History of Tattoo

Humans have marked their bodies with tattoos for thousands of years. These permanent designs—sometimes plain, sometimes elaborate, always personal—have served as amulets, status symbols, declarations of love, signs of religious beliefs, adornments and even forms of punishment. Joann Fletcher, research fellow in the department of archaeology at the University of York in Britain, describes the history of tattoos and their cultural significance to people around the world, from the famous " Iceman," a 5,200-year-old frozen mummy, to today’s Maori.In terms of tattoos on actual bodies, the earliest known examples were for a long time Egyptian and were present on several female mummies dated to c. 2000 B.C. But following the more recent discovery of the Iceman from the area of the Italian-Austrian border in 1991 and his tattoo patterns, this date has been pushed back a further thousand years when he was carbon-dated at around 5,200 years old.

History of Cotton

No one knows exactly how old cotton is. Scientists searching caves in Mexico found bits of cotton bolls and pieces of cotton cloth that proved to be at least 7,000 years old. They also found that the cotton itself was much like that grown in America today.

In the Indus River Valley in Pakistan, cotton was being grown, spun and woven into cloth 3,000 years BC. At about the same time, natives of Egypt’s Nile valley were making and wearing cotton clothing.

Arab merchants brought cotton cloth to Europe about 800 A.D. When Columbus discovered America in 1492, he found cotton growing in the Bahama Islands. By 1500, cotton was known generally throughout the world.

Cotton seed are believed to have been planted in Florida in 1556 and in Virginia in 1607. By 1616, colonists were growing cotton along the James River in Virginia.

Cotton was first spun by machinery in England in 1730. The industrial revolution in England and the invention of the cotton gin in the U.S. paved the way for the important place cotton holds in the world today.

History of Silk

Chinese legend gives the title Goddess of Silk to Lady Hsi-Ling-Shih, wife of the mythical Yellow Emperor, who was said to have ruled China in about 3000 BC. She is credited with the introduction of silkworm rearing and the invention of the loom. Half a silkworm cocoon unearthed in 1927 from the loess soil astride the Yellow River in Shanxi Province, in northern China, has been dated between 2600 and 2300 BC. Another example is a group of ribbons, threads and woven fragments, dated about 3000 BC, and found at Qianshanyang in Zhejiang province. More recent archeological finds - a small ivory cup carved with a silkworm design and thought to be between 6000 and 7000 years old, and spinning tools, silk thread and fabric fragments from sites along the lower Yangzi River – reveal the origins of sericulture to be even earlier. There are many indigenous varieties of wild silk moths found in a number of different countries. The key to understanding the great mystery and magic of silk, and China's domination of its production and promotion, lies with one species: the blind, flightless moth, Bombyx mori. It lays 500 or more eggs in four to six days and dies soon after. The eggs are like pinpoints – one hundred of them weigh only one gram. From one ounce of eggs come about 30,000 worms which eat a ton of mulberry leaves and produce twelve pounds of raw silk. The original wild ancestor of this cultivated species is believed to be Bombyx mandarina Moore, a silk moth living on the white mulberry tree and unique to China. The silkworm of this particular moth produces a thread whose filament is smoother, finer and rounder than that of other silk moths. Over thousands of years, during which the Chinese practiced sericulture utilizing all the different types of silk moths known to them, Bombyx mori evolved into the specialized silk producer it is today; a moth which has lost its power to fly, only capable of mating and producing eggs for the next generation of silk producers.

History of Diamond

The first recorded history of the diamond dates back some 3,000 years to India, where it is likely that diamonds were first valued for their ability to refract light. In those days, the diamond was used in two ways-for decorative purposes, and as a talisman to ward off evil or provide protection in battle.The diamond was also used for some time as medical aid. One anecdote, written during the Dark Ages by St Hildegarde, relates how a diamond held in the hand while making a sign of the cross would heal wounds and cure illnesses. Diamonds were also ingested in the hope of curing sickness. During the early Middle Ages, Pope Clement unsuccessfully used this treatment in a bid to aid his recovery.
Natural History :
When carbon or carbon bearing materials are exposed to high temperature and pressure for an extended period of time, diamonds are formed. Deep within the Earth, there are areas that are thermodynamically favorable for the formation of diamonds, due to the high temperature and pressure found in these regions. Starting approximately 90 miles under the continental crust, with a pressure of 5 gigapascals and a temperature of 1200 degrees Celsius, diamonds are formed. Diamonds tend to grow larger under oceanic crust, after long periods of exposure to the high pressures and temperatures found there.

