English Channel Tunnel

Plans to build a cross-Channel fixed link appeared as early as 1802, but British political and media pressure over the compromising of national security had disrupted attempts to build one. It was not until the late 20th century, though, that the necessary technology was developed.

In 1880, the first real attempt was made by Colonel Beaumont, who bore a tunnel more than a mile long before abandoning the project.

The idea was discussed several times during the 20th century but only in the 1960s did dialogue between France and the UK result in a call for proposals, leading to the drafting of a convention in 1972.

In 1986, Britain and France signed a treaty authorizing the construction of a tunnel running between Folkestone, England, and Calais, France. Digging started in 1988, with tunnel boring machines (TBMs) used for all the tunnels. Five TBMs dug from France, six TBMs dug from the UK.

The tunnel was officially opened for passenger service on May 6, 1994. In 1996, the American Society of Civil Engineers identified the tunnel as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.
English Channel Tunnel

Battle of Poitiers

Fought on 19 September 1356, the Battle of Poitiers was the war between a French army commanded by King John II and an Anglo-Gascon force under Edward, the Black Prince, during the Hundred Years' War.

The Black Prince’s army numbered some 7,000 knights, men-at-arms and archers. Numbers in the French army are uncertain but were probably around 35,000. The French army comprised a contingent of Scots commanded by Sir William Douglas.

In 1355, members of the Gascon nobility sailed to England to inform their overlord, King Edward III, that ever since 1352, Edward’s hereditary lands in Gascony had been under continuous attack by the French King’s lieutenant in the southwest, Count of Armagnac Jean I.

In early 1356 the Duke of Lancaster landed with a second force in Normandy and began to advance south, while Edward, Prince of Wales, the "Black Prince," set out from English-held Aquitaine in southwest France to raid central France. Edward III was engaged in fighting in Scotland.

The new king of France, John I, led an army against Lancaster forcing him to withdraw towards the coast. King John then turned to attack the Black Prince, who was advancing north east towards the Loire pillaging the countryside as he went.

Marching in three parallel columns to maximize destruction, the raiding force went 100 miles South before swinging East, crossing the river Gers, and entering Armagnac territory. There, Edward’s army began mercilessly slaughtering every living creature it came across, torching everything that would burn and smashing everything that would not.

In early September 1356 King John reached the Loire with his large army, just as the Black Prince turned back towards Bordeaux. The French army marched hard and overtook the unsuspecting English force at Poitiers on Sunday 18th September 1356.

At first, a representative of the Pope, one Cardinal Talleyrand de Perigord, tried to negotiate a deal between the two sides but neither could agree terms. Both sides used the breathing-space to strengthen their position: Edward by digging trenches and forming barricades with his supply wagons, John by assembling more troops.

The Black Prince’s army camped in a forest near Poitiers for the night. They emerged the next day and seized a hilltop position about a mile in front of the French, who had spent the night camped in battle formation.

The English army was an experienced force; many of the archers veterans of Creçy, ten years before, and the Gascon men-at-arms commanded by Sir John Chandos, Sir James Audley and Captal de Buche, all old soldiers. The French, although they had some archers, continued to rely on crossbowmen as firing a crossbow required less training to use, but the weapon had a seriously slower firing rate than the longbow, about one bolt to five arrows in terms of speed of delivery.

The French attack began in the early morning of Monday 19th September 1356 with a mounted charge by a forlorn hope of 300 German knights commanded by two Marshals of France; Barons Clermont and Audrehem. The force reached a gallop, closing in to charge down the road into the center of the English position. The attack was a disaster.

Eventually the French king and his bodyguard were overwhelmed. Jean was taken into captivity and held until a vast ransom was paid in 1360, but many of his leading nobles had lost their lives. The English and Gascons decisively won the battle. A major consequence of the battle was that it allowed Edward III to keep 25% of France under the 1360 CE Treaty of Brétigny. The battle also cemented the reputation of the Black Prince as one of the greatest of all medieval knights.
Battle of Poitiers

Sir Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis (1906-88) - British car designer

Sir Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis was British car designer, who was responsible for both the Morris Minor and Mini. He was knighted in 1969.

He was born on November 18, 1906, in Smyrna, Asia Minor. His father was of Greek descent but was a naturalized British subject in Turkey who ran a marine engineering business.

In 1922 the family found themselves amongst the many evacuees fleeing the conflict between the Turks and Greeks.

Educated at the Battersea Polytechnic, Issigonis began his working life in 1933 as a draughtsman at Rootes, the Coventry car manufacturer.

