray, and inert moon, that Lovell described as "like plaster of Paris or grayish beach sand." he added, "the vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and makes you realize just what you have here on Earth."
        In fact, because the moon keeps the same face continually turned on Earth, Earth does not "rise" or "set" from the surface, but remains at the same point in the sky permanently.
         The Earthrise photograph was taken up by the developing environmental movement and proved a powerful graphics image for the notion, proposed by James Lovelock, of "Gaia," Earth as a self-correcting, almost intelligent organism.
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BANGLADESH DECLARES INDEPENDENCE

East Pakistan secedes, provoking a military response from its western counterpart.

          When East Pakistan's political leaders issued a declaration of  independence from Pakistan, the move came as great surprise. since its creation in 947, Pakistan was an unpolitical entity, with two territories separated by more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of Indian land. Apart from the Islamic religion, the two parts had little in common. West Pakistan politically dominated the two-winged state. the more populous East received much less than half of government spending, was underrepresented in the military, face discrimination in the award of government contracts, and had its political leadership marginalized. The inept government response to the 1970 cyclone was for many the final straw. In the elections, the separatist East Pakistan Awami League won a landslide victory and had an overall majority in the National Assembly. The military simply refused to accept the results. The declaration of independence was an expected reply.
           The government in West Pakistan, of course, was not prepared to leave such a challenge unanswered. It had already begun to lunch a brutal campaign of repression. A primary victim was the Hindu minority.The hurriedly raised Mukti Bahini (Liberation force) fought back using guerrilla warfare. The issue would eventually be decided by India, who, incensed by the attacks on Hindus and by the military buildup in the East, intervened in December. They rapidly advanced and took Dacca (Dhaka) within days. The new nation of Bangladesh had become a reality.

THE UNIVERSE IS MUCH LARGER THAN WE THOUGHT

Edwin Hubble announces the discovery of  other galaxies, revealing that the universe is much larger than we thought.

          Until the 1920s, it was widely assumed that the galaxy of stars of which our sun is one was the only galaxy in existence. Astronomers, however, had already begun to suspect that there might be other structures farther out in space. One such Astronomer was a young American from Missouri, Edwin Powell Hubble. He focused on nebulae - clouds of interstellar dust and gas-- and from 1919 studied them at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. He discovered that some object thought to be nebulae were actually large-scale aggregates of stars, or galaxies like our own. In 1923, for example, he found thirty-six stars inside the Andromeda nebulae, which he subsequently calculated to be 900,000 light years away from us and an enormous distance beyond our own galaxy's edge. The astronomers published hi research result on the first day of 1925.
           Hubble classified the galaxies into three main types- spiral, elliptical, and irregular. He not only demonstrated that the universe is immensely bigger than previously thought, but went want to show that it is expanding, meaning that the other galaxies are moving away from us. In 1929, he found that the speed at which the galaxies recede increases with their distance from us (Huble's Law) and established a ratio (Hubbles Constant) between the speed and the distance. Subsequent investigations suggest that ratio has not always remained the same, but over time has decelerated and accelerated.
             Hubble continued working at Mount Wilson virtually until his death in 1953. The Hubble space Telescope was named in his honor. 

THE MASTERY OF THE SEAS

The HMS Dreadnought gives Britain the lead in the race for global naval supremacy

          As Britain new warship HMS Dreadnought slid into the water at Portsmouth dockyard in 1906, the nature of the world's navies changed. All existing Battleships were now obsolete. Its design was so radical that it gives it name to a whole new style of ship. Inspired by the thinking of Admiral Fisher, once commander - in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet and now First Sea Lord, The professional head of the Royal Navy,  the design brought together all the recent developments in propulsion, armor, and gunnery to create a fast, powerful ship capable of destroying  any other ship. All future British warships would follow this model.
           Other maritime nations - including the U.S,Japan,France,Italy and Russia - were obliged to follow this design if they were to project maritime power. But the major repercussions were felt in the new German Empire, where  Kaiser Wilhelm II, supported by his navy minister, Admiral Tirpitz, had a policy of noval rivalry with Britain in the hope of challenging her predominance in the world's oceans. Both nations invested in more such ships with ever more sophisticated designs. The imperial German ship program was major worry for the British. In World War I, the two fleets would eventually face each other at the battle of Jutland, although although the outcome proved inconclusive.
             The Dreadnought concept dominated the world's navies until the new technologies of submarines, aircraft and carriers. By the end of  the World War II, the Dreadnought was obsolete.

COMMUNICATION BY SPACE SATELLITE (FIRST TELEVISION BY SATELLITE)

The lunch of Telstar 1 enables television transmission to be sent back to earth by satellite and makes the world seem a little smaller.

