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Author Topic: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread  (Read 61273 times)

Offline Tanxs1

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I've never posted in this thread before, but I've been following it for a long time. A good and interesting read :). Thanks three60!


Offline BFM_Crimson

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Offline Marty

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The BBC's version of the story goes that the morning of June 6th was the only gap in a nasty weather front that lasted for about two days, and Stagg predicted this gap, allowing the invasion to be launched. The cruncher was that the defending forces did not see this gap coming, so as a result the forces caught the defence off guard in more ways than one.


As I recall, he had a single report from a ship in the mid-Atlantic on June 5[su]th[/sup] which indicated a high pressure front - meaning calm weather. This was all he had, as well as a healthy serving of experience with a side of good luck.


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Offline BFM_Kiwi

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It's amazing that with everything riding on this, Eisenhower accepted this guy's judgement and rolled the dice.  Really gutsy call that was.


Offline jim360

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As I recall ...

As you recall from watching the same programme as I was.
Check out my Short introduction... corner and my "Historical figures who should perhaps be better-known" thread!!

Exciting videos: 1.1 / 1.2 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6



              

Offline Marty

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As I recall ...

As you recall from watching the same programme as I was.

Your point being?


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Applied for BFM: 28th August 2008
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Nothing happened: 15th July 2012



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Offline jim360

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The phrase "running about like a headless chicken" has its roots, unsurprisingly, in the fact that some chickens can briefly survive the chop and what's left of them runs about. My great aunt once owned a hen that had arthritis and was 'put out of its misery', but her late husband made a bit of a bad job of it so off came the head and all. The body ran about for a bit, prompting the amusing comment, "If you'd done that before you were dead you wouldn't have had your head pulled off!" You had to be there...

Anyway, it's true. Hens can survive without their head. The most famous example of this is Miracle Mike, the Headless Chicken, who survived for a full eighteen months without a head, since the botched job left his brain stem intact. Remarkably it was a pretty full and normal life - Mike would try to crow and even preen his feathers, without that much success, and peck for food - again, a difficult job.

You could argue that it is a bit cruel to keep anything alive for so long in that state. And you'd be right - not least because Mike's survival doomed hundreds of other hens to a similar fate as people 'tested the science out for themselves' with fatal results, sadly. But Mike's story does serve to illustrate the remarkable difference between existence and life.
Check out my Short introduction... corner and my "Historical figures who should perhaps be better-known" thread!!

Exciting videos: 1.1 / 1.2 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6



              

Offline jim360

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Here's a post that ought to please Mil.

American History has its origins in the pilgrim fathers, etc., I'm sure most of you know the story better than I do. But the story does of course go back further, and the first step was to have the ability to cross the Atlantic in the first place. That takes us back to Columbus, who "sailed the ocean blue" in 1492, of course. Some of Columbus' diary entries make for less-than-romantic reading so history tends to gloss over them, and so shall I, but he isn't what I want to talk about.

No, the point is that in the 15th and 16th centuries the World's leading nations were Spain and... Portugal. Particularly Portugal. The reason for that was (among others) that Portugal was an early centre of academic greatness - lots of brainy people. One of those was Abraham Zacuto, whose claim to fame is discovering how to navigate at sea while south of the Equator. It's a remarkable thought today, in the age of GPS, that anyone would have trouble with this, but back then the main guide was the North Star, fixed in the sky, but only visible in the Northern Hemisphere. This stopped ships travelling much farther south than what is now Senegal, severely limiting trade and expansion.

Zacuto's solution, in around 1470, was to produce an astrolabe capable of working at sea by using the Sun. This let sailors know how far south they were going, and with other traditional techniques the ships of the Portuguese navy could pass the Equator, opening up trade links with Africa, crossing through to India (this new route also hitting the traditional route through Eastern Europe ) and as far as Japan. It also explains why Brazilians speak Portuguese - they got there first (well, second).

Zacuto's achievement, coupled with some translation work by another Portuguese man, Jose Vizinho, made Portugal rich and powerful, at least for about a century, until Spain, then France, and finally England, took over the job of top dog. It also had a profound influence on the history of Japan because several major battles of the time were fought using Portuguese weapons.
Check out my Short introduction... corner and my "Historical figures who should perhaps be better-known" thread!!

Exciting videos: 1.1 / 1.2 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6



              

Offline jim360

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It's probably a bad thing if you're an anti-conspiracy theorist to post about a man who looms constantly in the background of European politics from c.1918 onwards, shaping events that still affect us today, but nevertheless Jean Monnet, for good or ill, has had a profound influence on the modern world in more ways than one.

