UNKNOWN HISTORY OF WORLD

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A portrait taken of a woman while she was mid-sneeze (1900).

on August 07, 2019

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A mathematician’s life work was reduced to 40 seconds

7 November 1946: a utility model of the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) being built at Welwyn Garden City by Dr Andrew Donald Booth. (Keystone/Getty Images) Schoolmaster and amateur mathematician William Shanks (1812–82) spent the greater part of his life working out the value of pi (the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter) to 707 decimal places. More than 60 years after his death, mathematician DF Ferguson, using a mechanical calculator, pointed out that he had got the last 180 of these decimal places wrong. In the late 1940s an ENIAC computer took 70 hours to calculate 2,037 digits of Pi. In 1958 an IBM computer did in 40 seconds what Shanks had done in a lifetime. The millionth digit of pi was found in 1973 and the billionth by 1995.

Boston witnessed a ‘toffee-apple’ tsunami

This image depicts the widespread damage in Boston’s North End caused by the explosion of a molasses tank in January 1919. (The Boston Globe via Getty Images) On Wednesday 15 January 1919 in Boston, Massachusetts, a 90-foot wide cast iron tank containing two-and-a-half million gallons of crude molasses (for rum manufacture) exploded, probably because its contents had expanded during a rapid overnight rise in temperature. The tank, belonging to the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, was set 50 feet above street level; its entire contents spilled within a few seconds and with no warning. The resulting thick, sticky “wall of molasses”, which at times was up to 15 feet high, ran through the streets, reaching a speed of 35mph. It demolished buildings, tearing them from their foundations; it carried off vehicles and drowned horses. People who tried to outrun the wave were engulfed and drowned where they fell. In all, 21 people were killed and 150 injured (arriving at...

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A portrait taken of a woman while she was mid-sneeze (1900).

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