My Science School

When Napoleon, Emperor of the French, created his marshals in 1804, one of the men he chose was Michel Ney. During the Revolutionary Wars, Ney earned such a reputation for gallantry that he was dubbed the Bravest of the Brave.

As marshal, Ney distinguished himself at the crucial battles of Eylau and Jena and was sent on a diplomatic mission to Switzerland. In 1808 he led French troops into Spain where he served for four years. On his return Ney followed his emperor to Russia. During the terrible retreat from Moscow, Ney commanded the rearguard. He did this so well that he personally led many French men to freedom who would otherwise have been taken prisoner or perished. He stood by Napoleon until the Emperor abdicated in 1814 and then made his peace with the reinstated King of France.

When Napoleon escaped in 1815, Ney joined him at once. He fought bravely through the campaigns which followed. At the Battle of Waterloo he led a tremendous charge of cavalry at the British centre. Despite his undoubted bravery, Ney failed. He was arrested and shot for his part in the campaign by the returning king.

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In 1971 a film launched a new star on to the movie screens of the world. In just four films, including Fists of Fury and Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee established himself as the leader of a growing interest in Oriental martial arts. Lee had played in domestic Hong Kong films since he was a boy but had attracted little notice elsewhere. Lee himself was a skilful Karate fighter who developed his own style. This expertise was used to the full in his films, together with Lee's incredible fitness. When Lee dropped dead just one year later, martial arts films had lost their leader and rapidly faded. Lee was a remarkable, if short-lived, figure in the film world.

Lee had difficulty finding acting jobs after the cancellation of The Green Hornet, and he began supplementing his income by giving private jeet kune do lessons to Hollywood stars, including Steve McQueen. In the 1969 film Marlowe, Lee received notice for a scene in which he destroyed an entire office through kickboxing and karate moves. Troubled by his inability to find other suitable roles, however, he moved back to Hong Kong in 1971. There Lee starred in two films that broke box-office records throughout Asia, and he later found success in the United States with Tang shan da xiong (1971; Fists of Fury [U.S.], or The Big Boss [Hong Kong English title]) and Jing wu men (1972; The Chinese Connection [U.S.], or Fist of Fury [Hong Kong English title]).

Lee used his sudden box-office clout to form his own production company, and he coproduced, directed, wrote, and starred in his next film, Meng long guo jiang (1972; Return of the Dragon [U.S.], or The Way of the Dragon [Hong Kong English title]). Lee’s following film, Enter the Dragon (1973), was the first joint venture between Hong Kong- and U.S.-based production companies, and it became a worldwide hit, thrusting Lee into international movie stardom. Tragically, he died six days before the film’s Hong Kong release. The mysterious circumstances of his death were a source of speculation for fans and historians, but the cause of death was officially listed as swelling of the brain caused by an allergic reaction to a headache medication. At the time, Lee had been working on a film called Game of Death, which was pieced together with stand-ins and cardboard cutouts of Lee’s face and was released in 1978.

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With a string of successful films behind him, all of them huge box office hits, Paul Newman has become so popular that few others can approach his fame.

He was born in Ohio in 1925 and though he worked in TV and theatre, he did not appear on film until 1954. In his films made in the 1950s, Newman established his screen personality as a charming loner. In films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Towering Inferno, he played characters who disagree with those in authority. Newman manages to combine success with privacy in a way other actors do not, and seems set to continue his popularity well into the future.

In 1953 Newman made his Broadway debut in William Inge’s Picnic. While working on the production, he met Joanne Woodward, an understudy. The two married in 1958 and became one of Hollywood’s most enduring couples. Newman’s performance in Picnic led to a film contract with Warner Brothers, and in 1954 he made his first feature, the widely panned The Silver Chalice, which the actor claimed was the worst movie made in the 1950s. Despite his inauspicious film debut, Newman was earning positive reviews for his work in live television dramas, notably Our Town (1955) and Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), which aired on Producers’ Showcase and The United States Steel Hour, respectively. In addition, he continued to act on the stage.

Classically handsome—with piercing blue eyes—and possessing a natural magnetism, Newman was soon offered another screen role. In 1956 he starred in Robert Wise’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, and his impressive portrayal of boxer Rocky Graziano secured his future in films. A string of acclaimed performances in notable dramas soon followed. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) was a highly praised adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play that also starred Elizabeth Taylor and Burl Ives; for his performance as a self-destructive former football player who is at odds with his father, Newman earned his first Academy Award nomination. The Long, Hot Summer (1958), which was based on short stories by William Faulkner, was the first of 10 feature films in which he would costar with Woodward. The drama centres on a drifter who becomes entangled with a wealthy family. In the biopic The Left Handed Gun (1958), Newman appeared as Billy the Kid. He closed out the decade with the melodrama The Young Philadelphians (1959), in which he played a manipulative attorney.

