Who knew?

[red750]

I thought I would start a topic where you can post unusual pieces of information that people may not know. Here is the first item.

 

[onetrack]

Peter, the image is a little misleading. I couldn't imagine what it does to your upper body circulation to be hung over a rope whilst standing - and most drunks can't stand.

I think Wikipedia has a more instructive description - the accommodation was a bench where one could sit, and there was a rope in front of the bench that the person being accommodated, could lean over to support their upper body from falling over, while the bench supported the main body weight.

 

I find it interesting that the accommodation was designed to support homelessness, a "relatively new problem" of the mid 1800's onwards.

One has to conclude that the Industrial Revolution and the increased efficiency of machinery, led to much unemployment and a corresponding increase in homelessness.

 

I am doing a little family genealogical research, and reading all the old British Census information is interesting. All through the records, so many people are employed as "farm labourer".

Then, when the Industrial Revolution started rolling in force by the mid 1800's, the cleverer people became "journeyman millwrights". This was a trade where people became skilled at installing machinery and ensured it was set up and working properly. In essence, an "industrial mechanic". I was surprised to find numerous ancestors were journeymen millwrights.

 

Another trade of value that was sought after, was wheelwrights. There were numbers of wheelwrights in my ancestral line, too.

If you had no trade, you tried to join the military, where you got a secure job and a pension. Naturally, the numbers of applicants for the military was high and the success rate was low.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_penny_coffin

[willedoo]

The Enclosure Act caused a big boost to the numbers classified as farm labourers. Previous to this, a lot of subsistence farmers had a house in the village and worked the common fields on the outskirts of town. The act allowed fencing of properties and was the end of most common farming. The poorer farmers couldn't afford to fence and drain their own plot, so had to sell out to wealthier farmers and work as labourers. A lot of people went from being self employed to life as a low paid worker. The idea of it was to increase food production for the growing population, and while it achieved that goal, it came at a cost to a lot small farmers.

[old man emu]

5 hours ago, onetrack said:

I am doing a little family genealogical research

The British 1921 census will be published in January 2022. It will be published online by www.Findmypast.co.uk so we will have to pay to view, unless your public library has access.

 

I want to find out which of my grandfather's brothers survived WWl.

[farri]

1.	Hot water will turn into ice faster than cold water.
2.	The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.
3.	The sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the English language.
4.	The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.
5.	Ant's take rest for around 8 Minutes in 12 hour period.
6.	"I Am" is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
7.	Coca-Cola was originally green.
8.	The most common name in the world is Mohammed.
9.	When the moon is directly overhead, you will weigh slightly less.
10.	Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from the blowing desert sand.
11.	There are only two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
12.	The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with.
13.	There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
14.	TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
15.	Minus 40 degrees Celsius is exactly the same as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
16.	Chocolate can kill dogs, as it contains theobromine, which affects their heart and nervous system.
17.	Women blink nearly twice as much as men!
18.	You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.
19.	It is impossible to lick your elbow.
20.	The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.
21.	People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because when you sneeze, your heart stops for a millisecond.
22.	It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky
23.	The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language.
24.	"Rhythm" is the longest English word without a vowel.
25.	If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die.

[willedoo]

22.	It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky   What if you put the pig in a recliner chair?

[Admin]

It is impossible to cry if you are looking up...I always got the kids to look up if they were crying about something

[Admin]

Bulb is the only word in the English language that doesn't have a rhyming word

[old man emu]

"Nothing" and "bulb" have no sounds in common, so how could nothing rhyme with bulb?

[onetrack]

Camels are the only animals, where the bull camel is the sex that comes on heat, as well as the female (rather than solely the females, as in all other animals).

So, with camels, you have both male and female on heat - whereas, with all the other animals, the female comes on heat and excites the male into action.

Edited July 4, 2020 by onetrack

[old man emu]

Recent trivial TV series have introduced the word "bachelorette" to many people, but is the word a 21st Century concoction of some TV scriptwriter?

