19 jahrhundert
12 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- European painters used ground-up mummies for centuries.
The pigment mummy brown was made of pulverised Egyptian mummies, white pitch and myrrh. Sales are documented from 1712 …
- How a rope that snaps holds the lift in place.
Lifts existed long before Elisha Otis – nobody trusted them. In 1853 Otis invented the safety brake: while the rope …
- In 1816 it snowed in June – because of a volcano in Indonesia.
In April 1815 Mount Tambora on Sumbawa erupted, the most powerful documented eruption in history. Its sulphur cloud …
- In the 1830s, merchants sold tomato ketchup as medicine.
In 1834 physician John Cook Bennett of Ohio declared that tomatoes cured diarrhoea and indigestion and protected …
- London got its sewers because Parliament could smell the river.
In the hot July of 1858 the Thames fermented with raw sewage right outside Westminster. Decades of debate had changed …
- No ancient trader ever travelled the "Silk Road".
The name was coined by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, who popularised it in 1877 after seven journeys …
- Reinforced concrete was invented for flower tubs.
Joseph Monier was a gardener at the Paris Tuileries who needed durable tubs for orange trees. He poured cement around …
- The Eiffel Tower was due to be scrapped in 1909.
Built from 28 January 1887 to 31 March 1889, the 300-metre tower was only a World's Fair attraction, scheduled for …
- The bicycle exists because a volcano killed the horses.
After the 1815 Tambora eruption, harvests failed in 1816 and tens of thousands of horses starved or were slaughtered. …
- The first long-distance car trip refuelled at a pharmacy.
On 5 August 1888 Bertha Benz drove roughly 106 kilometres from Mannheim to Pforzheim without telling her husband. Fuel …
- The oldest sound recording went unheard for 148 years.
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph in 1857. It scratched sound waves as a curve onto …
- The shortest war in history lasted 38 minutes.
On 27 August 1896 Britain demanded that Sultan Khalid bin Barghash step down. At 09:02 five warships opened fire on the …