The TITANIC - The Most Famous Ship in History

What kind of ship was the Titanic? What caused it to sink? A visit to the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, near Belfast in Northern Ireland, helps to provide answers to those questions.

The Titanic - Why Special?

According to Michael McCaughan, former curator of the Folk and Transport Museum, the Titanic is "the most famous ship in history". But the Titanic was not unique. It was the second of three huge vessels constructed in the shipbuilding yards of Harland andWolff in Belfast. The Titanic was one of the largest ships of its day, measuring 882.8 feet in length and 92.5 feet in width.

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The Early History of Balloon Flight

Joseph Michel and Jacques Étienne Montgolfier, sons of a wealthy paper manufacturer of Annonay, France, are honored in history for building and launching the first hot-air balloon. Their initial experiments during the early 1780’s involved paper balloons, which they believed were made to rise because of the smoke from burning straw and wool. Before long, they realized that it was the heated air that created the lift.

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Prehistoric Superglue

Scientists working in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, have discovered a superglue dating back thousands of years. “The glue . . . is just as good as the stuff found in hardware stores today,” says The Star, a Johannesburg
newspaper. It is believed that ancient hunters used the glue to attach arrowheads or spear points to their shafts. Scientists’ attempts to replicate the ancient formula—with red ocher, animal fat, acacia gum, and sand—and to get the temperature control just right to dry the adhesive next to a fire, gave the scientists “new respect” for the people who used it.

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A Penchant for Pizza

KING Ferdinand I (1751–1825) is said to have disguised himself as a commoner and, in clandestine fashion, visited a poor neighborhood in Naples. Why the secrecy? One story has it that he wanted to sink his teeth into a food that the queen had banned from the royal court—pizza.

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Timepiece - The Science Behind the Machine

Horology—the science that involves the making of machines that indicate time—is among the oldest of the scientific crafts. The “heart” of these machines is the escapement. This regulates the rate at which the power driving the machine is released. When this power is allowed to escape only in small amounts and at regular intervals, periods of time can be measured. No one knows exactly when the first all-mechanical clock was invented, but a milestone was reached about the year 1500, when portable timepieces were first made.

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The World’s First Photographer

French physicist Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce possibly started his quest to make permanent photos as early as 1816. But his real breakthrough came when he was experimenting with lithography and came across a light-sensitive substance called bitumen of Judaea. Sometime in the mid-1820’s, he put a bitumen-coated pewter plate in a camera obscura facing a window of his estate and exposed it for eight hours. Not even the most inexperienced of today’s amateur photographers would be proud of the blurry picture of a building, a tree, and a barn that resulted, but Niepce had reason to be. His picture was most likely the first permanent photograph ever taken!

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Long Lived Whale

When indigenous Alaskan hunters killed a bowhead whale in 2007, they found lodged in it the point and fragments of an old harpoon. These were identified as “parts of an exploding lance made in New Bedford [Massachusetts, U.S.A.] in the late 1800s,” says The Boston Globe.

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The Amazon Once Hosted Urban Civilization

Vast areas of southern amazonia believed to be virgin forests may once have hosted urban communities "surrounded by large walls." This conclusion was reached by anthropologists working in Mato Grosso, Brazil.

There they discovered "networks of walled towns and smaller villages" overgrown by tropical forest and coverling an area of perhaps 11,600 square miles [30,000 sq km]. Some of the towns occupied 150 acres [60 ha].

A report by the University of Florida, whose anthropologists made the discovery, says that the settlements "date from around 1250 to 1650, when European colonists and the diseases they brought likely killed most of their inhabitants."

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