First Published: March 23, 2018
The most interesting facts I have discovered while reading this book so far are:
Abraham LIncoln
He had a revelation in a mirror, which made him think he would not see a second term in presidency. Abraham Lincoln reported a vision after his 1860 election where he saw two separate faces in a mirror: one a healthy reflection of himself, the other a pale, deathly image. His superstitious wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, interpreted this as a prophecy, stating the healthy image meant he would serve his first term, while the ghostly image signified he would be renominated but die before completing his second.
Samuel Symour was five when he witnessed Abraham Lincoln being shot, and he recounted the incident on the show 'I've Got a Secret'. He was the oldest person to appear on television at the time, on the program I've Got a Secret on February 9, 1956, 63 days before his death.
Adolf Hitler
On June 21, 1940 Hitler attended a ceremony accepting France's surrender, and he demanded it took place in the same train car where the armistice for the First World War was signed.
Al Capone
He had many affairs and contracted syphilis but refused treatment to stop his wife Mae to discover the affair. He later developed neurosyphilis, which forced his mental capacity to revert to a twelve-year-old. While he was imprisoned at Alcatraz, he suffered severe cognitive and behavioral decline, including paranoia, confusion, and an inability to follow instructions. His mental deterioration, particularly the development of paresis, led to his release from prison in 1939.
Alexander the Great
He was reputed to be the greatest warrior of his time. That reputation helped in his military feat. The Egyptians handed hi the throne, and the Persians wanted to join him and refused to obey his masters.
He founded 70 cities. The most famous of these is Alexandria in Egypt (331 BC), but many other cities bore his name, such as Alexandria Ariana (Afghanistan), Alexandria Arachosia (Afghanistan), and Alexandria Eschate (Tajikistan). He also founded cities like Nikaia and Bucephala in India after a major battle, Alexandria Troas in modern-day Turkey, and even founded a city as a teenager, Alexandropolis in Thrace.
Alexander Fleming
Even though Alexander Fleming is known as the Father of penicillin, Ernest Duchesne (30 May 1874 – 12 April 1912) discovered that penicillin kills bacteria thirty years before, but he died before he could prove his theory.
Alexander Graham Bell
Bell taught deaf children how to talk, and he was friends with Helen Keller. Alexander Graham Bell and Helen Keller were lifelong friends, with Bell playing a crucial role in introducing Keller to her renowned teacher, Anne Sullivan, and advocating for her education. Bell, already a respected advocate for the deaf, put Helen Keller's parents in touch with the Perkins Institution for the Blind. From there, Anne Sullivan was sent to Keller's home and began teaching her to write, read, and speak, a breakthrough Bell helped spread to the public. Their connection continued throughout Bell's life, with Keller dedicating her autobiography to him and Bell even setting up a trust fund for her college education at Radcliffe.
Aristotle
He tutores Alexander the Great from ages 13 to 16, instilling a profound love for learning, literature, philosophy, and science. Aristotle aimed to shape Alexander into an enlightened and just ruler, influencing his thinking on leadership, ethics, and governance.
When Alexander died, Aristotle fled to Chalcis on the Eubea Island.
Benjamin Franklin
He invented many objects like bifocals, swimming fins, the Franklin stove, the rocking chair, but he did not patent his inventions.
Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal glasses in 1784 to solve his personal problem of becoming both nearsighted and farsighted with age. He combined the lenses from his two different pairs of spectacles into a single frame, creating a lens with the top half for distance vision and the bottom half for reading.
Benjamin Franklin made a pair of early swimfins (for hands) when he was a young boy living in Boston, Massachusetts near the Charles River; they were two thin pieces of wood, about the shape of an artist's palette, which allowed him to move faster than he usually did in the water.
Buddha
His sister Sundari Nanda became the first nun of Buddhism. She became a nun after the enlightenment of her half-brother and became an arhat.
Carl Jung
Carl Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was one of the first psychologists. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies.
He was married to Emma Rauschenbach (30 March 1882 – 27 November 1955). She was a Swiss Jungian analyst and author. She married Carl Jung, financing and helping him to become the prominent psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, and together they had five children.
His grandfather, Erasmus (12 December 1731 – 18 April 1802), was the most respected British physician of the time. ne of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave-trade abolitionist, inventor, freemason, and poet.
Charles Dickens
His favourite book was David Copperfield, which was the most autobiographical. The novel details David Copperfield's adventures in his journey from infancy to maturity. It was published as a serial in 1849 and 1850 and then as a book in 1850.
Charles had an affair with actress, Ellen Ternan (3 March 1839 – 25 April 1914) , and he left Catherine, villifying her in public.
Christopher Columbus
Bjarni Herjolfsson (10th century) reached America 500 years before Columbus set foot in the continent. He is believed to be the first known European discoverer of the mainland of the Americas, which he sighted in 986.
Columbus's brother, Barrtholomew (c. 1461 – 12 August 1514) , was an explorer and mapmaker, and he was kidnapped by pirates but managed to escape.
Dalai Lama
Tenzin Gyatso (born 6 July 1935) is the fourteenth incarnation of the original Lama. He was selected as the tulku of the 13th Dalai Lama in 1937, and formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in 1939.
The first Dalai Lama was Gendun Drup (1391–1474) in 1391.
Dr Seuss
His real name is Theodor Geisel (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991), and he published over 40 books. His work includes many of the most popular children's books of all time, selling over 600 million copies and being translated into more than 20 languages by the time of his death.[
Edgar Allan Poe
The Murders of the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe is the model for detective stories such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. It was published in Graham's Magazine in 1841.
Elizabeth I
She turned down proposals from the king of Spain, the king of Sweden and the Archduke of Austria.
