History of Tobacco

Tobacco is derived from the leaves of the genus Nicotiana, a plant from the night-shade family, indigenous to North and South America. Tobacco is thought to have been cultivated in Americas since 6000 BC.

Americas Indigenous Americans began smoking and using tobacco enemas during circa 1 BCE. Archeological studies suggest the use of tobacco in around first century BC, when Maya people of Central America used tobacco leaves for smoking, in sacred and religious ceremonies. It then later started spreading as far as high up to the Mississippi Valley with the Maya community migrating from down south of America, between 470 and 630 AD.

The first Europeans to smoke were members of Columbus’ crew when they reached Cuba in 1492. In the same year, Christopher Columbus and his crew returned to Europe from the Americas with the first tobacco leaves and seeds ever seen on the continent. Within 150 years of Columbus’s finding “strange leaves” in the New World, tobacco was being used around the globe.

The British first obtained their tobacco by plundering Spanish ships en route back from America. Sir Francis Drake brought tobacco back from his circumnavigation of the globe in 1580 while some tobacco may have been brought back from the Caribbean in the 1560s. Sir Walter Raleigh brought tobacco back from his first Virginian expedition in 1586.

In the early 1500s Middle East Tobacco introduced when the Turks took it to Egypt.

In United Kingdom in 1833 the phosphorus friction matches introduced on a commercial scale, making smoking more convenient.

Manufactured cigarettes, made by a combination of hand and machine and later by machine alone, were first marketed in England in the 1850s. Their convenience, especially in the trenches in the First World War has resulted in them being the most popular nicotine delivery devices ever since.

In 1913 the Birth of the “modern” cigarette: RJ Reynolds introduced the Camel brand in USA.

Tobacco in many countries is sometimes adopted as a cash crop by the farmers and government treasuries (excise, taxes, etc.), and is also grown for local consumption.
History of Tobacco

Ancient history of clove

Clove is an ancient spice, which is believed to be originated in the first century, before Christ.

A clove tree, known botanically as Eugenia aromatica, may live 100 years. They begin producing fruit at seven years and come into full maturity around 25 years. The average crop yield is eight pounds although each year is different. The trees are indigenous to the Moluccas, also known as the Spice Islands. For a period of time around the 1700's, it looked as if the clove trees would never grow anywhere but the island of Amboina.

The clove has been used in India and China, for over 2,000 years, as a spice to check both tooth decay and counter halitosis that is bad breath. In the north Indian cuisine, it is used in almost every sauce or side dish made, mostly ground up along with other spices.

Pliny the Elder records that the spice was traded from India to Rome in the first century AD, and the earliest mention of cloves in the South Asian texts comes from the first-century BC Ramayana.

The oldest apparent medicinal use of cloves was in China, where it is reported that they were taken for various ailments as early as 240 BC. Cloves were taken over the centuries for diarrhea, most liver, stomach and bowel ailments, and as a stimulant for the nerves.

The first clue about clove’s fragrance was given by the ancient Chinese (207 B.C. to 220 A.D.). At that time, a Chinese Physician wrote that court visitors were required to hold clove in their mouth to prevent the Emperor from visitor’s bad breath.

As early as 200 BC, envoys from Java to the Han-dynasty court of China brought cloves that were customarily held in the mouth to perfume the breath during audiences with the emperor.

Arabic traders brought the buds to Europe in 4th century A.D., and in the seventh and eighth century A.D. Europe, cloves became very popular as a medicinal flower, due to their ability to preserve foods, and mask the smell of poorly-kept foods. Because of the price, they were kept in golden basket, like treasures.

The origin and source of clove was a mystery, until the discovery of Indonesia or Moluccas Island, by Portuguese, in 16th century.

During the late Middle Ages, cloves were used in Europe to preserve, flavor, and garnish food.
Ancient history of clove

Brief history of Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN)

CERN is a laboratory where scientists unite to study the building blocks of matter and the forces that hold them together.

Although scientists had been discussing the possibility of a European physics laboratory for some years, the idea was first voiced publicly in a message from the French physicist Louis de Broglie to the European Cultural Conference in Lausanne in December 1949. The initiative of setting up research organization for studying the nucleus of the atom was made by the French physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Louis de Broglie, in 1949. In Geneva in February 1952, eleven governments signed an agreement setting up a provisional 'Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire' — hence the acronym CERN, to be located at a site near Geneva. Its convention was ratified in 1954, and CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and its first accelerator, a 600 MeV proton Synchrocyclotron, began operation in 1957. One of the first experiment achievements was the long awaited observation of the decay of a pion into an electron and a neutrino.

