Browsing: July 15

A Brief History On July 15, 1799, French soldiers in Egypt discovered The Rosetta Stone, which is inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes.  The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and demotic scripts, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek.   The Because the decree has only minor differences among the three versions, the Rosetta Stone became key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, thereby opening a window into ancient Egyptian history, especially its system of writing. Writing is a…

A Brief History On July 15, 1815, Emperor Napoleon I of the French surrendered to the British aboard the HMS Bellerophon. We have previously used this historic occasion to commemorate 10 ships that had nifty, martial sounding names that seemed likely to inspire their crews. (We have also noted goofy ship names in the past, “June 5, 1829: 10 Goofy Names for Ships”.) Today we name 10 More Ships with Cool Names since we certainly did not get all the good ones the first time. What ship names would you add to the list? (As previously noted, the British are…

A Brief History On July 15, 2006, the social media vehicle known as Twitter was launched, and quickly became an essential part of electronic communications in the United States and world-wide.  Created by Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, the social networking device caught on with frightening speed, and became one of our most important and prevalent sources of information. Digging Deeper By 2016, there were well over 300 million users of Twitter, and on election day 2016 over 40 million ‘tweets’ were sent regarding election news.  Williams and Glass had founded an internet search and directory…

A Brief History On July 15, 1954, the first prototype of what became the Boeing 707 and US Air Force C-135 family of airplanes made its first flight.  Many airplanes have served a dual role well, moving cargo and people for civilian purposes or the same for the military.  Sometimes a military airplane might be an ideal test aircraft for scientific purposes, or as a weather observing plane.  Here we list 10 of these airplanes that have done double duty, and of course there are many more.   Digging Deeper 10. Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny.” The most widely produced North American airplane…

A Brief History The media, reinforced by politicians on both sides has given the public the impression that there is some sort of war on Black males going on in the United States, especially by White police officers.  Is this perception a case of “Dog Bites Man” (police doing their job) or a manufactured case of “Man Bites Dog” geared to arouse public passion and sell air time? As an important note, before reading onward, please keep in mind that the statistics discussed in this article are about recent history, i.e. from the 1990s to the present.  In the centuries before…