27th January 2016

Lord Byron – An all-round sportsperson

Lord Byron, also known as George Gordon Byron and 6th Baron Byron, was a famous English poet. He was known to enjoy adventure. He was extremely fond of exercise and sports. He loved swimming and once swam from Sestos in Modern Gallipoli in European Turkey to Abydos in Upper Egypt. He mastered a wide variety of sports. In addition to swimming, he fenced, sculled, rode and shot at targets. At Harrow, he was considered a good enough cricketer to play for the first team against Eton. He was also the captain of Harrow in that match.

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27th January 2016

What was Thomas Alva Edison afraid of?

Thomas Alva Edison is one of the greatest innovators who is credited with inventing the phonograph, the motion picture camera, film projectors, practical use of electricity, and an improved and effective electric light bulb that was superior to gas lighting. When asked once if he were afraid of anything he replied, ‘I am afraid of the dark.’

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27th January 2016

When was the fax machine invented?

The fax machine was invented by a Scottish inventor Alexander Bain in 1843. He devised an apparatus comprising two pins that were connected to two pendulums through five wires. When an electric signal was sent from the transmitting end, the receiving end was able to reproduce the signal on an electrochemically sensitive paper impregnated with chemicals. Thirty-three years later, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

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21st January 2016

An ace programmer and the first US navy officer

Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was the first US navy officer and a computer scientist. She realized that with an easy programming language it would be easy for users who were neither mathematicians nor computer experts. This conviction led her to invent a popular programming language COBOL (Common  Business-Oriented Language), which is used in business and finance.

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19th January 2016

Landing on the moon – ‘… one giant leap for mankind’

Apollo 11 was the mission of NASA, which placed a human on a celestial body, the moon. The journey to the moon took three and a half days and carried three astronauts: Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins. Armstrong said later: ‘We landed with a little less fuel than we would have liked to have had, maybe 20 seconds of fuel left.’ Armstrong and Aldrin stepped on the moon and Armstrong uttered the famous words ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ After about two hours of moonwalking, they returned to the craft which was named Eagle. They left an inscription that said: ‘Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.’

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