History of Gold

A child finds a shiny rock in a creek, thousands of years ago, and the human race is introduced to gold for the first time.Gold was first discovered as shining, yellow nuggets. "Gold is where you find it," so the saying goes, and gold was first discovered in its natural state, in streams all over the world. No doubt it was the first metal known to early hominids.

Gold became a part of every human culture. Its brilliance, natural beauty, and luster, and its great malleability and resistance to tarnish made it enjoyable to work and play with.

Because gold is dispersed widely throughout the geologic world, its discovery occurred to many different groups in many different locales. And nearly everyone who found it was impressed with it, and so was the developing culture in which they lived.

History of Earth

Sometimes science deals with incredibly large numbers, sometimes with great distances still other times with infinitely small particles. In science we must expand our conception of reality all the time. One of the very difficult concepts is the understanding of time. Everyone is conscious of the changes in the physical and biological world; they give us an awareness of time. The daily rhythm, the seasons, physical changes throughout a human lifetime are familiar concepts of time to us. Time is measured by change, but where change occurs over millions of years our own perception of time is on unfamiliar territory. To understand the rhythm of change of our planet and the effects it has on life on Earth we have to expand our perception of time. The geological processes that shape the surface of our planet, move the tectonic plates, build mountains and erode them again work over millions of years. These forces provide the ever changing conditions for life, which adapted to those changes. But those changes did not go undetected. Our understanding of Earth has expanded tremendously in the past 100 years, and new technologies have provided further insight into Earth's dynamic and history.

Earth itself acts like a clock, rotating on its axis once every 24 hours. To read Earth's time it is necessary to look at the changes that have been recorded. To identify changes that occurred due to the geological processes of our planet we can look at rocks. They are key to both the past and the nature of processes. Life has managed to leave records of time and the changes it went through time as well. Fossils are the remains of ancient organisms. Some looked very similar to life forms that are still living today. Fossils can be bones, teeth, shells, impressions of plants and even imprints of animal tracks. Fossils within a rock are a type of organic clock that tick by systematic radioactive decay of certain chemical elements, which permit us to measure with remarkable accuracy the number of years that have passed since the minerals in a rock crystallized. Fossils are recorded in rocks much like your footprints are recorded on a beach. As you walk along the beach, if the sand is fine enough and soft enough, you will make footprints. If the wind and waves do not destroy your footprints, they may record your existence well after your passing.

History of Burger

The origin of hamburger is a bit hazy and unclear. This is because there is no proper documentation to give us an idea about how the fast food came into being. Still, many people have claimed that the hamburger 'patty' was first noticed in the medieval times. Tartars (a band of Mongolian and Turkish warriors) used to place pieces of beef under their saddles. Under the weight of the rider and the saddle, the pieces used to turn tender enough to be eaten raw. Thus was born the initial beef ‘patty’.

A food item resembling the present-day burger, to some an extent, reached America around the 19^th century. The dish, called Hamburg style beef, was brought to Hamburg (Germany) from Russia in the 14^th century and when the German immigrants arrived in America, they brought it along with them. With time, the raw, chopped piece of beef evolved into the ‘patty sandwiched in a bun’. Thus, it can be said that America had a major role in giving the world the hamburger, as we know of it today.

History of Golden Ratio

Golden Ratio is a term (with an astounding number of aliases) used to describe aesthetically pleasing proportioning within a piece. (There is, in fact, a mathematical formula with which one can calculate Golden Ratio. Please see the links at right for information on such, from those who are less right-brained than your Guide.)

All math aside, some unknown genius figured out (millennium ago) that, in a work of art or architecture, if one maintained a ratio of small elements to larger elements that was the same as the ratio of larger elements to the whole, the end result was extraordinarily pleasing to the eye. This ratio is a common theme in sacred geometry world-wide.