           Communication by space satellite, which has today become the basis of a thriving commercial industry and a vital factor in military operations, was first suggested by the writer Arthur C. Clarke in 1945. One of the first to carry to idea forward in the 1950s was a U.S engineer working for Bell  Telephones, John R. Pierce, who played a leading part in the work that led to the lunch of the Echo Communications satellite in 1960 and Talstar 1 in 1962.
            Echo reflected microwave radio signals back to Earth from its aluminum surface, but Telstar was a more sophisticated device, which for the first time allowed television transmissions to be winged back to Earth. It was launched by American Telephone and Telegraph in cahoots with Bell Telephones and the British and French post offices. a gigantic antenna, built in Maine, near andover, was locked on to the satellite, and subsequent televisions picture was relayed across the Atlantic to be received at stations in England and French.
             The first picture from Telstar showed the flag at the Andover station, but it was presently transmitting a baseball game between the Chicago cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, and President Kennedy used it to give a live transatlantic press conference. Telstar 1 went out in of action in February  1963, possibly affected by radiation from the testing of nuclear weapons. It was replaced by Telstar 2. Development continued, and in 1964 the syncom 3 satellite relayed pictures of the Tokyo Olympic Games across the pacific. 

THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH

Niepce takes the first photograph after searching for years for an image fixative

Photography, one of the great inventions of the early nineteenth century, was created by a Frenchman, sixty-two-years old Joseph Nicephore Niepce. He his brother were inventors, developing a boat driving by an internal-combustion engine, The pyrelophone, in 1798. From 1816, Niepce tried to ''fix'' an image produce by a camera obscura, which projects a scene onto a surface using the principle of a pinhole camera, sometimes with mirrors and lenses. He experimented with silver halide-coated paper and produced an image of window view, but the negative image venished when exposed in daylight.
      He sought a way of producing a positive image, and in 1822 succeeded in making a contact print of an engraving onto a sheet of paper through the action of light on a glass plat coated with Judia bitumen. Two years later he made the first permanent images from the camera obscura, although these required an exposure time of many hours. He experimented with the material of photographic plate and in 1827 visited England to demonstrate  his pewter technique to the Royal Society at kew. He did not win a prize because he would not reveal the chemicals used in this process. Around the same time, he produced a successful image-- a view from his window exposed over eight hours -- etched onto a tin plate, now regarded as the world's first true photograph. From 1829, he worked with Louis Daguerre; Niepce died in july 1833, leaving Daguerre to create the daguerreotype in 1839.

THE DOOR TO NUCLEAR ENERGY AND ATOMIC WEAPONS

NUCLEAR FiSSION

    Otto Hahn opens the door to nuclear energy and atomic weapons

Otto Hahn "the founder of the atomic age," was a German scientist who discovered nuclear fission in 1983 at the mounting tensions that would lead to World War II escalated. Fortunately, as an anti-Nazi, his genius was not used by Hitler.
       Hahn was born in 1879, graduated from Marburg University in 1904, and worked at University College,London, discovering the isotop radiothorium (thorium 228). Transferring to McGill University, Montreal, in 1905, he worked under Sir Ernest Rutherford before becoming a professor at Berlin University in 1906. There he discovered ionium the "mother substance" of radium, married and fathered a son. He also began his thirty-year collaboration with Lise Meitner, an Austrian chemist. After being conscripted to develop poison gases in World War I, Hahn wrote the book Applied Radiochemistry, which become the "bible' of U.S Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb.
        Hahn's most important discovery was made after he bombarded uranium with neutrons, leading to the splitting of the uranium nucleus into atomic nuclei of medium  weight - nuclear fission. In 1934 Hahn resigned from Berlin University in protest at the persecution of Lise Meitner and other Jewish colleagues. He procured Meitner a passport, enabling her to emigrate. Hahn was entered at the end of the War near Cambridge, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1945, Hahn spent the time before his death in 1968 warning against the atomic arms race and the dangers of radioactive pollution.  

THE FIRST PERSONAL COMPUTER

Can we imagine our selves  without technology? No, in this generation  it is impossible,everything around us bounded with the technological instruction,
Yes, and computer is the main leading device....

On of the most important technological innovations of the twentieth century was the computer. It gradually progressed from an enormous, unwieldy machine to a small personal computer that could be used in offices and at home. A key event in this development was the introduction by the international Business Machine (IBM) company of a new personal computer in 1981.  The computer, named the 5150 was not the first of its breed by any means, but IBM's solid reputation for quality and reliability made it a strong seller and gave the use of  personal computers a powerful boost. they were no longer a trendy fad, but something people increasingly they ought to have.
      IBM had a history in this general field. It created the world first floppy disc in 1967 and in 1975 unveiled its 5100 portable computer, which was probably the first self-contained portable computer system. Around 1980 , the company marketed its Data-master all-in-one desktop word processor. Like the 5100, it was expensive (around $15,000) and sales were low. The 5150 was a different story altogether. It was reasonably affordable at around $3,000 and it offered more memory than its rivals, whose makers promptly began copying it, producing what were initially known as ''IBM clones'' and later simply as PCs. In August 1982, after a year of manufacturing, the two hundred thousandth model was shipped out.
        The first 5150 contained the Intel 8088 CPU, a single floppy disc drive, and 64 KB of RAM and was the brainchild of engineer Don Estridge. The decision to supply the computer with Microsoft's DOS operating system was the foundation for that company's domination of the software market. 

FIRST IRON BRIDGE

Hi, friends today we are going to learn about a interesting topic related with our daily life....
Bridge :
  A structure that is built over a river, railway cross ,mountain tips, junction to allow people and vehicles to cross from one side to the other without losing the time and the communication of daily life to be easier ...