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It is always difficult for child prodigies to carry their fame and ability into adulthood. Most fade from public view. Elizabeth Taylor, on the other hand, has become even more famous as an adult actress than she was as a child star.

Born in London in 1932, she played in her first Hollywood film ten years later. Her most famous film as a child was National Velvet, still popular today. By the early 1950s she had started to play roles as attractive young women and she was recognised as a great screen actress. In 1960, she won the title role in the multi-million dollar epic Cleopatra. Elizabeth Taylor has since gone on to star in several more successful films.

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Mickey Mouse is probably the best known cartoon character of all time. His manic adventures, which spread over 130 films, have brought him fame and popularity all over the world.

Mickey was created in 1928 by a young American artist, Walter Elias Disney, who had been working in cartoons for some years. He thought up the idea of a cartoon mouse that he wanted to call Mortimer. His wife persuaded him to change the name to Mickey Mouse. The first film to star Mickey was Steamboat Willie, the first sound cartoon. It was this character which established the fortunes of his creator, Walt Disney.

Disney, born in Chicago in 1901, showed his imaginative flair early in life. When Mickey was created, Disney was working in a converted garage. Soon he had to take on staff and expand into a massive studio just to keep pace with the success of his characters. Today, long after the death of Walt Disney himself, the studios he began continue to produce loveable and popular cartoons.

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Montezuma was an emperor of the 16th Century ruling over the Aztec empire from one of the greatest capitals in the world at that time Tenochtitlan in what is now Mexico"

It was like an enchantment... on account of the great towers and temples rising from the water... things never heard of, nor seen, nor even dreamed." So wrote the Spanish chronicler Bernal Diaz of the city of some 200,000 people. Montezuma's capital was on an island in Lake Texcoco which had been enlarged by a system of drainage canals, and was joined to the shore by causeways.

Across these causeways Hernan Cortes in 1519 led a force of 400 Spaniards, to be greeted by Montezuma as a god. The Spaniards were shown over the shrine-topped pyramids where human sacrifices were made to the Aztecs' stern war god, Huitzilopochtli.

"The figure...had a very broad face and monstrous and terrible eyes, and the whole of his body was covered with precious stones, and gold and pearls... There were some braziers and in them were burning the hearts of three Indians they had sacrificed that day." Diaz wrote, describing the scene he witnessed with Cortes. The Aztecs held the Spaniards in awe, but suspicion took over and they realized that Cortes was no god. In this atmosphere, Cortes took Montezuma as a hostage. Hostilities flared, and Montezuma was injured and died.

In the Noche Triste or Night of Sadness which followed, the Spaniards were all but annihilated by the Aztecs. Cortes and some of his men escaped. A year later they captured Tenochtitlan and razed it to the ground. The Spaniards built a town upon the ruins. It is still the capital of a nation-Mexico City.

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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869_1948) was a great Indian political leader who played a major part in his country's struggle to win independence from Britain. The title Mahatma, or Great Soul, was given to him by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1915.

In 1893 Gandhi went to South Africa as a lawyer and championed the cause of the Indian community there against discrimination. It was while he was in South Africa that he was converted to a strict personal regime of self denial, called brahmacharya, which was closely interwoven with his creed of nonviolent resistance, which he named satyagraha, or truth force.

Gandhi returned to India in 1914 and soon became the recognized leader of the Indian National Congress in its struggle to establish an independent republic. Although he attacked the British Government, Gandhi asserted that he respected the British people. In their turn most Britons admired Gandhi-even when they did not understand him.

He adopted the loincloth as his dress and toured the country promoting the spinning wheel as a means of freeing India from dependence on Lancashire cotton mills. In 1922 he was imprisoned for two years for sedition as the leader of a mass campaign of civil disobedience.

Gandhi published newspapers and pamphlets, identified himself with the Untouchables (low-caste Hindus), whom he called Children of God, and introduced a system of hygiene and first aid in remote villages. Millions of followers of all classes I called him Bapu, meaning Father. But his efforts to bring Muslims and Hindus together did not meet with great success.

Finding progress towards self government too slow, Gandhi increased his harassment of the British authorities. He was frequently sent to prison, for the last time in 1942 when he declared that the Allies could expect support only from a "free India".

After the Second World War, Gandhi agreed to the formation of the separate Muslim state of Pakistan as a condition of independence. When riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims, Gandhi entered on his fourteenth fast, which he swore he would maintain until death or the end of the bloodshed. For a time he was successful in halting the fighting. But on January 30, 1948, shortly after the end of his fast, he was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic on his way to conduct a prayer meeting.