History of Pi

Pi has been known for almost 4000 years—but even if we calculated the number of seconds in those 4000 years and calculated pi to that number of places, we would still only be approximating its actual value. Here’s a brief history of finding pi:
The ancient Babylonians calculated the area of a circle by taking 3 times the square of its radius, which gave a value of pi = 3. One Babylonian tablet (ca. 1900–1680 BC) indicates a value of 3.125 for pi, which is a closer approximation.
Rhind Papyrus (ca.1650 BC), there is evidence that the Egyptians calculated the area of a circle by a formula that gave the approximate value of 3.1605 for pi.
The ancient cultures mentioned above found their approximations by measurement. The first calculation of pi was done by Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. Archimedes approximated the area of a circle by using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the areas of two regular polygons: the polygon inscribed within the circle and the polygon within which the circle was circumscribed. Since the actual area of the circle lies between the areas of the inscribed and circumscribed polygons, the areas of the polygons gave upper and lower bounds for the area of the circle. Archimedes knew that he had not found the value of pi but only an approximation within those limits. In this way, Archimedes showed that pi is between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71.

History of Photography

First, the name. We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel , who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public. (*1) The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing.
Before mentioning the stages that led to the development of photography, there is one amazing, quite uncanny prediction made by a man called de la Roche (1729- 1774) in a work called Giphantie. In this imaginary tale, it was possible to capture images from nature, on a canvas which had been coated with a sticky substance. This surface, so the tale goes, would not only provide a mirror image on the sticky canvas, but would remain on it. After it had been dried in the dark the image would remain permanent. The author would not have known how prophetic this tale would be, only a few decades after his death.
There are two distinct scientific processes that combine to make photography possible. It is somewhat surprising that photography was not invented earlier than the 1830s, because these processes had been known for quite some time. It was not until the two distinct scientific processes had been put together that photography came into being.
The first of these processes was optical. The Camera Obscura (dark room) had been in existence for at least four hundred years. There is a drawing, dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci; about this same period its use as an aid to drawing was being advocated.
The second process was chemical. For hundreds of years before photography was invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colours are bleached in the sun, but they had made little distinction between heat, air and light.

History of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, 23, founded Facebook while studying psychology at Harvard University. A keen computer programmer, Mr Zuckerberg had already developed a number of social-networking websites for fellow students, including Course match, which allowed users to view people taking their degree, and Face mash, where you could rate people's attractiveness.

In February 2004 Mr Zuckerberg launched "The facebook", as it was originally known; the name taken from the sheets of paper distributed to freshmen, profiling students and staff. Within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up, and after one month, over half of the undergraduate population had a profile.

History of Love Songs

In ancient times, all poetry was sung. The poet is pictured playing a lyre or other instrument. There was no separation of lyrics and melody as we now think of them. Unfortunately none of the melodies for these early love lyrics has survived but it's easy to imagine a softly strummed harp and a husky voice singing the words that have come down to us.

Though they are thousands of years old, the earliest love songs sound so contemporary, so honest, so urgent, they might have been written yesterday. They are proof that human emotions have not changed. When we fall in love today, we feel what men and women felt in centuries past: desire, joy, disappointment, yearning, fulfillment.

So just how far back can we trace love songs? When Pharoah Rameses wanted to tell a beautiful, bronze-skinned Egyptian lady that he found her desirable, did he have a court musician sing something that sounded like "Love Me Tender"? In a way, he did. We have recovered 3500-year-old Egyptian love poems from pieces of papyrus and pottery fragments. They are filled with the language and sentiments we hear in today's pop songs.

History of Colors

Isaac Newton made a study of color starting at the age of 23 in 1666 and developed the useful Newton color circle which gives insight about complementary colors and additive color mixing. He realized that some colors (magenta, purple) could not be produced as spectral colors. One of his contributions was the idea that white light is light containing all wavelengths of the visible spectrum. He demonstrated this fact with experiments on the dispersion of light in glass prisms.
Thomas Young suggested the threefold character of color perception in 1802 and speculated that there were three different types of color sensitive receptors in the eye.
In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell explored the use of three primary colors and realized that no additive combination of three primary colors can cover the entire gamut of perceivable hues. He showed that the set of primaries was not unique, but that spectral primaries more widely separated in wavelength could be used to produce a wider range of perceived hues. He also realized that with some subtraction, the entire gamut of perceived colors could be covered. Maxwell recognized that the chromaticism (hue and saturation) of a colored surface is relatively insensitive to the brightness. Maxwell's work could be considered to be the basis for modern calorimetry.