 Today's post related about The World's First Iron Bridge;

When and Where The World's First Iron Bridge Opens?
 >The completed iron bridge first opened one New Year's Day 1781, The bridge spanning the River Severn Gorge near Coalbrookdale, England, was the idea of young architect Thomas Pritchard. He commissioned  Abraham Darbylll, just twenty-nine at the time and a Quaker iron-master--- whose grandfather Abraham Darby l had triggered the industrial Revolution by inventing the smelting of coke powder to make iron -- to build the pioneering design for a single-span, 120-foot (37 m), 378-ton bridge, using massive parts, the largest of which was 70 feet (21 m) long.
       The bridge used iron to mimic traditional woodcarving techniques-- such as mortise and tenon, dovetails, and wedges--to feet join together. Although Pitchard died in 1777, work on the bridge continued, financed by another local iron-master, John Wilkinson. It was completed in 1779, although the approach roads took another two years. No records were kept on the construction, and exact detail remained a mystery until 2002, when a watercolor by Elias Martin was discovered in Sweden showing how it was made. The bridge become so celebrated that a new town, Iron bridge, grew up around it.
        Darby overspent and was in debt for the rest of his life, but the bridge, although over-heavy and subject to cracks around its foundations, survived and is now recognized as a milestone's in the worlds industrialization. in 1987, Iron bridge was declared a World Heritage Site, attracting a tourist industry that celebrates the industrial Revolution.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Hi friends, Me K.R.Ansari(Historical History/).

Today We are going to learn about the History of  Nobel Peace Prize, as we all heard about it but many of us including me don't  know why and where from it come,So my friends through this we are going to know about the foundation of Nobel,  yah it will be very interesting so get started....

What is Nobel peace prize?

The Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, The inventor of dynamite, wrote in his will that awards should be given every year to people, who 'in the previous year have done the greatest good for mankind'. This prizes are named after Alfred Nobel and awarded for path-breaking achievements in the field's of medicine,physics, chemistry,and literature---and for excellent services given to great humanitarians like Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luthr King, and Mother Teresa and also to organisations such as the Red Cross and UNICEF of the United nations. In 2006, Mohammed Yunus, a banker from Bangladesh, received the Nobel peace prize. He lent very small amounts of money to poor people----often just 50 Euro----who needed only the small amount to break the cycle of poverty for good. Today, his theory of 'micro-lending' is helping to eradicate poverty in the world. Since 1901, The Nobel prizes are awarded in Oslo every year on December 10, the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel.

SECRET BEHIND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

1809 Thomas Paine, guiding light of the American Revolution and on of the most influential thinkers of the age, died in New York City today. Through his writings, Paine inspired and revived the nation's morale during the dark days of America's fight for independence from Britain. His famous pamphlet Common sense, Published in 1776 and including the words, "The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind" sold more than 1,00,000 copies in three months. The American Crisis, published later in the same year, is credited with contributing to America success at the Battle of the Trenton. While in France, Paine wrote the Writes of Man, a defense of the French revolution that earned him the brand "traitor" in his native Britain. Although a supporter of the revolutionary cause, he was oppose to the execution of Louis XVI: this aroused radical suspicions and landed him in the Luxembourg Prison, where the work on the statement of his religious beliefs, The age of Reason, published after his release. 

LET'S MAKE OUR PLANETS AS HUMAN LIVING PLANET

Hi friends, Me K.R.Ansari(Historical History).

A good morning to all of you & also drawing attention to World Environment Day 5 June;

World environment day occurs on 5 June every year, and is the United Nation's important vehicle for empowering overall mindfulness and activity for the for the protection of our environment. World Environment Day seeks to bring to all a heightened awareness and understanding of the Environment and the problem that besiege it.

 A clean environment is essential for human health and well-being. However, the interactions between the environment and human health are highly complex and difficult to assess. This makes the use of the precautionary principle particularly useful. the best known health impacts are related to ambient air pollution, poor water quality and insufficient sanitation.
        Environment related issues that affect our health have been one of the most important triggers that have led to creating an increasing awareness of the need for better environmental management. Changes in our environmental induced by human activities in nearly every sphere of life have had an influence on the pattern of our health. The assumption that human progress is through economic growth is not necessarily true. We expect urbanization and industrialization to bring in prosperity, but on the down side, it leads to diseases related to overcrowding and a inadequate equality of drinking water, resulting  in an increase in waterborne diseases such as infective  diarrhea and air borne bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis.High-density city traffic leads to an increase in respiratory diseases like asthma and many more.
       
          Let's make our planets as human living planet.

PRINTING FROM MOVABLE TYPE (first printing book)

Hi friends, Me K.R.Ansari(Historical History).

 K.R.Ansari(Historical History).