A period as an enthusiastic sports driver in the 1930s and 1940s familiarized him with all aspects of car design.

In 1936 he moved to Morris Minor at Cowley.  Issigonis‘s first major triumph came with his Morris Minor in 1948. Starkly functional, it was greeted with little enthusiasm by Morris sales staff. It went on, however, to sell 1,293,331 models before it was withdrawn in 1971.

Issigonis dislike mergers, and after merger of Morris with Austin to form the British Motor Corporation he left to join Alvis in 1952. The car he designed there, a V8 saloon was built as a prototype but was never put into production.

Issigonis returned to BMC to become Technical Director in 1955, and he took his ideas further in 1959 with his famous design, the Mini Minor. Despite some initial faults there was never any doubt that Issigonis’s model would sweep the world.

He died on October 2, 1988.
Sir Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis (1906-88) - British car designer

Biography of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890 – 1962), British statistician and geneticist who pioneered the application of statistical procedure to the design of scientific experiments. He received a knighthood in 1952.

Twin sons were born in February 17, 1890, London, England, to Fisher’s father, a British auctioneer. One of them soon died, and Ronald was survivor.

Studied at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, Fisher graduated in mathematics in 1913 and spent two years as a statistician with an investment company. Fisher’s interests were broad, including astronomy, mathematics, physics and biology.

In 1918 Fisher published the results of his statistical analysis of characters that show continuous variation, such as human stature. Fisher argued that the effects of dominance and gene interaction would confuse the actual genetic similarity between relatives,

Too short sighted for military services, he taught at Rugby School for the duration of World War 1.

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher

Fisher started his mathematical career when he joined Rothamsted Experimental Station in 1919, with the task of sorting and analyzing numerous field data.

By his treatment (partition) of the statistical variance, he was able to distinguish between variation due to environmental factors and that due to genetic factors; the latter were confirmed as being largely determined by the cumulative effects of many separate genes, each inherited according to Mendelian principle.

Fisher subsequently did much to improve experimental methodology by introducing the concepts of random sampling and the technique of analysis of variance, which qualifies sources of variations in an experiment. In the paper ‘On the Mathematical Foundation of Theoretical Statistics’ (1922) he developed a sensible theory of estimation.

His books notably Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1925), The Design of Experiment (1935), and Statistical Tables (1938), form the foundation of statistical analysis in modern biological experimentation.

Fisher’s mathematical study of genes and their mutations populations demonstrated how Mendelian genetics is consistent with the Darwinian view of evolution by natural selection, making The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930) one of the seminal works of neo-Darwinism.

Fisher became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1929. In 1933 he was appointed Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London, and thereafter professor of genetics at Cambridge University (1943 – 57) until his retirement.

From 1960 he spent the remainder of his life working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Adelaide, Australia.
Biography of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher

Biography of John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)

John Desmond Bernal, British physicist. He was a pioneer of diffraction X-ray method. His interest of biology increased during the 1930s and the 1940s, probably in relation with the study of biological molecules (peptides, nucleic acid, etc) with this new physical method.

Bernal’s family were farmers in Nenagh, now in the Republic of Ireland. Brought up as a Catholic, he was educated at Stonyhurst and Cambridge, where he abandoned Catholicism and became (1923) an active member of the Communist Party.

In Cambridge, his first work on crystallography was done as an undergraduate on the mathematical theory of crystal symmetry.

After Cambridge, Bernal spent four years at the Royal Institution in London learning the practical details of X-ray crystallography from Sir William Bragg.

When he returned to Cambridge in 1927 he planned a research program to reveal the complete three-dimensional structure of complex molecules, including those found exclusively in living organisms, by the techniques of X-ray crystallography.

He first suggested the covalent nature of the metallic bond and wrote a masterly article on X-rays and crystal structure for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Later he used X-ray analysis to help inorganic chemists puzzle out the formulae of the sterols.

In 1933 Bernal succeeded in obtaining photographs of single crystal proteins and went on to study the tobacco mosaic virus. It was not, however, Bernal’s own achievements in crystallography, as much as those of his pupils and colleagues, such as Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz, that brought about the revolution in biochemistry and launched the subject of molecular biology.

In 1937 Bernal was appointed professor of physics at Birkbeck College, London. His attempts to develop the department were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Despite his known membership of the Communist party and against the advice of the security forces, Bernal spent much of the war as adviser to Earl Mountbatten.

In 1945 he returned to Birkbeck College and in 1963 was appointed to a chair of crystallography. In the same year he suffered a stroke and although he continued to work for some time, a second and more severe stroke in 1965 paralyzed him down one side and virtually ended Bernal’s scientific life.