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Adolf Hitler was able to seize power in Germany because the economic slump of 1929 gave him the opportunity to gain the support of the magnates of business and industry, and also of the lower middle class and of the unemployed to the business men he promised a strong right-wing government; to the lower classes he gave faith and hope, proclaiming that Germany would triumph over her suffering and reassert her natural greatness.

Hitler was born at Braunau, Austria in 1889, but he resented the Austro-Hungarian government and fought for Germany in the First World War. In 1920 he joined and soon became leader of a new party, the National Socialist German Workingmen's Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei) later to be abbreviated to "Nazi". In 1923 he was sent to prison as a revolutionary and wrote Mein Kampf (My Fight). He-believed that inequality between races was inevitable and that the Aryan race must dominate He determined that Germany should rule the world and expressed his fanatical hatred of all Jews.

On leaving prison in 1924 Hitler skillfully built up the Nazi strength. At the 1930 election it become the second largest party in the country with more than 6,000,.000 votes. By 1933 so many Nazis had been elected to Parliament that the President of the German Republic, Field Marshal Hindenburg, was persuaded that the country could no longer be governed without their leader's help. Hitler was invited to join the government and soon became Chancellor. Once in power he proceeded to establish an absolute dictatorship. In March 1933 a Bill giving him full powers was passed in the Reichstag by the combined votes of Nazi, Nationalist and Centre Party deputies. Hitler took control of the police and established special Nazi forces, the S.A. and the S.S. when Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, the offices of Chancellor and President were merged, and Hitler became an undisputed dictator.

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Paul Revere (1735-1818) is famous for his ride on horseback during the American Revolution to warn Massachusetts colonists of the approach of British troops.

Paul Revere's father, a Huguenot refugee, who had settled in Boston, Massachusetts, taught his son the art of silversmithing. Revere became a great artist in silver but, in his need to support his family he also sold spectacles, replaced missing teeth and made surgical instruments.

He was a fervent patriot, cut many copper plates for anti-British propaganda and was a leader of the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when a group of citizens disguised as Indians threw a cargo of tea into the sea as a protest against the British tax on it.

In 1775, when the American Revolution broke out, Revere constructed a powder mill to supply the colonial troops. He enlisted in the army and in 1776 was a lieutenant-colonel, in command of Castle William, at Boston.

But his most famous exploit took place the year before when, as principal express rider for Boston's Committee of Safety, he warned Middlesex County, on April, 18, that British troops were leaving Boston to seize military stores at Lexington and Concord. His exploit has been immortalized in the poem Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1820).

After the colonist's victory, Revere set up a rolling mill for the manufacture of sheet copper in Massachusetts, and became rich.

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The great British naval hero Horatio Nelson, who defeated the French at Trafalgar in 1805 in one of the most memorable of all sea battles, was born at Burnham Thrope in Norfolk, England. His father was rector of that parish Horatio's mother (nee Suckling) was related to Sir Robert Walpole the British statesman and Prime Minister.

Nelson's uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling, who later became Comptroller of the Navy, gave Horatio his first taste of the sea. Horatio, who was educated in his home county of Norfolk by the North Sea, was entered in the ship Raisonnable by Captain Suckling in 1770 when there was an alarm of war with Spain. But the dispute with Spain was quickly settled, and Nelson was packed off in a merchant vessel to the West Indies to gain experience.

This was the beginning of a hard apprenticeship during which time Nelson visited such remote areas as the Arctic and the East Indies.

Five years after his first appointment at sea Nelson fell ill and was invalided home. It was not until two years later, having just passed his examination as lieutenant, that his remarkable career began in earnest.

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Robert Clive (1725-74) was the founder of Britain's Indian Empire. Yet at school he was idle, unruly and turbulent and became the ringleader of a gang of youths who terrorized his native town of Market Drayton, shropshire.

Both Market, Drayton and the Clive family must have been relieved when, at the age of 18, he left England to become a clerk with the British East India Company in Madras. At first he was so depressed by his new environment that he twice tried to shoot himself, but his opportunity for greatness came with the outbreak of war between the French and the British for supremacy in India. In 1751, when the tide was running against the British, Clive led a few hundred English and Indian troops to seize the great fort at Arcot the capital of one of France's Indian allies. For 53 days his small force held the fort against repeated assaults until the besiegers were forced to retreat, leaving the district to be ruled by an Indian who favoured the British. Clive followed up this success with further victories which led to settlement in south India in Britain's favour in 1752.

He returned to England in 1753 with a large fortune, but soon spent it and went back to India as Governor of Fort David. He was sent north to re-establish British power and defeated the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, at the great Battle of Plassey in 1757, replacing him with Mirjaffir, who was sympathetic to the British. Clive accepted a gift of £200,000 from the new ruler and when Mir Jaffir died was left lands with annual revenue of £30,000.

He sailed for England in 1760 but five years later returned as Governor of Bengal and tried to curb the corruption which was rife in India and to which he himself had contributed in earlier days. In 1767 he left India for the last time.