History of Water

History is, one might say, somewhat waterlogged. Since water is absolutely essential to human life, it should not be surprising that it is an important component of human history. Yet it is surprising how little attention water receives in historical accounts.
Water facilitated relatively rapid transportation prior to about 1850 C.E. In the era of exploration and discovery from the late 15th through the 18th centuries, Europeans explored all the major oceans and seas. Water was also thought to be an essential aspect of imperialism from the 16th century on (this is known the "salt water fallacy," the idea that an empire must be separated from the mother country by an ocean; this is why neither the Russian nor the American continental empires were seen as comparable to the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch empires). The history of exploration and trade remains a major area of historical scholarship dealing with water.
Water was also an important source of power in the period before the Industrial Revolution. Even though steam power made water power less necessary, water remained an essential component in all kinds of manufacturing processes. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, however, water increasingly becomes a hidden factor in human history. For many, it quite literally went underground, hidden from sight until one turned on a faucet or flushed a toilet. Increasing, there was a tendency to view it as something to master and control. This is, of course, in accord with a more general approach to nature as a whole: mastery and control.

History of Cartoons

What may be seen as possibly the earliest political cartoon is an anonymous woodcut entitled Le Revers du Jeu des Suysses (The Other Side of the Swiss Game), produced in 1499. In this, the pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the kings of France and England can be seen playing cards while, under the table, a Swiss soldier stacks the decks in a satirical commentary on French ambitions in Italy (the support of elite Swiss soldiers was essential to France). At about the same time, Pope Alexander VI was depicted as a devil and in another drawing a Jesuit priest is given a wolf’s head. Perhaps the most memorable caricature of this period—and one exactly datable and attributable to a known artist—was an anti-Protestant woodcut by Erhard Schoen of 1521, showing the Devil playing a pair of bagpipes, the bellows of which are depicted as the head of Martin Luther.

A number of other artists of this period also produced heavily allegorical and often fantastical drawings which have resonances in the modern cartoon. However, it was in Italy at the hands of the Carracci family and others such as Pier Leone Ghezzi—the first artist to earn a living solely by this kind of work—that the modern cartoon can be said to have been moulded. It was also in Italy that these early caricaturas flourished, and almost uniquely so until collections of such drawings (especially those of Ghezzi) found their way across Europe, and Hogarth began his sequence of “modern moral subjects” in England in the 1730s.

HIstory of Cigarette

Of all the nicotine lovers, how many have ever wondered about the history and origin of their irresistible smoky delight? Probably none! Nevertheless, can’t really blame them. The high a cigarette provides, takes away all the reasoning power to think about such details. However, if at present you are out of that jubilation, read on to know some interesting information on the background of cigarette. The history of cigarette dates back to 6000 BC.The art of smoking gradually spread across the nations of South and North America. In the early 17th century in Spain, the corn husk was replaced by paper, spreading the custom of smoking the cigarette to a number of nations. During 1830s, cigarettes reached France, where its name was born. The present popular word ‘cigarette’ is actually the French adaptation of the Spanish word ‘sigarito’. In 1850, Turkish leaves were introduced, which became very popular in Russia. The cigarette was brought to the English world after Crimean War.

History of Painting

The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth or humans often hunting. There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in France, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia, etc.

In Western cultures oil painting and watercolor painting are the best known media, with rich and complex traditions in style and subject matter. In the East, ink and color ink historical predominated the choice of media with equally rich and complex traditions.

History of Money

Money is anything that is commonly accepted by a group of people for the exchange of goods, services, or resources. Every country has its own system of coins and paper money. In the beginning, people bartered. Barter is the exchange of a good or service for another good or service, a bag of rice for a bag of beans. However, what if you couldn't agree what something was worth in exchange or you didn't want what the other person had. To solve that problem humans developed what is called commodity money.Metals objects were introduced as money around 5000 B.C. By 700 BC, the Lydians became the first in the Western world to make coins. Countries were soon minting their own series of coins with specific values. Metal was used because it was readily available, easy to work with and could be recycled. Since coins were given a certain value, it became easier to compare the cost of items people wanted.

Some of the earliest known paper money dates back to China, where the issue of paper money became common from about AD 960 onwards.