When was the first hearing aid? The first hearing aid was an ear trumpet described in 1624 by a French priest and mathematician called Jean Leurechon. These days, people with hearing loss can buy pretty advanced hearing aids that have different settings depending on the situation. They can be directional or they can cut out […]
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When were houses first numbered? Houses were first numbered in France in the 15th century, but they were first widely numbered through Europe for the purpose of administration and not post. Every country in the world has some system for addressing houses and buildings. The Internet has vastly reduced the amount of post that is
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What happened to Lord Lucan? Nobody knows what happened to Lord Lucan, but he probably killed himself shortly after murdering his children’s nanny and attacking his wife. Richard John Bingham was the 7th Earl of Lucan. He was also Baron Bingham, Baron Lucan, Baronet Bingham of Castlebar, and Lord Lucan. He called himself Lucky because
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What is a raglan sleeve? A raglan sleeve is a sleeve that extends all the way to the collar, with a diagonal seam from the underarm to the collarbone. It is named after Lord Raglan, who lost his arm in the Battle of Waterloo. You will almost definitely have worn a raglan sleeve at some point in your life, even
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Who discovered Richard III’s body? Richard III’s body was found by the screenwriter Philippa Langley and archaeologists from the University of Leicester. Richard III was born in 1452, and he was king from 1483 to 1485. This rule of 2 years and 57 days makes him the monarch with the shortest reign in English history, if you don’t count King Edward V
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Why did Newton invent calculus? Newton developed calculus because he needed mathematics that could deal with quantities that were continuously changing. This became enormously useful for his work on motion and gravity. If you want to know how long it will take a car to cover a certain distance, you can use algebra. We know
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Morse code was developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in the 1830s. Morse came up with an early system that used numbers and a codebook, while Vail appears to have played an important role in developing the much simpler system that used different combinations of signals for individual letters. Exactly how much each man
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Alfred Wegener realized that all of the continents had once been joined together, but he could not explain how they could move. It took the mapping of the ocean floor during and after World War 2, followed by the discovery of strange magnetic patterns in the seabed, for scientists to finally work out what was
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Was the Charge of the Light Brigade real? The Charge of the Light Brigade did really happen. It was during the Battle of Balaklava in the Crimean War. It happened on 25 October 1854. The Charge of the Light Brigade was made famous by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem of the same name. It was a
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Who was Otzi the Iceman? Otzi was a man who lived in the area where the Austrian Italian border is today in roughly 3250 BC. Otzi the Iceman was found in 1991 by two German tourists called Helmut and Erika Simon. They saw the top part of his body sticking out of ice. An unusually
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