At home he was cross-examined about his great wealth by a strongly critical parliamentary committee which found him guilty of fraud and greed. Because of his services he was not prosecuted. But the pitter attacks on him, together with the strain of his life in India, so affected his mind and health that he committed suicide in 1774.

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The first Dalai Lama, head of an order of Buddhist Monks in Tibet, lived in the Tashilhunpo monastery, which he founded. He died in 1474, and was called Dge-'dungrub-pa.

Since then, there have been many Dalai Lamas. Most of them have had both political and religious power. The fifth Dalai Lama moved his residence to Lhasa, where he had an enormous palace built, called the Potala. From there Tibet was governed by him and his descendants.

In 1959, the Dalai Lama had to flee to India, because he was thrown out of Tibet by the Chinese Communists.

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Grandma Mosses (1860-1961) became famous as a painter when she held her first exhibition at the age of 78. She was then "discovered" by collector, Louis J. Calder, and became internationally known as a modern" primitive: a self-taught naïve painter.

Anna Mary Robertson was born in Greenwich, New York, of Scottish-Irish descent. At the age of 58 she decided to start painting and chose scenes from her childhood, which she presented in bright, uncomplicated colours and peopled with her memories.

In 1940, when she was 80, she had her first solo exhibition in New York and nine years later was received at the White House by President Truman. In 1960 Governor Rockefeller proclaimed her birthday, September 7, as Grandma Moses Day in New York State.

Her works were reproduced don Christmas cards, calendars and birthday cards and became immensely popular because of their simplicity and directness and the faithfullness and love with which they recorded humble scenes now vanished from the American way of life.

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Kublai Khan (1216-940) was the greatest, most intelligent and most cultured of the great Mongol leaders of Asia. He became ruler over more people than had ever before acknowledged allegiance to one man.

Kublai was the grandson of Genghis Khan, the great Mongol conqueror who founded a vast empire as the leader of a horde of fierce nomadic horsemen. As a child, he formed an ambition to complete the conquest of China, started, by his ancestors. This he achieved in 1279, establishing himself at Cambaluc (modern Peking), assuming the title of Emperor and founding the Yuan dynasty, which ruled China until 1368.

In his efforts to expand the empire of the Great Khan, Kublai owed much of his success to the great generalship of Bayan, his commander-in chief. Bayan was described as "the hundred-eyed" because of his ability to see every aspect of a situation before drawing up and executing his military plans. Kublai also hoped to conquer Japan, but the Mongols, though wonderful troops on horseback, were bad sailors and the attempted invasion ended in disaster. Nevertheless, his dominions stretched across Asia from the Arctic Ocean to the Malay Peninsula and from Korea to Asia Minor and the border of Hungary.

Kublai Khan adopted the Chinese way of life and made Buddhism the state religion. Throughout his lands the barriers came down and the highways were opened to the spread of commerce and knowledge between East and West. His fame attracted scholars, merchants, adventurers and envoys from many countries to the Chinese capital. Among them was the Venetian traveller Marco Polo who spent 17 years in the service of the Khan, and whose book describing the splendours of Kublai's court fired the imagination of much later explores and led eventually to the discovery of America.

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Charles Best was an American-Canadian scientist, who co-discovered insulin, a critical milestone in the treatment of diabetes. Charles Best also discovered the vitamin choline and the enzyme histaminase. He was among the first to introduce anticoagulants in the treatment of blood clots.

Best was born in Maine, the U.S., in 1899. He grew up in Pembroke before joining the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, to study medicine in 1915, but his studies were interrupted by the onset of the First World War. He served as an infantry soldier and later as an acting Sergeant Major in the Canadian Army. He returned to Toronto in 1921 to continue his studies. He was a professional basketball player and used his remuneration from sports to pay his academic fees.

While still an undergraduate, Best became an assistant to Frederick Banting, who was experimenting on pancreatic secretions. By then, it had been established that diabetes involved problems with the pancreas. JJ.R. Macleod, professor of physiology at the University of Toronto, was overseeing the work of Banting and Best. The biochemist James Collip was added to the team later. In 1921, the team succeeded in obtaining the pancreatic extract of insulin in a form that controlled diabetes in dogs, thus paving the way for its trial and usage in human patients. In 1922, the team successfully injected Leonard Thompson, a 14 year-old boy with insulin. He was critical due to diabetes and the injection helped save his life. Banting. Best and Collip shared the patent for insulin, which they sold to the University of Toronto for $1 each.

In 1923, the Nobel Prize Committee honoured Banting and Macleod with the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of insulin, ignoring Best and Collip. But Banting shared half his prize money with Best, while Macleod did so with Collip. Best continued as research associate in the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, which was created at the university in 1923.

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