Jean Monnet was a French man who was throughout his life big on unity. To begin with, in the First World War he worked to improve co-operation in the Allied war effort (a pretty obvious idea in hindsight, but for some reason it never really seemed to catch on), pressing the French and British governments to combine their military and economic resources. After that Monnet started to focus on working to bring Europe as a whole closer together. He made no secret of his aims, stating in 1943 that, "There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty... the European states must constitute themselves into a federation...".

After World War one Monnet worked in the League of Nations as Deputy Secretary General for a few years and then in the late 20's helped to rescue the Polish and Romanian economies from ruination. Incredibly he also worked in the Chinese Railway network and set up a bank in the USA, a bank that even weathered the Great Depression.

As WWII rolled around, Monnet's work was vital first in bringing French and British industry in line with each other, and also worked in the British Mission to get America's help in the war effort. Monnet's advice was apparently instrumental in persuading Roosevelt to mobilise the US arms industry, "shortening the war by about a year" according to another giant of the age, the economist J. M. Keynes. After the War Monnet's work helped the French Economy to recover (using German coal).

Monnet's final contribution to the modern world was his work in setting up the European Economic Community, which from 1950 onwards (first as the ECSC, then the EEC, then the EC and now the EU) began to unite many European nations in a way that had never before been achieved. The EU now has 27 member states and its stated aim is to create a United States of Europe. Should this be achieved then Monnet's dream of peace in Europe would finally be realised.
Check out my Short introduction... corner and my "Historical figures who should perhaps be better-known" thread!!

Exciting videos: 1.1 / 1.2 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6



              

Offline jim360

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I mentioned before that among the people who can lay a claim to being "the man who won World War Two" is Alan Turing, the cryptanalyst (code-breaker) and computer expert. This post isn't about him either, but the reason that he's up here is because code-breaking is a huge part of any war. Put simply, if you know what your opponent's plans are, you can do something about it.

In Europe the big code-breaking effort was at Bletchley Park, a place that is pretty much always talked about every time the WW2 anniversaries roll around for another year, but there the code-breakers were working only on the German and Italian codes. In the Pacific, the Japanese were also (obviously) transmitting messages in code to each other, and that required a whole different team.

By comparison with Enigma, the Japanese code is simple - each character in the Japanese alphabet, the kanji, is assigned a 5-digit number. To encode the message you just add another five-digit number on top of this to each character, then to decode you subtract the same number. The problem with decoding this is that you need to know firstly what number is assigned to what character before you can even get started. Oh, and you have to speak Japanese too.

Joseph Rochefort was the man at the top of the effort to break this code. Together with his team in the US, British and Dutch teams helping, and using a tonne of material, he eventually managed to break into this code so that by about March 1942 most, if not all, Japanese messages were instantly readable by the US Navy. This was a pretty handy time, because the Battle of Midway would follow about 2 months later, and indeed the intelligence gained from breaking this code was vital in winning that Battle.

In fact, it's no coincidence that the changing fortunes of the US forces in the Pacific match with the progress in code-breaking. Up until mid-1942, the Japanese were winning; once the codes were broken, the US had the advantage of surprise on top of superior numbers.

As Turing's team won the war in Europe, Joseph Rochefort led the effort to win the Pacific War, and must also go down as one of the most important code-breakers in history.
Check out my Short introduction... corner and my "Historical figures who should perhaps be better-known" thread!!

Exciting videos: 1.1 / 1.2 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6



              

Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #100 on: August 02, 2011, 07:23:18 AM »
Abraham Zacuto, as mentioned before, had done some fine work that allowed ships to find out how far South and North they were, and in what direction they were heading, without reference to the Pole Star. However what it did not do was allow sailors to work out how far West or East they were. In fact, by 1490 people still didn't know how big Europe and Asia were, which explains why Columbus thought he was in Asia - he wasn't stupid, but he was using a map that over-estimated the size of Asia.

The problem of working out how far West you've travelled is known as the "Longitude Problem", and it was the biggest challenge of navigation right up until the early 20th Century. Among other things, if you don't quite know how far west you are then you might run into some rocks that you know are there, but didn't realise that you were right on top of them until too late - this happened several times.

Thankfully there's a solution. In modern times the world is divided into timezones and this directly relates to the problem because what timezone you are in - specifically, how many more hours it takes for the Sun to get to its highest point in the sky - tells you where you are in the world relative to Greenwich. So, all you need to do to know how far west of Greenwich you are would be to know what time it is in London when it's mid-day local time. Unfortunately, even by 1750 there was no good way of doing this.