In 1960s, CERN was leading in neutrino physics benefiting greatly from fast ejection of protons from the synchrotron. The 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron commissioned in 1959 acted as the central hub and it provided an unparalleled variety of particle beams and research possibilities. CERN commissioned the Isotope Separator On-Line (ISOLDE) in 1967 for the study of very short lived nuclei.

The Intersecting Storage Rings came into operation in 1971 with remarkable smoothness, in advance of the schedule and within the authorized budget. The machine was a daring one when it was conceived but so thoroughly was the construction executed that the ISR is widely regarded as the most perfect example to date of the accelerator builder's art.

The most significant work started back in 1968 with the invention of multiwire proportional chambers and drift chambers that revolutionized the electronic particle detectors. Georges Charpak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1992 for this work.

CERN began to gather its momentum with the construction of a seven kilometer Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) in the early 1970s, initially planned for energy 300 GeV. The interconnected, large facilities gave an edge to the particle physics experiments, the construction of the SPS expanded the activities of CERN in the French side, thus residing now at the border of the two countries.

In 1983, for the first time, a Data Communications (DC) Group was set up in the CERN computing division (then "Data-handling Division" or "DD") under David Lord. Before that time, work on computer networking in DD had been carried out in several groups.

In 1984, Carlo Rubbia and Simon van de Meer received the Noble Prize for Physics for their work, which culminated in the discovery of the W-boson and Z boson at CERN in 1983 – the long sought carriers of the weak nuclear force – confirmed the “electroweak” theory unifying weak and electromagnetic forces.

In 1981, the construction of the 27 kilometers long Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) ring started. It was the largest scientific instrument constructed at the time, for initial operating energy of 50 GeV per beam.

In 1990 the World Wide Web was invented at CERN to help particle physicists around the world to communicate. Now CERN is leading work to create a “computing Grid” that will harness vast amounts of computer power through networks across the world.
Brief history of Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN)

Early history of dietary standard

During the 1830s, Boussingault in France, Gerrit Mulder (1802-80) in Holland, and Justus von Liebeig (1803-73) in Germany had all proposed that the nitrogen content of food could served as an indicator of its nutritive value.

In 1847, based on studies of Dutch army rations, Mulder recommended 100 grams of protein daily for laborer and 60 grams for a sedentary person. In 1862 Dr, Edward Smith formulated a new dietary standard at the request of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom. This was expressed as 4300 gram of carbon and 200 gram of nitrogen daily, and it was exemplified in many dietary formulae.

The first organized attempt at developing a dietary standard came as a result of food shortages during World War I when it became necessary for the United States government to devise a rational basis for shipments of food from this country to its allies in Europe.

With limited knowledge at that time of nutrition in general and of human nutrient needs in particular, recommendations could be made only for energy and with reservations for protein.

Between 1920 and 1940, rapid progress was made in advancing knowledge of the newly discovered essential nutrients. The knowledge needed for establishing dietary standards was becoming available.

Beginning in 1938, Health Canada published dietary standards called Recommended Nutrient Intakes (RNIs). In the United States, the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) were first published in 1941.
Early history of dietary standard

The Bohemian Revolt

In 1526, Ferdinand I, the ruler of Austria, had conquered Bohemia and imposed the rule of the Roman Catholic Habsburg dynasty over the Kingdom.

In 1618, in what is known as the Bohemian Revolt, Protestant Bohemians attempted to rid their kingdom of Catholic rule by the Habsburgs.

The Bohemian Revolt against the Holy Roman Empire began successfully. The revolt was not a popular uprising, but an aristocratic coup led by a minority of desperate militant Protestants.

In May 1618 in Prague, a group of noblemen marched to the royal palace, found two king’s chief advisers and hurled them out of an upper story window. The official’s lives, if not their dignity, were preserved by the pile of manure in which they landed. This incident came to be known as The Defenestration of Prague.