His books include The Social Function of Science (1939), Science In History (1958), and the Origin of Life (1967).

Bernal speculated about the colonization of space and the construction of very large spherical space settlements in his futuristic 1929 work The Work, the Flesh and the Devil.
Biography of John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)

Muffin in history

Muffin recipes first began to appear in print in the mid 18th century and quickly caught on. The word muffin is derived from the French word moufflet, which is often applied to breads and means soft.

By the 19th century muffin men walked the streets of England at tea time to sell their muffins. They wore trays of English muffins on their heads and rang their bells to call customers to their wares.

English muffin history dates all the way back to the 10th and 11th centuries in Wales. Early English muffins were cooked in muffin rings which were hooplike and placed directly on a stove or the bottom of a skillet. English muffins were made from yeast dough, in contrast to the quick bread muffins served in early America.

American style muffins are 'quick breads' made in individual molds. Quick breads (chemically leavened as opposed to yeast leavened) were not developed until the end of the 18th century. This took place in America, where pearlash was discovered.

Pearlash is a refined form of potash, and it produces carbon dioxide gas in dough. In 'American Cookery' (1796 - the first American cook book) Amelia Simmons published recipes using pearlash, and were exported some 8,000 tons to Europe in 1792. Baking powder was not developed commercially until 1857 (phosphate baking powder).

Muffin became widely used as a breakfast food because they were easy to prepare and cook in a short period of time. Because muffins grew stale so quickly, they were not marketed as  a baked good until the middle of the 20th century.

Three states in the United States of America have adopted official muffins. Minnesota has adopted the blueberry muffin as the official state muffin. Massachusetts in 1986 adopted the Corn Muffin as the official state muffin. Then in 1987 New York took on the Apple Muffin as its official muffin of choice.

Muffins have become increasingly popular as a hot bread served with meals or eaten as a snack. Freshly baked muffins are served in restaurants and bakeries and consumers can buy packaged ready-to-eat muffins from grocery stores and vending machines.

Packaged muffins mixes were introduced to the market place in the 1950’s. Muffins were marketed as an alternative to donuts in the 1960’s.
Muffin in history

Modern history of apple cider

Cider was known and consumed in much of Europe in the 3rd century. In France, Charlemagne enforced laws to promote and control the manufacturer and production of cider.

The first written evidence of cider in the United Kingdom comes from Norfolk, England, in AD 1204, as a record payment. Farms would continue to use cider as payment for workers until the late 1800s, when the British parliament stopped the practice.

In 1588, Julien Le Paulmier, a Norman, publishes a treatise called “De Vino et pomaco”. It contributed to make cider better known and give it the place it deserves as a healthy drink, and praised its medicinal properties. The consumption of cider grew and grew but was then halted several times by permanent state of war.Colonists from Western Europe brought apples to America but Native Americans had already been making a cider from crab apples.

During colonial era, hard apple cider was by far the most popular alcoholic beverage in America far more than whiskey, wine or beer. Hard cider became the traditional drink of New England not long after the first settlers arrived.

Apple cider continued in its popularity into the 1800s due in part to the efforts of the legendary Johnny Appleseed who planted many apple trees in the Midwest. As a result, apple cider brewing spread into that area of the country.

In England around the 18th century about two thousands varieties of apples were grown. Many scientific methods had been developed to improve and speed up the production of cider.

Treatises began to appear in making coder. A Dutch technologist Hermann Boerhaave, found that the rate of acid production in the vinegar process was directly proportional to the amount of surface exposed to air.

Today apple cider vinegar fits in well with the move many people are making toward more healthful, simple lifestyles. It’s readily available, inexpensive, and extremely versatile.
Modern history of apple cider

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963)

Frost, Robert Lee was a United States poet who did much to popularize contemporary poetry. He has been called America’s purest classical lyricist and one of the outstanding poets of the twentieth century. He received forty-four honorary degrees and many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

Frost was born in San Francisco to Isabelle Moodie Frost and William Prescot Frost. After his father’s death from tuberculosis in 1885, Frost moved with his mother and sister to New England, where they settled in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

An inauspicious education at Dartmouth College and Harvard (he never completed a college course to obtain a degree) was followed by various menial jobs and marriage at the age of twenty one. It was not until he took his wife and four children to England in 1912, where he met several of the Georgian poets, that Frost’s talent began to emerge.

In 1894 he published a few poems in The Independent and began corresponding with its literary editor, Susan Hayes Ward.

