What Toronto Blue Jays player had a part of the Wheat Sheaf Tavern's ceiling fall on his head when he was at bar enjoying a brew?
The new trivia thread.
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Answers.....
Who introduced tobbacco and potatoes to England?
It wasnt Sir Walter Raleigh. His fame rests almost entirely on things he didnt do.
The first report of a smoking Englishman is of a sailor in Bristol, seen ‘emitting smoke from his nostrils’. This was in 1556, four years before Raleigh was born.
Raleigh never personally visited Virginia or any other part of North America. It was a Frenchman named Jean Nicot, from whose name the word ‘nicotine’ is derived, who introduced tobacco to France in 1560, and it was from France, not the New World, that tobacco reached England.
Raleigh was a keen smoker and probably helped popularise the tobacco habit after he was introduced to it by Sir Francis Drake.
The term ‘smoking’ is a late seventeenth-century coinage; until then it was referred to as ‘drinking smoke’.
Potatoes were known in Spain by the mid-sixteenth century, and probably reached the British Isles from Europe, rather than directly from America. As a member of the nightshade family the plant was assumed to be poisonous (as, indeed, the upper portions are). When Raleigh planted one in his garden in Ireland, his neighbours threatened to burn his house down.
Potatoes gradually caught on. By the middle of the seventeenth century the surgeon Dr William Salmon was claiming they could cure tuberculosis, rabies and ‘increase seed and provoke lust, causing fruitfulness in both sexes’.
Who invented the steam engine?
Heron (sometimes called Hero) invented the steam engine some 1,600 years before Thomas Newcomen's engine of 1711.
Heron lived in Alexandria around AD 62, and is best known as a mathematician and geometer. He was also a visionary inventor and his aeolopile or ‘wind-ball’ was the first working steam engine. Using the same principle as jet propulsion, a steam-driven metal sphere spun round at 1,500 rpm.
Unfortunately for Heron, no one was able to see its practical function, so it was considered nothing more than an amusing novelty.
Who invented the telephone?
Antonio Meucci.
An erratic, sometimes brilliant, Florentine inventor, Meucci arrived in the USA in 1850. In 1860, he first demonstrated a working model of an electric device he called the teletrofono. He filed a caveat (a kind of stopgap patent) in 1871, five years before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent.
In the same year, Meucci fell ill after he was badly scalded when the Staten Island ferry’s boiler exploded. Unable to speak much English, he failed to send the $10 required to renew his caveat in 1874.
When Bell’s patent was registered in 1876, Meucci sued. He’d sent his original sketches and working models to the lab at Western Union. By an extraordinary coincidence, Bell worked in the very same lab and the models had mysteriously disappeared.
Meucci died in 1889, while his case against Bell was still under way. As a result, it was Bell, not Meucci who got the credit for the invention. In 2004, the balance was partly redressed by the US House of Representatives who passed a resolution that ‘the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.’
How many men have been President of the United States.
Whilst there have been 44 Presidential terms, 43 different men have been President of the United States. Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th President so he took the Presidential Oath twice. Benjamin Harrison was president between Clevelands non-consecutive terms.
Who introduced tobbacco and potatoes to England?
It wasnt Sir Walter Raleigh. His fame rests almost entirely on things he didnt do.
The first report of a smoking Englishman is of a sailor in Bristol, seen ‘emitting smoke from his nostrils’. This was in 1556, four years before Raleigh was born.
Raleigh never personally visited Virginia or any other part of North America. It was a Frenchman named Jean Nicot, from whose name the word ‘nicotine’ is derived, who introduced tobacco to France in 1560, and it was from France, not the New World, that tobacco reached England.
Raleigh was a keen smoker and probably helped popularise the tobacco habit after he was introduced to it by Sir Francis Drake.
The term ‘smoking’ is a late seventeenth-century coinage; until then it was referred to as ‘drinking smoke’.
Potatoes were known in Spain by the mid-sixteenth century, and probably reached the British Isles from Europe, rather than directly from America. As a member of the nightshade family the plant was assumed to be poisonous (as, indeed, the upper portions are). When Raleigh planted one in his garden in Ireland, his neighbours threatened to burn his house down.
Potatoes gradually caught on. By the middle of the seventeenth century the surgeon Dr William Salmon was claiming they could cure tuberculosis, rabies and ‘increase seed and provoke lust, causing fruitfulness in both sexes’.
Who invented the steam engine?
Heron (sometimes called Hero) invented the steam engine some 1,600 years before Thomas Newcomen's engine of 1711.
Heron lived in Alexandria around AD 62, and is best known as a mathematician and geometer. He was also a visionary inventor and his aeolopile or ‘wind-ball’ was the first working steam engine. Using the same principle as jet propulsion, a steam-driven metal sphere spun round at 1,500 rpm.
Unfortunately for Heron, no one was able to see its practical function, so it was considered nothing more than an amusing novelty.
Who invented the telephone?
Antonio Meucci.
An erratic, sometimes brilliant, Florentine inventor, Meucci arrived in the USA in 1850. In 1860, he first demonstrated a working model of an electric device he called the teletrofono. He filed a caveat (a kind of stopgap patent) in 1871, five years before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent.
In the same year, Meucci fell ill after he was badly scalded when the Staten Island ferry’s boiler exploded. Unable to speak much English, he failed to send the $10 required to renew his caveat in 1874.
When Bell’s patent was registered in 1876, Meucci sued. He’d sent his original sketches and working models to the lab at Western Union. By an extraordinary coincidence, Bell worked in the very same lab and the models had mysteriously disappeared.
Meucci died in 1889, while his case against Bell was still under way. As a result, it was Bell, not Meucci who got the credit for the invention. In 2004, the balance was partly redressed by the US House of Representatives who passed a resolution that ‘the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.’
How many men have been President of the United States.
Whilst there have been 44 Presidential terms, 43 different men have been President of the United States. Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th President so he took the Presidential Oath twice. