My Science School

Today’s neckties are the direct descendants of the neck cloths worn by the Croatian troops in the army of the French king Louis XIV (1638-1715). The French called the neck cloth by the same name they called the Croat: Cravate. In English it became the cravat, ancestor of the modern tie.

          In the mid 1660s men of fashion began to adopt the cravat as a replacement for the large linen collars which were then customary. At first the chosen style consisted of linen strips tied at the throat in a bow with cravat strings which were sometimes coloured ribbons. Later the neck cloth was looped at the throat. By the turn of the century it had become wider with tasseled or lace-bordered ends.

       Towards the middle of the 18th century a twist of fashion decreed a stiff, folded neckband called the stock, which fastened at the back of the neck and became higher round the throat as the century progressed. Soon after 1800 the collar of the shirt began to appear above the stock and the neckband was worn almost to the ears.

     As collars rose still higher, the folded stocks gave place to ties. These were sometimes very large, but smaller bow ties with the stocks were quite common. The frilled shirt gave way fast to the plain shirt front visible above the waistcoat. About the year 1840 men about town resorted to turning their collars down.

Royal or real tennis is the distant ancestor of lawn tennis, the game which is now played all over the world.

     The old game of Royal tennis was popular with the kings of both England and France in the 16th and 17th Centuries. It is mentioned in Shakespeare’s play Henry V. when the French Dauphin sent a contemptuous gift of tennis balls to the English king. A famous tennis court at Hampton Court Palace, near London, was built for Henry VIII in 1530. But the earliest known rules date from 1599, and those used today were drawn up in 1878.

     The game, which can be even more strenuous than lawn tennis, is played by two or four players, with a ball made of tightly bound cloth strips and rackets made of ash wood. About 27 inches long and weighting 15-17 ounces. The enclosed walled court is usually 96 feet long and 30 feet wide, with gallerious and openings which form the scoring points. Scoring is generally similar to lawn tennis, but usually the best of 11 games is played.

 

The first solo flight across the Atlantic was made on May 20-21, 1927, by an American, Charles Lindbergh. He flew from New York to Paris in an aircraft called spirit of t Louis after the city where the machine was made.

      The flight, which took 33.5 hour, gained Lindbergh world. Wide fame and a prize of 25,000 dollar offered by a man called Raymond Orteig to fly non-top from New York to Paris. He later made an air tour of the United States, visiting every state and 78 cities.

The Salvation Army was founded by William Booth (1829-1912) on military lines in the East End of London, to wage war on in, and to help the poor and desperate. It has since become established in more than 70 countries.

       General Booth, as he was to become known, was born of poor parents in Nottingham and was still a child when he determined to help the “down and out”. He joined the Methodists and was ordained a minister, spending his free time as a wandering preacher. In 1855 he married Catherine Mumford who assisted him in his mission, and also bore him eight children. In 1865 he left the Methodists to form his “army” in the East end of London. At first his movement was known as the Christian mission, but in 1878 it was named the Salvation Army and modeled on military lines. Its head is known as general, its officers have military ranks and its other members are soldiers. The importance of obedience is stressed, and campaigns are fought all over the world.

        William Booth used rousing hymn tunes, banners, trumpets and drums in his battle to lure the poor from the gin palaces. At first the army met persecution in some districts, but it defeated the opposition and flourished, founding hospitals, homes and other institutions, and campaigning in the very worst slums, which others would not enter.

        The “Sally army” believes that God will forgive anyone who is truly sorry for his wrongdoings. It shares the general beliefs of the Protestant church, but has no sacraments because it regards the whole of life as a sacrament. Its work and care for the poor has made it loved and respected throughout the world, for it believes that a hungry, homeless person is more likely to become a good Christian if first given help, food and shelter.

The term impressionist is used to describe a new and revolutionary movement in painting which was developed in Paris in the 1870s. The word was first used derisively by critics of the movement, and was taken from Claude Monet’s canvas representing the sun rising over the sea and entitled impression. Monet was a central figure in the development of the impressionist movement, along with Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cezanne, Guillaumin and Berthe Morisot.