Now my dear friends before getting let I want to share with you something new which I recently collect from revised history; that is about "First Printing Book"
         
    In 1450 Johann Gutenberg, a craftsman and metalworker from Mainz in Germany, took out a loan from financier. He had been experimenting with ways of printing from movable type, using his knowledge of metalworking to produce a method of casting metal type in quantity by means of a hand mold. He needed funds to develop further tools and equipment,including a wooden screw press, oil based printing links, and paper that could take an impression. With the printing press he created from all these elements he was able to start work on his masterpiece, the Gutenberg Great Bible, the printing of which was completed not later than 1455.
      Gutenberg Bible(also known as the forty-two line Bible, because each page had forty-two lines of text) is commonly held to be the first printed book in Europe and marked the beginning of the mass production of books. It probably took a year to produce the first printing of 180 copies of 1,282 pages each. Gutenberg soon had many imitators, and printing press were set up in city after city to produce Bibles, encyclopedias, theological works, histories, and romances to feed an ever-growing appetite for the printed word.
       The invention of movable type has been likened to the birth of the internet. It was the technological breakthrough that powered the dissemination of ideas during the Renaissance and the humanist explosion of learning of the early sixteenth century. In 1999, Time magazine named the Gutenberg printing press the most important invention of the millennium.

The great Scientist EINSTEIN dies today

The great Scientist EINSTEIN dies today

In this 1955 Albert Einstein died in his sleep today at Princeton Hospital, aged 75. Regarded as one of the most creative intellects in human history, Einstein made his greatest contributions to scientific theory before the age of 50, He was awarded the Nobel prize in Physics in 1921, for the photoelectric law and his work in the field of theoretical Physics. His history of relativity,which had in beginnings in as essay he wrote when he was only 16, was verified by the Royal Society of London in 1919. Einstein commitment to world peace and Zionism brought him into conflict with right-wing opinion in his native Germany. When Hitler become Chancellor of Germany in 1933, after Lise Meinter split the atom, he urged on President Roosevelt the importance of US scientist developing an A-bomb ahead of the Nazis, and his recommendation marked the beginning of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. The horror of Hiroshima in 1945 shocked Einstein into issuing letters calling for the establishment of world government to prevent future use of the bomb, aware that without his theory of relativity the nuclear age would not have dawned. 

ABEL TASMAN THE EXPLORER...DISCOVER NEW ZEALAND

ABEL TASMAN THE EXPLORER...DISCOVER NEW ZEALAND 

The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman born in 1603, Abel Tasman spent his career in the service of VOC, The Dutch eastv Indian company, when the Netherlands was Europe's preeminent sea-trading power. In 1634 he was second-in-command of an expedition that reached Formosa(Taiwan) . He also made voyages to Japan in 1641 and to Sumatra in 1642. Later that year, Tasman commanded an expedition to find a fabled "southern land" in the Pacific whose existence had never been verified.
            Tasman sighted the west coast of Tasmania on November 24, which he named after Anthony van Diemen, governor of the Dutch east Indies. Intending to sail north,Tasman was blown east by the prevailing winds, and on December 13, he become the first European to see New Zealand's south islands, which he named the Staten land on the mistaken assumption that it was linked to Argentina's Staten Island. Sailing north , one of his ships attacked by the Island Maori Inhabitants, and four of his sailors were killed. Tasman named the spot Murders Bay(Golden Bay).
             In 1644,Tasman mapped Australia's northern coast. He settled Batavia   and become a wealthy leader of Dutch community---his later life marred only when he was find and demoted for hanging a sailor without trial. He Died in 1659.

ONE OF THE MOST DECISIVE BATTLES IN EUROPEAN HISTORY

ONE OF THE MOST DECISIVE BATTLES IN EUROPEAN HISTORY

In 732, on a hilltop between Tours and Poitiers in France, on of the most decisive battle in European history was fought. In the hundred years following ,armies inspired by the Islamic faith had pressed forward through north Africa and the Iberian Peninsula to arrive in the heart of Western Europe. In 732, the governor-general of Muslim Spain, Abd-ar-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, led an army across the Pyrenees and conquered Aquitaine, laying waste to Bordeauxe. He than headed for the kingdom of the Franks, toward the city of Tours.
              The Frankish leader Charles Martel placed his 30,000-strong army on high, wooded ground, in their line of advance. He formed his men into a tight infantry square, and waited. Abd-ar-Rahman al-Ghafiqi held off from attacking from 7 days, although his force may have outnumbered the Franks by two to one. when he finally lunched his cavalry, the Frankish infantry stood firm and repelled their charges. After a long fight, the Muslim horsemen withdrew to defend their war  chests, and abandoned by his men, Abd-ar-Rahman al-Ghafiqi was surrounded and killed.
               It is likely that Abd-ar-Rahman al-Ghafiqi had not sought to coquer European Chsistendom, but just to lead a raidinng expedition. But if the Frankish warriors had lost, nothing would have stood in the way of a Muslim takewover of western Europe. Charls Martel consolidate the Carolingian Empire, which formed a barrier to the northward expansion of Islam.
               

A JOURNEY THROUGH IMPOSSIBLE MOUNTAIN BARRIER TO ATTACK ROME.

A JOURNEY THROUGH IMPOSSIBLE MOUNTAIN BARRIER TO ATTACK ROME.