 

The male term "bachelor" has been in use since the 13th Century, initially as a term for a young man, or a young squire in training as a knight. Since squires were not supposed to marry, bachelor came to mean an unmarried man. One early recorded use of the word bachelorette is in "The Dummy," Alice Yates Grant, 1896.

Jessica. Thanks! Is Mr. Sparrow a bachelor?

Miss Cornelia. He is, and in all probability will remain one.

Jessica. I'm beginning to think there are pleasanter conditions in this world than being a bachelorette.

Miss Cornelia. Where did you ever pick up such a remarkable word? A bachelorette! What in the world is a bachelorette?

Bachelorette is concocted by adding the French -ette to bachelor. More of an example of pidgin French than a grammatically correct, since -ette means small, as in cigarette.

 

What tickles my fancy is that we now frown upon the use of many words that are the feminine form of male occupations such as actress, aviatrix, but young, unmarried women are quite happy to be referred to as bachelorettes.

[Yenn]

Were batchelors gay really? I don't think so.

[facthunter]

Smarter than the average, I reckon.  It can be the lottery you lose but keep paying for the ticket. This is NOT sexist. It works both ways.. You INVEST more than money in a relationship .Nev

[nomadpete]

And we all know that a ship, of any description, is a hole in the water into which one pours money.

[old man emu]

Did you know that Mexico was one of the Allies in WWll? I've never heard mention of them until recently, but here's the good oil:

 

 

What I find interesting is not so much the story of the Aztec Eagles, but the benefit Mexico got from the USA in the form of Lend Lease provisions.

[onetrack]

Who knew that the world-record-beating (and enduring race car classic) Mercedes W196 open-wheeler, utilised fuel injection for the first time in any race car, in 1954?

What is even more intriguing is that the Daimler-Benz direct fuel injection system used on the W196, was adapted directly from the fuel injection used on the DB601 V12 aircraft engine, utilised in the Messerschmidt BF-109E!

 

The fuel injection system on the 2.5L straight eight of the W196, enabled Mercedes to dispense with supercharging - which was the first time since the 1920's, that Mercedes had produced a Grand Prix race car, that wasn't supercharged!

The W196, producing 257HP from its 2.5L with desmodromic valves, won 9 of the 12 races it was entered into, and won both World Championships it was entered in. Every time, at the hands of the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio, or Stirling Moss.

 

Sadly for race car aficionados, the W196 domination of GP racing was ended prematurely and abruptly, when Mercedes abandoned car racing entirely in June 1955, directly as a result of the 1955 24 Hour Le Mans race disaster, where 83 people were killed.

 

The W196 had been fitted with a new body with enclosed wheels (renamed the 300 SLR), and entered into the 1955 24 Hour Le Mans.

 

Driven by Pierre Levagh, the 300 SLR collided with an out-of-control Austin Healey 100S, which had tried to avoid Mike Hawthorns rapidly-braking, disc-brake Jaguar, which had cut across the Austin-Healeys path, to enter the pits.

The Mercedes driven by Levagh became airborne when it hit the rear of the Austin-Healey. The Mercedes flew into a retaining wall at height, at 200kmh, then somersaulted and disintegrated, as it travelled in a long line through the crowd of spectators.

 

The officially-recorded 83 people killed at the 1955 24 Hour Le Mans, is still the worst racing accident, for the number of fatalities, in racing history. Mercedes removed itself from car racing for 30 years, as a direct decision taken from the Le Mans tragedy.

Edited July 6, 2020 by onetrack

[Yenn]

From memory that accident at Le Mans was caused more by fatigue than what other drivers did. I think Pierre Levagh had driven the Merc for all of the race without his co driver getting to the wheel.

[old man emu]

Recently someone posted here that Henry Ford invented mass production. That's not true. What Henry did was introduce the assembly line to the manufacture of motor vehicles in December 1913. It was not even his idea. A notable assembly line in use during the 19th century was actually a disassembly line. Employees at a Midwest meat-packing company harvested cuts of meat from carcasses hanging from a trolley overhead. When the work at one station was done, the pieces were easily transported to the next point on the line.