This initiate a Protestant counter offensive throughout the Habsburg lands. Fear of Ferdinand’s policies led to Protestant uprisings in Hungary, as well as Bohemia. Those who seized control of government declared Ferdinand deposed and the throne vacant.

When Emperor Mathias died in 1619, the stalemate broken, Ferdinand succeeded to Imperial title as Ferdinand II (1619 – 1637) and Ferdinand V, one of the Protestant electors, accepted the Bohemian crown.

The Bohemian crisis led the Hapsburgs straight into the Thirty Years’ War. This means that the major international conflict of the seventeenth century and perhaps altogether the major conflict in European history between the Crusades and the Napoleonic wars, started as a domestic affair within one of the Hapsburg domains. The Battle of White Mountain was the first major battle of the Thirty Years’ War. It ended the Protestant Bohemian Revolt and led to the subjugation of Bohemia until the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918.
The Bohemian Revolt

History of painting art in Greece

The earliest settlers of Greece probably learned painting from the Phoenicians and employed it after the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Phoenician manner, on pottery, terra-cotta slabs and rude sculpture.

The Greek myths and legends were a vast source of subjects for narrative painting. These tales, many of which can be traced back to the Akkadians, were the result of mixing Doric and Ionic deities and heroes into the pantheon of Olympian gods and Homeric sagas.

Certain themes were taken from the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’ as frequently shown as, afterward, the Annunciation in Italian Painting.

The traditional subjects, the Centaurs and Lapiths, the Amazon War, Theseus and Adriane, Perseus and Andromeda, were frequently depicted.

The vase painting arose 900 BC with the Geometric period. Figures were black silhouettes formed by circles, triangles and squares.

In Archaic black and red figure vase painting males and females are presented in mythological or everyday scenes.

According to the literary sources Greek wall painting did not come into its own until about 475 – 450 BC after the Persian Wars. During this period artist gradually discovered how to model figures and objects and how to create a sense of spatial depth.
History of painting art in Greece

History of Nokia

Nokia is a Finnish company that since 1995 has become a global leader in the production of cellular phone. For most of its history, Nokia grew as a conglomerate of three very different businesses of which the first was started in the town of Nokia, named after the river running through it.

Nokia is an old Finnish industry; it origin are traced to 1865 when an engineer named Fredrik Idestam built a pulp mill on a river in southwest Finland to produce paper. A small town eventually grew up around this mill site, and a company formed and achieved success in the production of paper and cardboard products.

In 1966 Nokia entered the electronics field. Initially it employed only 460 people and it was the country’s fourth largest employer in electronics. 1966 was also the year that Nokia’s three industries – forest products, rubber, and cable – merged. As late as the early 1980s Nokia was better known as a producer of rubber boots and toilet paper.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Nokia pursued an active acquisition policy and sought a refashion itself in several ways. The company’s strategy sought to develop a corporate structure modeled after General Electric. One of these was the purchase of Luxor, television maker.

Nokia first established itself as a mobile telephone producer with the creation of the NMT zone.

International success finally came in 1984, when the Mobira Talkman, a portable cellular phone, came on the market and captured attention as a result of its innovativeness.

In 1992, Nokia decided on a new radical strategy. Nokia would become a mobile-phone pure play and sell off all other non-mobile phone assets, Nokia’s core business would henceforth be technology, not paper products, and not even computer or television technologies.

This decision came as Nokia launched its 2100 series GSM cell phone, which was an incredible success. Nokia manufactured and sold 20 million. In the year 200o, it was ranked fifth among the world’s 10 most valuable brand names - the only non-American company on the list.

On 2 September 2013, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Nokia's mobile device in a deal worth €3.79bn, together with another €1.65 bn to license Nokia's portfolio of patents for 10 years; a deal totaling at over €5.4bn.
History of Nokia 

Cocoa drinks in Europe

The first European to discover cocoa was Columbus although the Spaniard Hernand Cortes was the first person to bring the cocoa seed back to Spain in 1519, within the reign of King Phillip III.

Drinking chocolate was initially very much the drink of the Catholic aristocracy and became associated in the minds of the Protestants North with the idle rich.

It was not until 1657 however, that cocoa was introduced to England. It became a trend in London in the 1700s; English will added milk to the chocolate and served after dinner.

In the eighteenth century chocolate started to become available to more classes of society with the establishment of chocolate houses in London.