In the fall of 218 B.C.E., an exhausted,demoralized army lay scattered among the rocks,snow, and ice of a high Alpine pass.A  force of wild tribesmen from Spain , Libyan foot soldiers, and Numidian horsemen from north Africa had followed twenty-eight-year-old general Hannibal Barca in a bid to cross this apparently impossible mountain barrier.
           Hannibal's native city, Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the Roman republic from control of the western Mediterranean. In the spring of 218 B.C.E., Hannibal had led his army from Spain to Italy. He set out with more than 100,000 men, tens of thousands of horses and mules, and thirty-seven war elephants. A long journey to hostile territory greatly reduced the army even before it reached the Alps. There, advancing up narrow tracks through mountain gorges, Hannibal's soldier were attacked by the Alloroges and other local tribesmen. It took 9 days to reach the top of the pass.
            Hannibal, Who had shared in all his men's hardships, rallied the cold and hungry troops to under tack the descent into Italy, which, he said, would place Rome ion their hands. Walking walking on snow and ice, the animals and men struggled along the narrow downward track, terrified of falling to their deaths over the slippery edge. At one point they had to spend four days rebuilding the obliterated path. Only around 26,000 men made it to Italy, with a handful of elephants. Nonetheless, Hannibal had achieved an extraordinary feet in crossing the Alps and could now advance upon the Rome.  

EUREKA! The Archimedes Discovery While Taking a Bath....how to measure density..

HOW TO MEASURE DENSITY

           King Hieron of Sicily, wanting to find out if a crown he had been given was made of solid gold, or whether he had been palmed off with on containing silver, asked Archimedes to solve the problem. But how was he to do so without melting down the metal and destroying the crown? Interestingly while  taking a bath, Archimedes noticed the water level rose when he got in, and he realized that he could determine the gold density of the crown by weighing it in water. He was so excited by this discovery that he reputed to have rushed out naked into the street shouting "EUREKA!"  ("I have found it") .
                 Archimedes was born in 287 b.c.e. in the Greek city-state of Syracuse, Sicily, and is also credited with inventing the lever and the Archimedes screw - a device for lifting water  - and for setting fire to Roman ships using mirror and sun's rays during the siege of Syracuse.  When the city fell in 212 B.C.E., Archimedes, so it was said, was killed by a Roman soldier because he ignored a commend to leave his mathematical diagrams. Archimedes was held in great respect by the ancient world, both as a practical and theoretical  scientist . He wrote on mechanics, hydro-statics, catoptrics (refraction), and mathematics. Although much of his work is lost, his surviving writings were known to Islamic mathematicians in the middle ages. ................ 

MOST POWERFUL BOMB (H-bomb) WIPES OUT ISLAND

MOST POWERFUL BOMB (H-bomb) WIPES OUT ISLAND

           In 1954 The US today exploded the most powerful bomb ever made - and tiny  Bikini Atoll in the south Pacific died. The explosion was the equivalent of 15 million tons of TNT - hundreds of times more powerful than the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The " Bravo" test of the world's first full-scale hydrogen bomb was a complete success. Cameras were there to record the awesome flash and the immense mushroom cloud - the symbol of our post - war era. But the bomb was apparently even more powerful than expected: the shock went right off the dials of the recording instruments. Though the atoll was cleared of islanders and the seas were patrolled, there are reports that Japanese fisherman on boats more than 70 miles from the blast have been seriously burnt by white ash that fell from the sky. In a smaller test blast two years ago , a complete island vanished.  This puts the US well ahead in the arms race, but it is only a matter of time before the Soviets test their own H-bomb.

BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE

BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE

            There was of course, no ''bang'', big or small, because there was no medium in which sound could exist. It was the beginning of time, space, matter, energy, everything - all inexplicably  created out of a ''singularity'' in which none of these existed before. In the 1960s, scientist detected the echo of the Big Bang in the form of background radiation from across the sky. impressively, they have produced a theoretical explanation of what must have happened in the very first second of the universe. When the universe was still tiny and incredibly hot, a sudden expansion occurred as matter moved from the minute quantum scale to that of a small but growing cosmos. Vast amounts of matter and antimatter were created, almost all of which mutually annihilated, leaving just a tiny portion matter. As the universe cooled from its enormous  levels of energy, subatomic particles assembled. It was not for another 380,000 years that temperatures fell sufficiently for electrons and protons to come together to form atoms.
           Vast cloud of hydrogen collected, cohering into ever - denser masses that compacted under the force of gravity until hydrogen atom at the center fused into helium, releasing energy that made them bum as stars. When some of these exploded into supernovae, heavier atoms were made, which form the raw materials for the universe as we know it.
           The theory of Big Bang was put forward in the 1950s, and it is still the unchallenged scientific explanation of the origins of the universe.

THE MONGOL CONQUEROR, WHO BUILT THE PYRAMID OF SKULL

THE MONGOL CONQUEROR, WHO BUILT THE PYRAMID OF SKULL

      On this day, 1405 Taimur the Lame, the Mongol conqueror who built the Pyramid of skull all over Central Asia, is dead - laid low by disease during an expedition to conquer China. He was 68. Timur (called Tamerlane in Europe) carved out a vast Empire by the sword, stretching from Mongolia to India, from Baghdad to Egypt - although he was crippled in his youth and often had to be carried into a battle on a litter. Claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan, he conquered hi native Transoxiana (Uzbekistan) 35 years ago, and made Samarkand his capital. Then he attacked all his neighbors in turn. His terms were simple: surrender or death - and hesitation meant mass be headings. A brilliant technician, Timur routed the Golden Horde, conquered the Turks, Anatolians, Mamelukes, Arbas and Persians, and sacked Delhi, Damascus Baghdad. He filled Samarkand with looted art treasures -  for Taimur loved art, and was a philosopher who impressed the great minds of his time, even though he was illiterate. his four sons now inherit the empire.

