One of the great names in the history of man’s work in electricity is that of Michael Faraday. He was born in a small village near London on September 22,1791 in a poor family. His father, a blacksmith, could feed his family with difficulty, and could not even dream of an education for his boy. […]
The famous naturalist and thinker, Charles Darwin, was born on February 12, 1809. The family lived near Shrewsbury, not far from the river Severn. Charles’ father was a well-known physician, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the son of a still greater physician, poet and scientist—Erasmus Darwin. Charles’ father hoped that his son also […]
Henry Bessemer, who was born on January 19, 1813, inherited his love of inventing from his father. Old Bessemer had worked in Holland and helped to build the first steam-engine in that country. Later he designed a new kind of lathe and made some other inventions while he was in France before the French Revolution […]
In 1877, an American, Thomas Alva Edison, made a recording on a little machine which he had invented, and played it back to himself. Although he knew that he would hear them, he was astonished just the same when his own words were spoken back to him. It was a historic moment, so you may […]
“Success. Four flights Thursday morning. All against wind with engine power alone. Average speed through air thirty-one miles. Longest flight fifty-nine seconds…” Such was the triumphant telegram Orville and Wilbur Wright sent to their father in December 1903, when their machine took to the air. How easily a bird flies from one tree to another! […]
The Early Period of Owen’s Activities Robert Owen was born at Newtown, a small town in central Wales, on May 14, 1771. At the end of the 18th century Newtown was a quiet little place of one thousand inhabitants with a single business street across the town. Robert’s father, an ironmonger, was poor, and Robert […]
Alexander Mackenzie was a man who did much to explore Canada from sea to sea during the early part of the 19th century. One of that country’s greatest rivers, the Mackenzie, was named after him. Alex, as he was called by his friends, was born in 1764 in a small stone-built house near the sea […]
John Franklin was born on April 16, 1786; he was the ninth child in his family. The Franklins had once been rich, but John’s grandfather had left his widow practically without money and John’s father, to support himself, was apprenticed to a small shop in Lincoln, where later he started his own business. John’s parents […]
Ferdinand Magellan, who gave its name to the Pacific Ocean and whose ship was the first to sail round the world, did not see the sea, and perhaps could not even swim, until he was a young man. Unlike most great seamen, who spent their boyhood near the sea and watched ships come and go […]
Sea voyages in the South A number of sea voyages were made by the ancestors of the Eastern Slavs as far back as the 6th and 7th centuries of our era. In 626 the Scythians reached Constantinople by sailing along the western coast of the Black Sea. Russian seamanship in those early days was not […]
