Mechanical Turk – a chess machine that could beat anyone
Have you heard of the Mechanical Turk? I do not mean the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace, this is not the same. The Mechanical Turk was a creation of Wolfgang von Kempelen. How did it happen? In 1769 when the French illusionist François Pelletier was invited to perform in Vienna at the court […]
The Dutch create a lake
In 1932 the Dutch completed what they call The Afsluitdijk, which is Dutch for “shut off dike”. It stretched across the top of the Zuiderzee and created a large lake and as several rivers were flowing into it, it soon became a freshwater one. It was completed 89 years ago, even though the project had […]
A village, an independent republic!
Perloja – The Village that Became a Republic We have been filled with stories of great empires and powerful nations, but sometimes, the more interesting stories come from the smallest and most unlikely of places. This is the story of Perloja, a tiny village in Northern Europe that, would you believe, against all odds, declared […]
The ‘dancing plague’
Today we dance for fun, we can dance all night, and we think nothing of it, but in the 14th century they thought it was a disease! They called it the “Dancing Plague”. Between the 14th and 17th centuries in European towns people would suddenly start dancing erratically, then others joined them, sometimes this grew […]
Athens, an early democracy
In 510 BC the Athenians overthrew their tyrant King Hippias, with the help of Cleomenes I, King of Sparta. Naturally, he tried to put his own man on the throne, and he chose Isagoras. However, Cleisthenes, an Athenian lawyer, who was supported by the middle class and basically most of the population, opposed him. Isagoras […]
The Ancient Olympics, how did they start?
Do your children know that the Olympics date back to an Ancient Greek festival, which was part of a five day festival held every four years in honour of Zeus, the King of the Gods. It is believed there were similar festivals as far back as the 13th century BC, yes, that long ago! However, […]
Did the people of Pompeii know they lived by a live volcano?
The city of Pompeii was a major resort city during the times of Ancient Rome. However, then everything changed when it was buried in volcanic dust in 79 AD, disaster struck the city when it was buried for 2,000 years under 20 feet of a blanket of ash and pumice when the nearby volcano, Mount […]
Ancient Rome’s Financial Crisis
Did you know that in 2008 they used 2000-year-old solution to save our economy! It was in 33 AD that a financial crisis hit Ancient Rome and the solution Emperor Tiberius used was “quantitative easing”, a phrase yu may have recently, as this izs what they did in 2008. It all happened because in 26 […]
Julius Caesar, another broken dictator?
Julius Caesar was a dictator, and that is why he was assassinated by a group of senators on the Ides of March of 44 BC at a meeting of the Senate at the Curia of Pompey of the Theatre of Pompey in Rome. They obviously didn’t like him as 60 senators were involved as they […]
Who was Theseus?
We know him as the Greek who slayed the Minotaur of the Cretan king Minos. What did he do before that? His birth His birth is interesting. It is said that he was the son of Aegeus, King of Athens. Aegeus had a problem, just like Henry VIII, he needed a son, he knew several […]