Browsing: Science & Technology

A Brief History On August 1, 1993, the Great Mississippi and Missouri Rivers Flood of 1993 came to its peak. Was this disaster the worst flood of the Mississippi River since European colonization of North America? The answer is a solid “maybe.” Different parameters for measuring how “bad” a flood is can leave the subject of which flood is the “worst” open to debate. In some ways, the Great Flood of 1993 can be considered the worst Mississippi River flood in US History. Digging Deeper Big floods often cause big damage, both in dollar amounts and in environmental impact. Washed…

A Brief History On July 30, 2012, the Tamil Nadu Express train caught fire as passengers lay sleeping at 4:22 am, roasting 32 of them and injuring another 27. Only quick action by a railroad emergency crew prevented further carnage when the flaming sleeping car was detached from the other cars. Some died leaping from the moving train, some died trying to leave through the forward exit, and some died asleep in their beds. Digging Deeper The S-11 sleeping car carried 78 passengers that morning, bound from New Delhi to Chennai. Of those passengers, 72 had reservations to be on…

A Brief History On July 29, 1973, British race car driver Roger Williamson met his death when his Formula 1 race car crashed at the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort Circuit in the Netherlands. The 25 year old 2 time British Formula 3 champion was trapped under his flipped car, not seriously hurt from the crash, but was burned to death as the car was engulfed in flames. We wrote about that crash in our July 29 article, “10 Famous Car Wrecks” and followed that article with “5 More Famous Car Wrecks.” Today we look at another 5 famous/infamous car…

A Brief History On July 17, 1918, in the latter stage of World War I, the RMS Carpathia, a ship made famous for rescuing 705 of the passengers of the infamous RMS Titanic when she sank in 1912, was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by German submarine SM U-55 and sunk, losing only 5 lives in the process, a far different circumstance than the Titanic. Digging Deeper Carpathia, completed in 1903, was built for the Cunard Line of shippers, an intermediate sized ship not designed to compete with the very largest and fastest ocean liners, but to operate economically…

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…