    What these painters tried to do was to get away from the romanticism and the fetters of the accepted artistic convention. Experiments were made with the use of the pure colours of the prism and the splitting up of “tone” into its component colours.

      The impressionists painted outdoor modern life and chose as their subjects Paris and urban scenes, the coasts of the English Channel and the North Sea, and the little village resorts along the banks of the seine and Oise which had been made accessible by railway. They aimed to convey the changing rhythm of light.

 

In ancient legends about the Norsemen, Valhalla was the place where all the brave warriors went when they died.

     The kind of man they most admired was one who had great courage and a spirit of adventure. The warriors who went to Valhalla were supposed to lead a very happy life, eating boar’s meat daily and amusing themselves by fighting each other. They were supposed to live in Valhalla till Doomsday, led by Odin, father of the gods, they would march out of the 640 doors of the palace to fight against the giants.

 

               The flag used at the Olympic Games has a white background with five interlaced circles representing the five inhabited continents: Africa, America, Asia, Australasia and Europe. Each symbol has a different colour: red, yellow, green, black and blue. But the colours are merely decorative and in no way represent particular continents.

“Cutting the Gordian Knot” is an expression describing the solution of a problem by quick, decisive action.

    In ancient Greek mythology, the Gordian knot was devised by Gordius, king of Phrygia, and the ruins of whose capital lie near Ankara in Turkey. He had bound his chariot yoke so tightly and with such intricacy that it was impossible to loosen. An oracle foretold that he who could unite the knot would go on to conquer Asia.

   When the Greek king Alexander the great (356-323 B.C.), one of the supreme soldiers and states-men of history, invaded Asia Minor in 334 B.C , with the object  of defeating the Persians, he came to the ancient capital of Gordium. According to the story, king Gordius’s chariot still stood with the knot unbroken.

    Alexander is said to have resolved the problem in characteristic fashion by drawing his sword and cutting through the Knot at a stroke! The conqueror went on to bring the empire of the Persians, 50 times larger than Greece, under his dominion.

Golfers clubs can be divided into four basic classes: drivers, irons, spoons and putters. All four are shaped for different purposes and are used according to the ground the golfer is playing on and the shot he intends to make.

       Wooden drivers are used for the first stroke from the tee. Spoons are designed chiefly to get a ball out of a rut. Various irons are selected for the approach to the green, where the putter is brought into play for the final shots.

      Usually a good player’s set will include seven to ten irons and three to four wood clubs. The different clubs are known by both number and name. Wood clubs are numbered one to five the fifth sometimes replacing an iron and iron from one to ten. No more than 14 clubs should be carried by a player during a round.

You would use a rouble in the Soviet Union, a Yen in Japan, a rupee in India and Pakistan, a drachma in Greece, and a guilder in Holland. They are all units of the monitory systems of those countries.

     The rouble, which is divided into 100Kopeks, was the name for silver bar money which was in use in Russia from the 14th to the 17th century. Peter the great set up the modern system of coins, and the silver bar money was abolished.

     The Yen was originally a gold coin, but was changed to silver. A one Yen coin is now made of aluminum and the five and ten yen pieces are made of nickel.

    The word rupee means “silver coin”. It came into use in 1542 when the Sultan of Delhi, Sher Sha, reorganized the currency. It was kept as a monitor unit and is now divided into 100 noye paise (new paisas). Large amounts of rupee have special names: a lakh is 100,000 and a crore is ten million rupees.

    The drachma, in Ancient Greece was a silver coin and also a measure of weight. There were 100 drachmae to one mina which weighted about one pound. The modern drachma is divided into 100 lepta.

        The guilder, which is the currency of the Netherlands and its overseas territories, is divided into 100%. This unit of currency spread to Northern Europe from Florence in Italy and is also used under the name of florin

An Aztec was an Indian who lived on the plains of Mexico from the 11th century to the beginning of the 16th. The Aztec civilization was one of the most magnificent in the whole of Central American history, although it was not created by the Aztecs themselves. They simply took over and organized what others had already created. They spoke a language called Nahua, which is still used by over a million Mexicans today, although Spanish is their official tongue.