PYRAMID OF GIZA HOUSES

BUILDING OF THE GREAT PYRAMID

        Khufu's monument is the only one of the seven Wonders of the Ancient world to survive today. built in 2575 B.C.E., it house of the tomb of king Khufu, who for twenty-three years had been King of  Upper ad Lower Egypt. Few records survive from his reign, but inscriptions suggest the campaigned both in Nubia to the south and Canaan to the north. Despite this paucity of information,  his reputation has endured for millennia. Khufu is remembered as a cruel ruler, determined to achieve two great goals: to ensure the survival of the dynasty beyond his son Khephren; and to ensure hi own immortality, through the building of the great Pyramid, the largest monument of the Ancient World. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus, writing some 2,000 years later, claimed Khufu forced his daughter to work as a prostitute to raise funds for his pyramid.
        The logistics of constructing such a massive object, 480 feet (146 m) and comprising some 2.3 million blocks of stone, in a relatively short period were astounding. Yet they were obviously overcome. The building simple design, unusual Egypt for not being covered with inscriptions or prayers, has fascinated observers for millennia. In recent years exploration of the structures narrow passageways using robot-mounted cameras has suggested that the Pyramid was aligned with the star Orion in order to allow the King's soul to travel to the stars.
         Beside the pyramid was a 141-foot-long (43 m) funeral boat in which the King was carried to his final resting place, and smaller tombs for members of his household - an unprecedented sight at the time.  

NELSON MANDELA WAS FREED TODAY AFTER 26 YEARS IN JAIL

NELSON MANDELA WAS FREED TODAY AFTER 26 YEARS IN JAIL

         On this day in 1990 Nelson Mandela was freed today after 26 years in jail for his opposition to South Africa's white racist regime. President E.W. de Klerk unconditionally revoked the 72 year old black leader's life sentence for treason and sabotage. Met at the prison by his wife Winnie and a crowd of supporters, Mandela set off to a jubilant crowd in front of Cape Town's city hall. His message was one of  ''peace, democracy and freedom'' - but he also endorsed the African National Congress's ''armed struggle''. In jail, he had refused offers of freedom in exchange of renouncing violence. Mandela, a lawyer, became an ANC leader in 1949, working under Noble peace  Prize-winner Albert Luthuli. The ANC, founded in 1912, was committed to peaceful resistance for 48 years, in spite of the brutal official response to black protest. But when white people massacred black protesters Sharpeville in 1960, Mandela started a sabotage campaign. In jail he become the symbol of freedom in the black struggle that has no forced de Klerk's government to renounce apartheid. 

DEATH OF SOCRATES, the famous Philosopher

SOCRATES IS FOUND GUILTY 

         The Athenians needed a scapegoat. Politically, the city's fortunes were at a low ebb in 399 B.C.E. after  a humiliating defeat, five years before, at the hands of its traditional enemy, Sparta. There was one man in Athens who had made himself a reputation for being awkward- the great Philosopher  Socrates. He liked to ask difficult and irritating questions; he mocked those in power and spent his time debating ideas with a band of devoted pupils. He was also known as an associate of some of Athens's discredited leaders. So Socrates was put on trial, charged with not believing in the gods and with corrupting the young men of Athens. Socrates 's famous pupil Plato left an account of his trial, in which he states that Socrates could have saved himself by paying a fine, but instead refuse to answer the charges against him, claiming he had done nothing wrong. He was found guilty and was sentenced to death by drinking poison hemlock, a toxic herb that paralyzes the nervous system. Still debating questions such as the immortality of the soul with the friends who had gathered around him, Socrates took the poison calmly from the executioner and drunk it in one swallow. Death followed quickly.
         Socrates was one of the most significant thinkers in the course of history and, with Plato and Aristotle, was largely responsible for founding Western philosophy. He was interested in the values that make people act as they do, yet left no writings of his own. Most of what we do know of his teachings comes from the Dialogues of Plato. 

THE PUMP,CIRCULATING THE BLOOD AROUND THE BODY

HARVEY'S DISCOVERY,the pump,circulating the blood around the body.

        We take the function of heart so much for granted that it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of William Harvey's discovery, published   in his work Exercitatio Anatomica Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animal ) , that it is a pump, circulating the blood around the body and back to the heart.
         Born in 1578 in Folkestone, Kent, Harvey had studied medicine at the University of Padua, reputed to have best Medical school in Europe (Italy was regarded as the center of anatomical study), Where he had sat at the feet of Hieronymus Fabricius (Girolamo Fabrici), the leading anatomist of the day. On returning to England in 1602, he married the  daughter of  a physician to the royal household, and it may have been through her family's influence that he obtained the post of physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London.
         Harvey's great passion was for anatomy. Determined to discover how blood passes through the heart, he dissected every kind of creature from earthworms and insect to animals, eventually arriving at a correct description of  the circulatory system. His book made him famous throughout Europe, although traditionalists, especially in France, ridiculed his findings, which contradicted the long established writings of Galen (c.129-216). A few years after Harvey's death in 1657, Marcello Malpighi was able to confirm with a microscope that he had correctly assumed the existence of capillaries, too small to be identified with the human eye, linking the arterial to the venous system. 