Philip of Spain had been married to Elizabeth's Catholic half-sister, Mary I, and proposed to Elizabeth after Mary's death, which she rejected, leading to long-term hostility and the eventual Spanish Armada.
Queen Elizabeth I of England was courted by Erik XIV, the King of Sweden, who sent a proxy to press his suit but never got a firm answer from Elizabeth, who showed no interest in marrying and preferred to remain single.
Elizabeth I was courted by Archduke Charles of Austria (son of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I) in the 1560s, but negotiations for their marriage ultimately failed due to religious differences and the Emperor's insistence that Charles, as Elizabeth's widower, would succeed her on the English throne. Charles's strong Catholic faith was a significant obstacle, as Elizabeth, a Protestant, could not allow a Catholic monarch and his court to practice their religion publicly in England.
Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480 – 27 April 1521)
For his circumnavigation he had five ships with 256 sailors. Magellan died when a tribe attacked him and his men when he tried to convert them into Catholicism.
Florence Nightingale (12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910)
She had a great influence in healthcare. ightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. She significantly reduced death rates by improving hygiene and living standards.
He revealed that the moon had craters.
He discovered Jupiter's moons, Io, Europa, Callilster and Ganymede, in 1610.
Before Galileo was buried, Giovianni Targioni Tozzetti sold his ginger, thumb and tooth. His middle finger can be seen in Museo Galileo in Florence.
Genghis Khan
He attacked and destroyed the Tatar tribe for killing his father.
He also invaded Zhodu in China and killed so many people that the bodies looked like mountains. Genghis Khan captured and sacked the Jin capital of Zhongdu (modern-day Beijing) in 1215, a pivotal moment in the Mongol conquest of China. The siege and fall of Zhongdu, where residents resorted to cannibalism due to starvation, forced the Jin emperor to flee south and relocate the capital, significantly weakening the Jin dynasty and paving the way for further Mongol expansion.
One of his daughters married Toquchar. When Toquchar was murdered by a Nishapur archer, Genghis Khan killed over a million poeple in Nishapul. In 1221, after the death of Tuqachar, the husband of Genghis Khan's daughter, the entire city of Nishapur was destroyed by the Mongols over the course of 10 days. Genghis Khan's daughter requested the death of every resident of the city as vengeance for her husband's death. In order to be sure that no wounded would survive the massacre, the Khan's troops killed and beheaded most of the population of the city, and their skulls were reputedly piled in pyramids by the Mongols. Women, Infants, children, and even cats and dogs were among the beheaded. It is estimated that potentially up to 1,747,000 people were slaughtered.
He killed 100,000 people in Samarkand City and destroyed the city when they conquered the area in 1220, and much of its historic architecture was reduced to ruins, with only fragments of the walls remaining.
His real name was Grigori Yefimovich Norvych. A group of nobles led by Prince Felix Yusupov decided that Rasputin's influence over Alexandra threatened the Russian Empire. Rasputin was murdered during the early morning on 30 December 1916 at the home of Prince Yusupov. He died of three gunshot wounds, one of which was a close-range shot to his forehead.
Guy Fawkes
Guy Fawkes fought in the Spanish War against the Netherlands. The Spanish war against the Netherlands was known as the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648), a conflict for Dutch independence from the Habsburg rule of Philip II of Spain.
The conspirators to blow up the Houses of Parliament gathered in the Duck and Drake in the Strand, London.
Lord Monteagle (1575 – 1 July 1622) received an anonymous letter warning him to stay away from the Houses of Parliament.
Hannibal Barca (247 – between 183 and 181 BC)
He was known as the father of Strategy and for crossing the Alps in 218 BC.
During the Battle of Eurymedon in 190BC, Hanibal catapulted pots full of snakes at King Eumenes II's ships. The Battle of the Eurymedon was a double battle, taking place both on water and land, between the Delian League of Athens and her Allies, and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I. It took place in either 469 or 466 BCE, in the vicinity of the mouth of the Eurymedon River.
Hannibal's greatest victory was in the Battle of Cannae. The Battle of Cannae was a key engagement of the Second Punic War between the Roman Republic and Carthage, fought on 2 August 216 BC near the ancient village of Cannae in Apulia, southeast Italy. The Carthaginians and their allies, led by Hannibal, surrounded and practically annihilated a larger Roman and Italian army under the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro.
Harriet Tubman (c. March 1822 – March 10, 1913)
Her real name was Araminta Ross. She was born a slave and married a free man, John Tubman. Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad.
Henry Ford
He built his own steam machine at the age of fifteen.
He attempted to build a city called Fordlandia in the Amazon. It was established by American industrialist Henry Ford in the Amazon Rainforest in 1928 as a prefabricated industrial town intended to be inhabited by 10,000 people to secure a source of cultivated rubber for the automobile manufacturing operations of the Ford Motor Company in the United States.
Herod the Great
He reigned as King of Judea for over three decades.
Phasael, his brother, was governor of Jerusalem. Both Phasael and Herod began their careers under their father, Antipater, who was appointed procurator of Judea for the Roman Republic by Julius Caesar. Antipater appointed Phasael to be governor of Jerusalem, and Herod governor of Galilee.
Herod executed his family, including his wife, Mariamne I (d. 29 BCE).
Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC)
He is considered teh first historian. He wrote the Histories, a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars, among other subjects such as the rise of the Achaemenid dynasty of Cyrus.
He was the first doctor to explain how the human body works. He is traditionally referred to as the "Father of Medicine" in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field, such as the use of prognosis and clinical observation, the systematic categorization of diseases, and the formulation of humoral theory.
No comments:
Post a Comment