Two possible solutions came out. In the first one you use a telescope to find the moon and some other astronomical object, such as the star Regulus in the constellation Leo, measure the relative altitudes of both of these, and find the apparent angle between them. Now, you correct for parallax error due to the differences between where you are and where the Greenwich Observatory is, and also correct for atmospheric effects that broaden the apparent widths of both objects, and subtract the Moon's semidiameter. This gives a value that can be made accurate to one half of a minute of arc. This value can then be compared which a table that tells you what time of day it is in Greenwich when those angles occur, and because in fact the angle is the same (or as near as) for all observers at the same exact moment in time, knowing what time it was when you made the observations allows you to deduce the time in Greenwich and thus to work out the time difference, and so the distance, between you and London...zzz...

Alternatively, you could use a watch that was set in Greenwich and keeps time accurately. Then you look to see when it's mid-day where you are, and read the time of the watch you've got. That's much easier.

Actually, that "fall-asleep" method I described first (known as the method of Lunar Distances) was the one most people used for over a hundred years. The reason is that all watches made before the discovery that quartz could be used to keep time (guess what I'll be writing about later...) were mechanical and broke down at sea, because of winds, salt water, tides, etc.. So the first person to build a watch to overcome these problems would revolutionise navigation, or at least save the all the hassle of the first method.

And there is such a man. John Harrison, the self-taught watch- and clock-maker, designed and built 5 timepieces capable of keeping time at sea. Each of these is a marvel of engineering, and the last ones, known as H4 and H5, were good enough to be as accurate as the Lunar Distance method, if not more accurate, and by 1850 when prices had come down were in use in most ships that sailed on the high seas, improving both naval safety and navigational ability by a huge amount. James Cook's 2nd and 3rd voyages to Australia made use of (a copy of) one of these clocks.

Some of the technology used in Harrison's clocks are still in use today, including the "grasshopper" escapement that reduces the need for oiling clocks; the "bimetallic strip" that doesn't expand in warm weather - making pendulum clocks accurate whatever the weather; and the "roller bearing", that reduces friction in many mechanical applications.

All of this, and more - Harrison also worked on the mathematics of musical tuning.
Check out my Short introduction... corner and my "Historical figures who should perhaps be better-known" thread!!

Exciting videos: 1.1 / 1.2 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6



              

Offline BFM_Crimson

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #101 on: August 02, 2011, 03:51:09 PM »
Nonononono, you get a dagger, wound a dog with it, then dip the dagger in dust and the dog barks!
                                                           
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Offline BFM_Kiwi

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #102 on: August 02, 2011, 05:10:32 PM »

Offline BFM_Crimson

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #103 on: August 02, 2011, 07:18:41 PM »
Powder of sympathy was a form of sympathetic magic, current in 17th century in Europe, whereby a remedy was applied to the weapon that had caused a wound in the hope of healing the injury it had made. The method was first proposed by Rudolf Goclenius, Jr. and was later expanded upon by Sir Kenelm Digby. An abstract of Digby's theory is found in an address given before an assembly of learned men in Montpellier, France, and which is discussed in Pettigrew's Superstitions Connected with Medicine and Surgery. The recipe for the powder is: "take Roman vitriol [copper sulphate] six or eight ounces, beat it very small in a mortar, shift it through a fine sieve when the sun enters Leo; keep it in the heat of the sun and dry by night."
The powder was also applied to solve the longitude problem in the suggestion of an anonymous pamphlet of 1687 entitled "Curious Enquiries." The pamphlet theorized that a wounded dog could be put aboard a ship, with the animal's discarded bandage left in the trust of a timekeeper on shore, who would then dip the bandage into the powder at a predetermined time and cause the creature to yelp, thus giving the captain of the ship an accurate knowledge of the time. There are no records of the effectiveness of this procedure. It is also uncertain if it had ever been tried, and it is possible that the pamphlet was a form of satire.


I feel ashamed to say that that was copied straight from Wikipedia. I think my explanation was much better.
                                                           
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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #104 on: August 12, 2011, 03:10:06 PM »
Well it's certainly true that "powder of sympathy" would never work, and is just another example of people being silly. You get that a few times in history...
Check out my Short introduction... corner and my "Historical figures who should perhaps be better-known" thread!!

Exciting videos: 1.1 / 1.2 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6



              

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