EARLY FORM OF DEMOCRACY

EARLY FORM OF DEMOCRACY

     The man who created the structure of the world's first and most influential democracy, Cleisthenes, spent a large part of his life fighting for the rights of his own prominent family against other  noble factions in Athens, which included several decades in enforced exile. Eventually he achieved power by siding with the common people and seeking to implement the spirit of the reforms of the lawgiver Solon, who had attempted to balance the interests of the different communities of the city.
      Clesthenes therefore abolished the traditional forms of political organization based on family and clan, replacing it with that of ten ''tribes'' based on villages or demes, and set up a legislative council (''bouble'') on which the member were chosen by lot from among the entire citizenry, with quotas of representatives of each deme among its 500 members, Thee was strict rules about who was eligible and how long they could serve on the council, and the law courts and the military command were organized in a similar manner. In doing so, Cleisthenes ensured that political participation was greatly widened and that it would be difficult for cliques to dominate the state and rule only in their own interests. The years of tyranny ere over.
        Although this is often seen as the beginning of direct democracy in which all citizens participated equally, Cleisthenes himself did not call this system democracy ( meaning ''rule by the people''), but rather isnomia, or equal rights for all. In many ways he left much of the traditional culture of Athens intact, but his reforms are seen as the begging of the golden age of Athens, during which democracy is grew and culture flourished.   

AFTER SPENDING FOUR YEARS ALONE ON A DESERT ISLAND

AFTER SPENDING FOUR YEARS ALONE ON A DESERT ISLAND 

      In 1709 a castaway sailor has been rescued after spending more than four years alone on a desert island. Alexander Selkrik could hardly speak English when Capt. Woodes Rogers found him on one of the uninhabited Juan Fernandez Island of coast of Chile in South America. He had survived with the aid of a musket, a hatchet, a knife  and a flint to strike a flame, improvising all his other needs. Selkrikt had been left on the Island after an argument with master of his buccaneer ship, the Cinque-Ports. As Captain Rogers described it in his ship's log today, the longboat brought on board ''a man cloth'd in goat-skins, who look'd wilder than the first owners of them. For the first eight month he had ado to bear up against melancholy and the terror of being left alone in such a desolate place''. Rogers has appointed him ship's mate. He plans to help Selkrik publish a report of solitary sojourn. The story could interest the London writer Daniel Defore, who has been exploring the use of real events as the basis for his tales of fiction.

INDIA'S FIRST NEWS PAPER

BENGAL GAZETTE

       In 1780 Hicky's Bengal Gazette was published today in Calcutta,India. It was established by the Irishman James Augustus Hicky and is the first major English newspaper published India. The English lawyer William Hickey, no relation to the aforementioned Irishman, commented on the newspaper and its creator, saying: "There never having been a press in Calcutta.... it occurred to Hicky that great benefit might arise from setting on foot a public newspaper, nothing of that kind ever having appeared... every person read it, and was delighted. Possessing a fund of low wit, his paper abounded with proof of that talent. He had also a happy knack at applying appropriate nicknames and relating satirical anecdotes.''

IMAGE WAS SENT TO A SMALL SCREEN

FLICKERING THREAT TO SMALL SCREEN

  In 1926 Members of the Royal Institution in London today peered at crude and flickering images of a ventriloquist's doll as electrical engineer and inventor John Logic Bird's unveiled his new ''television''  machine. Baird's home-made equipment successfully transmitted a radio signal from a camera that is partly mechanical and partly electrical. The resulting image was sent electrically to a small screen. Two years ago Baird was able to transmit the outline of shapes, and he has progressed from there. The Scottish inventor's far-fetched idea is that his device could one day provide every home with a substitute for the cinema.

BIRTH OF THE INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC OF INDIA

BIRTH OF THE INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC OF INDIA

1950 200 years of British rule has officially come to an end, with the birth of the independent republic of India. A public holiday was declared across the nation and millions of people flocked to the streets celebrating with processions and ceremonies to hoist the new flag of India for the first time. Though the Government of India has been handling its own affairs since 15 August 1947, today's ceremonies mark the severing of India's last ties with Britain. India's first president, Dr Rajendra Prasad, has been officially sworn in and the new Constitution of India has been ratified.

THE DEATH DAY OF BADSHAH SHAH JAHAN , The great Mughal Emperor

THE DEATH DAY OF BADSHAH SHAH JAHAN
         On this day in 1966 Shah Jahan, the mighty Mughal Emperor of India who built the Taj Mahal  as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, died today in the fort where his son, Aurangzeb, imprisoned him eight years ago. he was 74.
He is to be entombed in the Taj Mahal beside his wife. Aurangzeb had fought and killed his brothers to seize the throne, as Shah Jahan had done before him in 1628. Aurangzeb confined his father to his harem in the fort at Agra, from where the old man could gaze at the magnificent white marble mausoleum in which his empress lay. He was a direct descendant of both Genghis Khan and Timur. 

