History
Short articles about history, one idea in each.
- Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the Great PyramidPyramids and Cleopatra share one picture of ancient Egypt in our heads. Do the sums and the Great Pyramid was already about 2,500 years old when she was born.
- 1816 had no summer because a volcano erupted the year beforeIn June 1816, snow fell in New England and Europe's harvests failed. The cause was an eruption on an Indonesian island a year earlier, on the other side of the world.
- Napoleon was not short: he was measured in French inchesThe legend of a tiny emperor comes from an old French unit of length, a crowd of very tall guardsmen, and British cartoonists who drew him the size of a child.
- The summer the Thames stank so badly that Parliament built sewersIn the hot June of 1858, the smell of London's river drove MPs out of their committee rooms. Within seven weeks they had passed the law that gave the city the sewers it still uses.
- Britain's clocks were set to London by the railwaysUntil the 1840s, each British town kept its own time by the sun. Train timetables made that impossible to live with, and the law followed decades later.
- Why the British tax year starts on 6 AprilIt looks like an odd day to start a year. It is the old new year, moved twice: once by a calendar change, once by a leap day the Treasury would not give up.
- Why the week has seven daysDays and years come from the sky. The week doesn't, quite. How a number from Babylon, Jerusalem and Roman astrologers ended up on every calendar.