The tradition of throwing disks for play or sport extends from ancient Greece to the modem Olympics. We also know that Roman soldiers used their shields as a Frisbee. Roman shields had razor-sharp edges. They threw them to the enemy in the same way as now we throw Frisbee.
However, in the 1940s, students at Yale University unintentionally put a twist on this tradition: they distracted themselves between classes by tossing around the shallow tin platters in which the popular pies of the nearby William R. Frisbie bakery were sold. The fad soon spread to other New England schools.
Meanwhile, in the 1950s, Walter F. Morrison of southern California created a toy disk that would fly and hover like the alien spacecraft made popular by Hollywood at that time. Soon after switching from metal to plastic material, Morrison reached an agreement with the Wham-O Company to produce and distribute these “Flyin’ Saucers” (1957), which were an instant success locally.
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Although developed after the airplane, the helicopter grew out of an idea that is several hundred years old. In the late Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci drew up a plan for such a flying machine. He made the first sketch of the helicopter with a brief description in 1489.
Three hundred years after Leonardo Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov built the first model of the helicopter. It consisted of a fuselage and two screws rotate in opposite directions.
In the early 20th century experiments with vertical flight failed for lack of a powerful enough engine.
A French engineer named Paul Cornu designed and built a workable helicopter in 1907. It was powered by a 24-horsepower engine and actually flew for a few minutes. As a prototype it was interesting, but the design proved impractical, in subsequent years numerous other designers built helicopter-like machines. Some never got beyond the planning stage, while others flew for short periods.
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Orville and Wilbur Wright were inspired by Otto Lilienthal, a German glider pioneer. Though he crashed to his death in 1896, the Wrights were obsessed by the technical problems involved in flight. They approached the issue methodically, working out ways to control a glider’s tendency to pitch up and down, roll side to side, or yaw left and right. By the third glider they built, they had solved most of these problems of steering and stability.
To make a self-powered airplane, they needed to develop a very light gasoline engine and an appropriate propeller. By December 1903, their first airplane (Flyer /, later renamed Kitty Hawk) was ready to test. It had a 12.3 meter wingspan, was 6.4 meters long, and weighed about 274 kilos without the pilot. It was powered by the Wrights’ home-made 12 horsepower gasoline engine. The Wrights returned to the site at Kill Devil Hill near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where they had tested their gliders. Their selection of this spot was based on national weather records which showed it to have consistently favorable conditions.
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Brighthelmstone was a little fishing village in the mid-eighteenth century. Most of the people living there were very poor. Then Dr Richard Russell said that drinking or bathing in seawater was extremely good for you and Brighton’s seawater was the best of all! So, Brighthelmstone became Brighton, a fashionable seaside resort.
The most famous visitor to Brighton in those days was King George Ill’s son. George III suffered from mental illness for some periods of his life. In 1811 he became so ill that his son was made Prince Regent. Regency Period lasted from 1811 to 1820. George III died in 1820 and the Prince Regent became King George IV.
In 1787 George asked the architect Henry Holland to transform the farmhouse where he first stayed into what became known as The Marine Pavilion. In 1815 George chose the architect John Nash to design what we see today, the magnificent Royal Pavilion. John Nash designed it in an Indian style. However, the rooms in the palace are mainly in a Chinese style.
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The Vikings came from the three countries of Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The name ‘Viking’ comes from a language called Old Norse and means ‘a pirate raid’.
The Viking age in European history was from about 700 to 1100. Vikings left Scandinavia and travelled to other countries some to fight and steal treasure and others settled in new lands as farmers, craftsmen or traders.
The Vikings conquered England in 1013 under Sweyn I, whose son Canute was later crowned king of England, Denmark, and Norway. The City of Dublin was founded by none other than the Vikings in the ninth century.
After invading Russia, they moved far inland and mixed with the native people. The name of Russia comes from a Viking word.
The sight of a Viking ship was enough to strike terror into the hearts of people. Some people think that Viking warriors wore helmets with horns in battle. But there is no archaeological evidence.
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Children around the world have always played with hoops, by rolling and throwing them or twirling them around the waist and limbs. For adults, hoop twirling has at times been recommended as a weight-loss measure (ancient Greece) and, ironically, denounced as a source of sprains, pains and even heart attacks (14th-century England). These hoops were once made of vines or other plants, wood, or metal.
The conversion of the toy hoop into 20th-century Americana came thanks to Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin, founders of the Wham-O Company. In 1957, an Australian visiting California told them offhand that in his home country, children twirled bamboo hoops around their waists in gym class. Knerr and Melin saw how popular such a toy would be; and soon they were winning rave reviews from schoolkids for the hollow plastic prototype they had created.
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Thousands of years ago some elephants wore heavy fur coats. Actually, the mammoth was an ancestor of the modern elephant. And mastodons were distant relatives of the mammoth.
Scientists have found many frozen mammoth bodies, especially in the icy area of Russia, Siberia. The animals died out at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago.
Mastodons appeared about 20 million years ago. They were smaller than mammoths. The legs were short, massive, and like pillars. Mastodons were covered with long, reddish brown hair.
Mammoths were the size of modern elephants. They had small ears and very long tusks. Although they were large creatures, they fed on plants. They ate willow, fir, and the leaves from bushes. When their stomach contents were examined many different kinds of leaves were found.
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