      In 1324 the Aztecs settled in an Island village called Tenochtitlan, which later grew up into a large town. Mexico City is built on the same spot.

     The Aztecs constructed many beautiful palaces and pyramid shaped temple for the worship of their numerous gods, to whom they offered human sacrifice. They also developed a surprising knowledge of mathematics and astronomy.

     The days of their greatest glory were also their last. In 1519 Hernando Cortez, a Spanish explorer landed in Mexico, marched to Tenochtitlan and took the Aztec king Montezuma prisoner two years later he finally defeated the Aztecs and destroyed their city.

      Fortunately, not everything belonging to the Aztec civilization has disappeared. It is possible to find many example of their culture in Mexico today. Apart from ornaments and trinkets, there are many well preserved architectural remains- sacrificial platforms, temples, and a remarkable calendar stone

The neighborhood of Dedham, in Essex, and Flat ford, in Suffolk, England is often spoken of as “constable country” because it provided so many subjects for the brush of John Constable (1776-1837), the English landscape painter.

    It has been said that constable was the first artist to discover that trees were green. What this really means is that, in the days when constable began to paint, it was fashionable to represent trees and fields in pictures in a dull brown colour which was considered “harmonious” and, also to redesign the landscape to make it more majestic or romantic.

    Constable had no use for such notions. He depicted the beauty of the English scene, with its changing seasons, as he saw it. So it was a long time before he was recognized as a great painter. When he tried to reproduce the effect of shimmering light on trees the critic talked contemptuously of “constable’s snow”. They thought his use of green vulgar and showy.

     However, in 1824 three of his landscapes which he sent for exhibition at the Paris salon were awarded a gold medal and had considerable influence

The word sterling refers to metals and coins of a standard value. It is also used, as in “pounds sterling”, to distinguish British pounds from other currencies.

        Sterling is said to be derived from the Easter lings, which were German coiners and were brought to England by King Henry II to improve the quality of the money. Another suggestion is that the word comes from the star with which some early Norman coins were stamped.

    In 1300 king Edward I ordered that all silver worked by silver- smiths should be of the same purity as the silver coins. This purity was called the sterling standard. It was introduced to prevent silversmiths from debasing silver with cheap metal. Sterling silver contains 92.5% silver. The other 7.5% is usually copper and is used for hardening.

    When fixing this standard Edward also instituted a system called hallmarking. This meant that every single piece of silver worked by the smiths had to be tested or assayed at the Goldsmiths’ Hall. If the article passed the test, it was then stamped with a leopard’s head. (A crown was later used for gold.) In 1544 the mark for English silver was changed to a walking lion, or lion passant. This is still used to stamp silver in London.

Valves in a trumpet enable the player to lower, momentarily, the pitch of the note he wishes to make. What happens when one of the valves is pushed down is that the air is diverted through a small loop of tube thus lowering the pitch or sound of the instrument.

       When the first valve is pressed usually by the first finger, the pitch of the trumpet will be lowered by a whole tone. The second valve, according to the same principle, lowers the sound by a semitone, and the third lowers it by a minor third.

        Nearly all trumpets and brass instruments today are made with valves. The mechanism as invented in 1815 by two Germans. Today most valves are of the piston type with springs to return the valves to their original position.

      The history of trumpets dates back to 1500 B.C in Egypt. But until the beginning of the 19th century all the variations produced by valves had to be made by the player controlling his breath.

 

 

From the earliest times mistletoe was regarded as a bestower of life and fertility. The common mistletoe is one of the most “magical” plants of European folklore.

      The mistletoe of the sacred oak was especially venerated by the ancient Celtic Druids. The Druid rite of plucking the mistletoe, described by Julius Caesar, adds an aura of mystery to the magical folklore surrounding the plant.

   Decorating the house with mistletoe may be a survival of the old Druid oak cult. The custom is also associated with certain primitive marriage rites.