A Brief History of Ventilation | Wellcome Collection
“Today, medical professionals would recognise this technique as a tracheotomy. Vesalius’s experiment demonstrated the power of mechanical ventilation – though it would not be incorporated into widespread medical practice for several more centuries. This was partly due to the fact that doctors did not yet fully understand the purpose of respiration.”
Would a Book Lie? | Distillations | Science History Institute
Louis XIV and his advisers—specifically, Jean-Baptiste Colbert—saw danger in free expression. There were an uncomfortable number of small print shops with only one or two presses that were difficult to keep tabs on and, when idle, might resort to unregulated printing of heterodox or politically incendiary tracts. The government’s strategy was to consolidate printing in a smaller number of larger print shops, the reasoning being that the larger ventures would be easier to regulate and their owners would have more to lose and thus less incentive for unauthorized printing.”
"Unlike any Other Upon the Globe" | Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
“Nothing has been, nothing can be said, to magnify the wonders of this national pleasuring ground. It is all and more that it has been represented. In the catalogue of earthly wonders it is the greatest, and must remain so. It confers distinctive character upon our country, greater than that of Niagara, Yosemite, of Mammoth Cave, though each of these is, in itself, without parallel.”
Sicko Doctors | The Public Domain Review
“To understand why this was the case, we might take a closer look at the above-excerpted review, which uses a metaphorical doctor to evoke a real ethical question that obsessed Americans at the time: the appropriate way to relate to other people’s suffering.“
The First English Female Aerial Traveller | Science Museum Blog
“For herself, Letitia Ann Sage felt ‘more happy, and infinitely better pleased with my excursion, than I ever was at any former event of my life’. Evidently, her neighbours were equally captivated: “The door is never quiet a single instant’”
Go to the board | Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)
“My mind and my heart were much disposed to admire all, to respect all, that was connected with him who had discovered the cause of the secular equation of the moon, had found in the movement of this planet the means of calculating the ellipticity of the earth, had traced to the laws of attraction the long inequalities of Jupiter and of Saturn, &c. &c. But what was my disenchantment, when one day I heard Madame de Laplace, approaching her husband, say to him, "Will you entrust to me the key of the sugar?”
Aurora Borealis | Book Excerpt
“With difficulty I at length persuaded some of them to listen to me, when I assured them that all they saw was a common phenomenon in more northern latitudes. I also endeavored to convince some of the strangers nearest to me that there was no cause for alarm; but I could gain no converts.”
Air Conditioning Wasn’t Invented to Provide Comfort to Human Beings | IEEE Spectrum
“Air conditioning was devised not for comfort but for industry, specifically to control temperature and humidity in a color printing factory in Brooklyn. The process required feeding paper into the presses a number of times, once for each of the component colors, and the slightest misalignment caused by changes in humidity produced defective copies that had to be thrown away.”
Hashime Murayama and the Art of Saving Lives | Distillations | Science History Institute
“There’s an old adage that says life is short, art long. And in certain circles Murayama’s wildlife art remains celebrated to this day. But even though he took Papanicolaou’s assignment under duress, Murayama’s work on cervical cancer had the more lasting legacy—art that helped make millions of women’s lives longer.”
Are Ghosts Haunting the British Museum? | 1843 Magazine
“Sometimes it’s the doors. To complete a full circuit of the museum more than 3,000 doors need to be opened and closed. Some of these, particularly ones that seal off the major galleries, are cumbersome to shut. But when bolted, they won’t open again without a tussle. Except when they do.”
How Your Embryo Knew What To Do | Nautilus
“It took Proescholdt 259 trials over two years to repeat this result five times, enough to warrant publication, in 1924. To her annoyance, Spemann insisted on adding himself as first author on the paper, even though his male students enjoyed solo bylines. He would later win the Nobel Prize for the discovery; Proescholdt would be all but forgotten for more than 60 years.”
The Fascinating History of Clinical Trials | The Conversation
“These clinical trials largely fall into two groups. With observational studies, researchers follow a group of people to see what happens to them. With experimental studies, people are assigned to treatments, then followed.
These study designs have come about from centuries of people trying out different ways of treating people.”
Untold Stories of the Apollo 13 Engineers | OUP Blog
“As it was, the engineers had just enough time to work the myriad, entangled problems and get them home. The triumph of Apollo 13 highlighted the work of engineers for the general public like no other mission. With the astronauts mainly just shivering for a few days, broadcasts had to at least attempt covering technical challenges, clever emergency fixes, and the years of careful planning that had paid off.”
America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms | The Atlantic
“As Knipling watched screwworms churn through their life cycle in his government laboratory, he made an observation whose importance he could intuit but not yet put to use: Female screwworms mate only once in their entire life. If a female screwworm mates with a sterile male, she will never have any offspring. So if the environment could somehow be saturated with sterile males, Knipling surmised, screwworms would very quickly mate themselves out of existence.
But Knipling did not know how to sterilize male screwworms.”
In a Global Health Crisis, Science Museums Have a lot to Offer – Even While Shut | Apollo Magazine
“The museum doors are firmly shut. Yet this is also an opportunity for great institutions to enrich our personal stories. Thanks to a quarter of a century of digitisation and enthusiastic experimentation, not to mention the improvements of the internet, museums are allowing online visitors to wander through collections, past exhibitions and virtual displays.”
A Jarring Revelation | Damn Interesting
“Over time, however, Dr. Andrews grew even more unconventional. He eventually bade adieu to Jones by telling her that he wanted to devote himself to thoughts of colonizing Mars.
The ever-curious Jones also took up a new interest: inventing. “
Reginald Fessenden and the Invention of Sonar | Distillations | Science History Institute
“Uncharacteristically, Fessenden compromised. As his wife and biographer, Helen, would later explain, he couldn’t resist the challenge of outwitting “those soundless perils of rock and shoal, of iceberg and fog, dumb agencies of Nature to menace and destroy.” Also, he needed a job.”
Who Invented Radio: Guglielmo Marconi or Aleksandr Popov? | IEEE Spectrum
“Now, it’s not always the case that museums know what’s in their own collections. The origins of equipment that’s long been obsolete can be particularly hard to trace. With spotty record keeping and changes in personnel, institutional memory can lose track of what an object is or why it was important.”
The Carouser and the Great Astronomer | Nautilus
“Had history turned out differently, we would know hardly any of these details. A young man with a dubious idea about invisible Platonic solids hovering in space, anxious to prove that there could only ever be six planets; and another young man, the disgraced father of an illegitimate son, on his way to battle the Turks: The litter of history could easily have blurred the outlines of their lives.”
Through the First Antarctic Night (1900) | The Public Domain Review
“Precisely at twelve o’clock a strange rectangular block of fire appeared in the east-south-east. Its size was that of a small tabular iceberg, but it had a dull crimson glow which made the scene at once weird and fascinating. Its base rested on the horizon and it seemed to rise, brighten, and move northerly. […] We watched this with considerable awe and amazement for ten minutes before we could determine its meaning. It passed through several stages of forms, finally it separated, and we discovered that it was the moon. It was in fact a sort of mirage of the moon, but the strange rectangular distortion, the fiery aspect, and its huge size, made a sight long to be remembered.”