The eighteenth century also saw the English mixing brick dust with their chocolate to thicken it, a habit that was stopped in 1727 when Nicholas Sanders mixed chocolate with milk creating the first hot chocolate.

In 1828, Dutch chemist, Coenraad Johannes Van Houten, invented the way forward by extracting the butterfat (cocoa butter) from the bean therefore making the drink smooth and tastier.

In 1926 Hershey capitalized in the soda fountain and ice cream parlor boom by marketing cocoa syrup, renamed chocolate syrup in time to compete with Bosco Chocolate Syrup for hearts and wallets of the baby boomers of the post-World War II generation.
Cocoa drinks in Europe

Napoleon at war

In 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte managed to capture Italian city states such as Venice, Milan and Mantua and by 1798 Napoleon finally conquering the entire Italian peninsula. At the end of 1799, he sized power by force.

Napoleon was at war or preparing for war during his entire reign. He certainly seemed up to the task of defeating the European powers. He created a sprawling empire in Europe between 1802 and 1812 through military conquest and alliances.

As the wars with leading powers of Europe continued, Napoleon proved to be a brilliant military strategist and political leader.

By 1802, he had signed favorable treaties with both Austria and Great Britain. He appeared to establish France as a dominant power in Europe. But the peace was short-lived.

In 1803 France embarked on an eleven year period of continuous war: under Napoleon command, the French army delivered defeat after defeat to the European powers. Austria fell in 1805, Prussian in 1806, and the Russian armies of Alexander I were defeated at Friedland in 1807.

In August of 1806, while in Germanies, Napoleon dismantled the old Holy Roman Empire. In October, two separate French armies, one directly under Napoleon’s field command – defeated two Prussian armies, one at Jena in Thuringia and the second near Auerstadt. By month’s end, the French marched into the city of Berlin, the Prussian capital.

In 1807 Napoleon invaded Spain and he drive out British expeditionary forces intent on invading French. Spain became a satellite kingdom in French Empire, although the conflict continued.

By 1810, the French leader was a master of the continent. French armies had extended revolutionary reforms and legal codes outside French and brought with them civil equality and religious tolerance. At that times Great Britain was the only remaining European power at war with Napoleon.

They also drained defeated countries of their resources and had inflicted the horrors of wars with army’s occupation, force billeting and pillage. Napoleon’s empire extended across Europe, with only a diminished Austria, Prussia, and Russian remaining independent.

Napoleon was successful on the battlefield because he developed tactics which brought him victories. His men move d about without connections to supply lines, living off the land. This allowed his army to move swiftly without being hindered by slow moving supply wagons.

Napoleon at war

War in Europe in 16th century

“War is one of the scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men”, wrote Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), the French Minister who played no small part in spreading the scourge.

War usually undertaken to gain additional territory or to reclaim lost territory, with rights of inheritance and claims through marriage or treaty given as the reasons for fighting when negotiations failed to produce a settlements of conflicting claims.

War affected every, member of the society from combatants to civilians. There were no innocent bystanders.

The early part of the century had witnessed the dynastic struggle between the Hapsburgs and the House of Valois as well as beginnings of the religious struggle between Catholic and Protestants.

But the wars that dominated Europe from 1555 to 1648 brought together the worst of both of these conflicts. War was fought on a larger scale, it was more brutal and more expensive, and it claimed more victims.

It brought ruin, misery, and displacement to innocent masses, especially to the poor and deprived. Some of the major wars were: Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between England and France, Germany experienced three different civil wars within three decades (1522-1555), the Dutch fought the Spanish (catholic) occupation for nearly nine hundred years and finally won independent in 1648.

During this century war extended thorough out the Continent.

Military technology increased in sophistication and expense following the ‘gunpowder revolution’ in the 14th-16th centuries and the oceanic explorations of 15th century and as highly trained and costly state based standing armies and navies were developed from the 16th century.

In the 16th century, the rulers of France, England and the Holy Roman Empire – who during part of the 16th century included the King of Spain, dominated warfare in international military campaign.

By end of the 16th century there were three great , centralized, gunpowder kingdoms in Europe, France, Spain, England, a diffuse but powerful Habsburg empire in central Europe and a number of smaller states - Sweden, The Netherlands – whose local power could not be ignored.
War in Europe in 16th century