History

#847 Christiaan Huygens – inventor of the pendulum clock and the balance spring.

Christiaan Huygens was a mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor. He was responsible for many discoveries during his lifetime. He discovered a new way to make more accurate telescope lenses by grinding and polishing them differently, and he used those lenses to find the first moon of Saturn, Titan, and to observe the true shape […]

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#824 What is a Luddite?

What is a Luddite? A Luddite is someone who is against new technology, but Luddites were a group of people who followed Ned Ludd, a person who was probably made up to support their cause. These days, we refer to anyone who is against new forms of technology or even new ways of doing things

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#821 What are druids?

What are druids? Druids were members of a priestly class in ancient Celtic cultures. There is not a lot of evidence for druids because they don’t come from a people with a written culture. Most of the records about them were written down by the Roman invaders Gaul and Britain. The Romans suppressed the local

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#816 What is a spinning jenny?

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What is a spinning jenny? It is a machine that can spin cotton into multiple reels of thread at the same time. It revolutionized the textile industry and is one of the key machines of the Industrial Revolution. There is a story that the inventor, James Hargreaves, named the spinning jenny after his wife Jenny,

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#815 What was the workhouse?

What was the workhouse? It was a place where people who could not support themselves financially could live. They existed from 1388 to 1948. Every country and every city has people that live below the poverty line, for many different reasons. These days, we live in a society where there is some help for these

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#813 How old is Santa?

How old is Santa? He is either 1,753, 500, or 202 years old, depending on how you look at it. Many different traditions have been mixed to leave the Santa Claus we know today. Why 1,753 years old? Santa Claus is loosely based on Saint Nicholas, a Roman bishop who lived in Turkey. Our name

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