His first two books of verse, A Boys’ Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were first published after his arrival in England. The latter volume, in particular, gained international following and contained some of Frost’s most widely read poems, including ‘Mending Wall,’ ‘After Apple-Picking’ and ‘The Wood Pie’.

He returned to United States of America in 1915. The collections that followed, Mountain Interval (1916) and New Hampshire (1923), contained some of Frost’s best and most popular poetry. His later books included Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942).

The ironic tone of much of Frost’s poetry, it’s simple language, and conventional manner make him one of the most accessible of modern poets. Through out of his Frost successfully combined a career as poet, farmer, and university professor and is regarded as one of the masters of twentieth century of United States poetry.

He held positions at many colleges, including the University of Michigan, Dartmouth, Harvard and for extended periods, Amherst.

Robert Frost died in Boston and buried in the family plot in Bennington, Vermont.
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963)

History of Birkbeck, University of London

Birkbeck College, can trace their origins to a mechanics’ institute in Glasgow as far back as 1800.

Almost 2,000 people flocked to the Crown & Anchor Tavern on the Strand to witness its launch.

Dr. George Birkbeck was born in Yorkshire but he worked for a time in Glasgow, where his lectures to working men led to the foundation in 1821 of one of the first Mechanics Institutes. In 1823, he founded a similar Institute in London.

In 1907, the London Mechanics’ Institute eventually in 1907 became Birkbeck College. In 1920 Birkbeck College was recognized as a constituent college of London University for both part-time and evening students.

The Institute can be found today just off London’s Gower Street where it continues its tradition of public education under the name of Birkbeck College as part of the University of London.
History of Birkbeck, University of London

History of St. John College, Cambridge

St John’s College, Cambridge, founded in 1511 owed is existence to Bishop John Fisher and Lady Margaret Beaufort, is one of the largest colleges in the University and is home to one of Cambridge’s famous landmarks, the Bridge of Sighs.

At the time of its foundation it took over the buildings and property and many of the duties of an earlier and then a venerable foundation, that of the Hospital of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge. The hospital was dissolved and replaced by the college which inherited its possessions, and the hospital’s cartulary, with a large collection of deeds relating to its lands, remains in the archives of the colleges.

The origin of the old house is obscure, and its earlier history lost, but it seems to have been founded about 1135 by Henry Frost, a burgess of Cambridge.

Lady Margaret Beaufort support for Cambridge began in 1505, when she re-founded God’s House as Christ’s College and it lasted until 1509, when she died.

St. John’s College, which was largely the work of Bishop Fisher, was posthumously created in 1511 in her honor. The college full name is ‘The Master, Fellows and Scholars of the College of St. John the Evangelist on the University of Cambridge'.
History of St. John College, Cambridge

The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China

The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China was founded on 29 December 1853 by a Scot, James Wilson from Hawick. He also founded the eminent financial magazine, the Economist.

James Wilson was from a wealthy family background. His brother established a manufacturing factory, which they dissolved in 1831. Wilson continued in the same line of business and reached a pinnacle of success.

The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China was being established with paid-in capital of 3 million pounds. The first branches opened in April 1858 in Bombay and Calcutta. Shanghai followed that summer and the Singapore and Hong Kong branches in 1859.

The Chartered Bank had arrived in Burma in 1862, just nine years after it formation in London by merchants and shipping interest with a view to financing the trade between Asia and Australia.

The bank’s traditional business was in cotton from Bombay, Indigo and tea for Calcutta, rice form Burma, sugar from Java, tobacco for Sumatra, and silk from Yokohama.

In 1969, Chartered Bank finally merged with Standard Bank of South Africa to form Standard Chartered.
The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China

History of train in England

The earliest railways were built and paid for by the owners of the mines they served.

In 1803 the first public railway was constructed and opened in London. It was a horse drawn which links Surrey and Croydon. The length of this railway is nearly nine miles. The wagons had flat-tyred wheels, making them usable on roads. A horse could haul five loaded 3 tons wagons on the flat.

Richard Trevithick was perhaps the single most important person to forward and demonstrate early steam technology for mobility on land.

He introduced the world’s first steam engine to run successfully on rails in 1804. It was used to haul iron from Merthyr Tydfil to Abercynon.

Steam powered vehicles were a small-scale invention until English engineers George and Robert Stephenson bought their skills to bear. On September 27, 1825, 450 people climbed up open carriages that were hauled along the railroad by the Stephenson’s locomotive called Locomotion. It was the first locomotive for public. 

The world’s first passenger railroad opened in Britain between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830 but not before a famous trial at Rainhill, England in 1829.
History of train in England