INDIA'S FIRST WOMAN PM

INDIA'S FIRST WOMAN PM
      In 1966 Today, Indira Gandhi become India's first woman Prime Minister. She follows in the footsteps of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was India's first Prime Minister . Mrs Gandhi, a widow, is not related to Mahatma Gandhi. She was sworn into power today following the sudden death last week of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri  as he was signing a peace pact with Pakistan. She has been president of the ruling National Congress Party since 1959. She follow's Sri Lanka's Mrs Srimavo Bandaranaike, who took office as the world's first woman Prime Minister in 1960.

ISLANDS IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN

ISLANDS IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN
     On this day in 1778 The English navigator James Cook has discovered a new group of islands in the Pacific Ocean on his 3rd voyage of discovery aboard his ship Resolution. The islands, inhabited by a powerful race of Polynesians, are called Hawaii in the local tongue, but Captain Cook today claimed the territory for the Crown and name them the Sandwich Islands.

      In his attempt to discover a northwest passage from Europe to the Orient from the Pacific side, Captain Cook sailed from the Cap of Good Hope in 1776 to meet the survey vessel Discovery; and then onward to the North American coast via the  Pacific. His plan is to force a passage through Bering Straits into the Arctic Ocean, and return to Europe this way. If no such passage exists, then the Resolution can return the way it came. Cook aims to use the newly-discovered islands as ports of call. However, the islands inhabitants have shown some animosity toward their first European visitors.

THE FAMOUS SIAMESE TWINS

CHANG & ENG, the famous Siamese twins. 

     In 1874 Chang & Eng, the famous Siamese twines, have died within three hours of each-other aged 62. They were joined at the hip, cheats, abdomen, and head, and even shared some organs. Chang & Eng mean ''left'' & ''right'' in Thailand, where they were born. Interestingly They married sisters and fathered 10 and 12 children respectively.

400 MISSIONS AGAINST 60 TARGETS IN IRAQ

BOMBS ON BAGHDAD
     1991 allied jets bombed Baghdad as war broke out early today. In spite of desperate last-minute peach efforts, the UN deadline for Iraq's Saddam Hussein to  withdraw his troop from Kuwait expired at midnight without an Iraqi response. The action started when US warship in the Gulf launched Cruise missiles at Iraqi targets. In the next four hours allied aircraft flew 400 missions against 60 targets in Iraq. UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar, President Mubarak of Egypt and King Fahad of Saudi Arabia all sent urgent appeals to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein yesterday. Perez de Cuellar promised that if the present crisis was averted concrete progress immediately be made on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian question, which Saddam consistently linked to his invasion of Kuwait. The appeals were fruitless.

BOMBING OF VIETNAM

NIXON HALTS US BOMBING OF VIETNAM
     1973 US President Nixon today ordered a halt to all bombing of Vietnam by American warplanes, less than a month after the massive US ''Christmas bombing'' raids hit North Vietnam's capital, Hanoi. This initiative comes as the Paris peace conference opens, with a cease-fire to end the conflict believed to be imminent. The Christmas bombing was planed by White House strategists as a means of forcing Viet Cong leaders to moderate their demands at the Paris negotiating table. Women and children were evacuated as Hanoi Hospital was hit by bombs, and 1600 civilians killed when more than 36,000 tons of bombs fell on the city over 12 days, leaving Hanoi a wasteland. In Washington a hostile congress had signaled its intention to limit Nixon's power to wage war if bombing continued.

A SAFE LANDING ON THE SURFACE OF AN OBJECT IN THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM.

SATURN IS WITHIN OUR REACH
      2005 Launched in October 1997, The Cassini-Huygens is a Flagship-Class NASA-ESA-ASI  robotic spacecraft sent on a mission to study Saturn. The name Huygens is derived from the Huygens atmospheric entry probe sent along with the spacecraft. It was supplied by the European Space Agency (ESA) and named after the dutch 17th century astronomer Christian Huygens. Today, the probe has successfully landed on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. It is the first probe to accomplish a safe landing on the surface of an object in the outer Solar System. In the meantime, the spacecraft has been studying Saturn and its many natural satellites since arriving at the planet in 2004. It has also been observing Jupiter, the heliosphere, and testing the theory of relativity. 

THE BIGGEST WRONG DECISION BY MUGHAL EMPEROR JAHANGIR

TRADERS FROM WEST
      On this day 11th January 1615 Mughal Emperor Jahangir has granted permission(farman) to the new traders, who call themselves The East India Company, to establish factories in Surat. in exchange for this permission, the Emperor is expecting an assortment of English products to be sent his way. These English traders come seeking a variety of Indian goods such as cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpeter and tea. Much conflict is expected from their Dutch and Portuguese counterparts, not to forget the French who seem to have established a strong foothold in India. But are they strong enough enough to hold their ground? Only time will tell.