All posts tagged: 19thcentury

The Steampunk Clocks of 19th-Century Paris: Discover the Ingenious System That Revolutionized Timekeeping in the 1880s

The Steampunk Clocks of 19th-Century Paris: Discover the Ingenious System That Revolutionized Timekeeping in the 1880s

Published by José

A mid­dle-class Parisian liv­ing around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry would have to bud­get for ser­vices like not just water or gas, but also time. Though elec­tric clocks had been demon­strat­ed, they were still a high-tech rar­i­ty; installing one in the home would have been com­plete­ly out of the ques­tion. If you want­ed to syn­chro­nize time­keep­ing across an entire major city, it made more sense to use a proven, reli­able, and much cheap­er infra­struc­ture: pipes full of com­pressed air. Paris’ pneu­mat­ic postal sys­tem had been in ser­vice since 1866, and in 1877, Vien­na had demon­strat­ed that the same basic tech­nol­o­gy could be used to run clocks. “The idea was to have a mas­ter clock in the cen­ter of Paris that would send out a pulse each minute to syn­chro­nize every clock around the city,” writes Ewan Cun­ning­ham at Pri­mal Neb­u­la, on a com­pan­ion page to the Pri­mal Space video above. “The clocks wouldn’t have to be pow­ered, the bursts of air would sim­ply move all the clocks in the sys­tem for­ward at the same …

How 19th-century Spiritualists ‘canceled’ the idea of hell to address social and political concerns

How 19th-century Spiritualists ‘canceled’ the idea of hell to address social and political concerns

Published by Sam

(The Conversation) — Between Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, drivers pass a billboard on Interstate 71 that has achieved some internet fame. Since 2004, a black sign has risen from this flat stretch of highway declaring “HELL IS REAL.” The H in “Hell” is painted in red, a color Christians have long associated with sin and Satan. The developer who erected the warning, Jimmy Harston, has similar signs scattered across the Midwest, including ones that ask, “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?” For years, this confrontational sign was mostly a local attraction. But it gained wider notoriety when Ohio’s two Major League Soccer teams, Columbus Crew and FC Cincinnati, dubbed their 2017 matchup “Hell is Real.” The sign has now spawned TikTok content, T-shirt designs, mugs and decals. But it also reflects a genuine belief in hell held by a majority of Americans today, though the numbers are slipping. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 59% of respondents believe in hell, while 67% believe in heaven. The numbers for hell belief are far …

The bombastic 19th-century anti-vaxxer who fueled Montreal’s smallpox epidemic

The bombastic 19th-century anti-vaxxer who fueled Montreal’s smallpox epidemic

Published by skeptic

This article was originally featured on MIT Press Reader. This article is excerpted from Sabrina Sholts’s book “The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from Our Bodies to Our Beliefs.“ “VACCINATE! VACCINATE!! VACCINATE!!! THERE’S MONEY IN IT!!! TWENTY THOUSAND VICTIMS!!! will be Vaccinated within the next ten days in this City under the present ALARM!!! That will put $10,000 into the pockets of the Medical Profession.” In case all the exclamation points and capitalized letters didn’t do the trick, Alexander Milton Ross embellished his poster with a large drawing of a police officer restraining a mother while Death vaccinated her child. It was terrifying, no doubt. For extra emphasis, the police officer held a piece of paper that read “Vaccination for the Jenner-ation of Disease,” a reference to the English physician Edward Jenner, who developed and promoted vaccination. In 1885, Canada had no greater adversary of smallpox vaccination than Ross, an Anglo-Canadian physician and naturalist whose medical training was informed by the sanitary movement of the 19th century. Opposed to the germ theory emerging in …

19th-century physics seemed complete. Kelvin thought otherwise

19th-century physics seemed complete. Kelvin thought otherwise

Published by skeptic

Key Takeaways In the late 19th century, physicists came to grips with electricity and magnetism. Further discoveries surrounding the atom led some to believe they were close to understanding the “grand underlying principles” of physics in their entirety. However, Lord Kelvin and others perceived two “clouds” looming over the horizon of physics. This has been adapted from QUANTA and FIELDS: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll with permission of Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. © 2024 by Sean Carroll As the nineteenth century drew to a close, you would have forgiven physicists for hoping that they were on track to understand everything. The universe, according to this tentative picture, was made of particles that were pushed around by fields. The idea of fields filling space had taken off throughout the 1800s. Earlier, Isaac Newton had presented a beautiful and compelling theory of motion and gravity, and Pierre-Simon Laplace had shown how we could reformulate that theory in terms of a gravitational field stretching …

The 19th-Century Novel That Reaffirmed My Zionism

The 19th-Century Novel That Reaffirmed My Zionism

Published by skeptic

I’m a Zionist who often walks through the campus of Columbia University, which since October 7 means I feel like Dr. Evil in a frumpy sweater. The protest chant du jour is “Min el-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya” (“From water to water, Palestine will be Arab”);  a recent sign of note expresses support for the Houthis, the terrorist group whose motto includes the phrase “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews.” I put myself through this because I write in the Columbia library and you court bad luck when you change a writing routine. But the slogans get to me. So recently I decided to boost my morale with Zionist works of art, preferably of the escapist variety. I thought about binge-watching Fauda, but the hairbreadth escapes from Hamas arch-villains are too stressful. As it happens, though, I was already reading a Zionist novel. It dates from 1876, and I was vaguely aware that it had a Zionist angle but hadn’t anticipated just how soaring its vision of Jewish ingathering would …

pro-slavery views of prominent 19th-century cleric raise questions about his educational legacy

pro-slavery views of prominent 19th-century cleric raise questions about his educational legacy

Published by skeptic

One of the comforting stories the British told themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries was that they were implacably opposed to slavery. Britons had decided “that the disgrace of slavery should not be suffered to remain part of our national system”, or so Lord Stanley, the colonial secretary at the moment of abolition, maintained. It was a claim willingly accepted by later generations. The 1833 Act that abolished slavery in Britain’s Atlantic empire reflected the undivided national will. But recent scholarship casts doubt on that verdict. The West Indian planters, who held hundreds of thousands in bondage, were well-connected and influential. The freeing of their captive workers did not seem to them inevitable. Many abolitionists thought the same, despairing at the entrenched power of the slave masters. When slavery went, it went because a series of political crises in Britain splintered the pro-slavery Tory coalition that had dominated politics for decades. It ended too because resistance by the enslaved in the Caribbean convinced legislators in London that slavery was no longer sustainable. But not …