 

In England Richard Garrett & Sons was a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, steam engines and trolleybuses.* Their factory was in Leiston, Suffolk, England. The company was founded by Richard Garrett in 1778. Richard Garrett III, grandson of the company's founder, visited The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, where he saw some new American manufacturing ideas and spoke to Samuel Colt, the firearms maker. Richard Garrett III introduced flow line production – a very early assembly line. He constructed a long building which came to be known as the "Long Shop", to distinguish it from the other buildings on the factory site. The wheeled chassis fitted only with the boiler was wheeled into one end of the building and parts were added to complete the engine as it was pushed from workstation to workstation through the centre of the building. https://www.longshopmuseum.co.uk/the-long-shop-new/

 

Another American myth is that Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. That's not correct either.  The basic idea of using electricity to create light was first investigated over 200 years ago by the English chemist Humphrey Davy.  In 1802, Davy created the first incandescent light by passing electric current through a thin strip of platinum, chosen because the metal had an extremely high melting point. It was neither sufficiently bright nor long lasting enough to be of practical use, but demonstrated the principle. The British chemist Warren de La Rue had solved the scientific challenges nearly 40 years earlier. He used thin – and thus high-resistance – filaments to achieve the brightness, and delayed burnout by making them from high-melting-point metal sealed in a vacuum. In 1878, another British chemist, Joseph Swan, publicly demonstrated the first light based on commercially-viable carbon, but his use of relatively thick filaments still led to rapid burnout.

 

Swan demonstrated his carbon light bulb on December 18, 1878 during a lecture in Newcastle, England. Edison did not demonstrate his light bulb until October 1879. In 1881 Swan started the Swan Electric Light Company and began to commercially exploit electric light in the domestic sphere. One year later Edison’s British office took its competitor Swan to court because of an alleged infringement of American patents. When Edison’s position turned out to be weak the Americans pushed for transatlantic collaboration, resulting in the Ediswan Company which was in business from 1883 to 1964. Mazda was a trademarked name registered by General Electric (GE) in 1909 for incandescent light bulbs. Ediswan marketed their bulbs under the name "Mazda" through a licence from General Electric.

 

So, the myth is that Ford and Edison invented things that did not exist before their time. The truth is that they applied existing knowledge and improved on earlier constructs. The Wright Brothers fall into this category, too.

 

* Since Garret & Sons was an English manufacturer of transportable steam powered agricultural equipment, their engines are probably easy to find in Australia's grain growing areas.

[pmccarthy]

And add the Hills rotary clothes line, invented by Joseph Phillips Hill, a Civil War veteran from Vermont, who sold over a million Hill's rotary clothes dryers in the 35 years after 1874. 

 

[old man emu]

5 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

And add the Hills rotary clothes line

Now, I thought that Lance Hill from Adelaide had invented that thing, but back in 1911, Gilbert Toyne patented and made the Aeroplane Clothes Hoist. In 1926 he had made a major breakthrough and perfected the raising mechanism, enclosing it entirely within a knuckle on the upright post that was activated by a simple handle. In 1941, Toyne's patent for the all-important hoisting mechanism lapsed, paving the way for competitors to use his invention. Enter Lance Hill who had a knack for promotion, and the Hills hoist became part of a range of useful metal items, from laundry trolleys to children's swings.

[spacesailor]

Would you believe  !.

The very first British Aeroplane fatality, was none-other than mr Henry Rolls of RR fame.

The tail broke on his Wright-Flyer, in 1910.

spacesailor

ps don,t shoot the messenger, !I read it in the paper.

[onetrack]

I bet that taught him not to buy those dodgy American-design aeroplanes!

[nomadpete]

37 minutes ago, onetrack said:

I bet that taught him not to buy those dodgy American-design aeroplanes!

And we still haven't learnt from the experience.

[kgwilson]

We might have. The current catch cry is If it's "Boeing I ain't going"

[spacesailor]

Almost as good as the First flyers to cross the English channel.

A female pilot inverted her plane and dropped the passenger out.

No word of how that passenger fared, but if higher the the wing_span I doubt they would have survived.

spacesailor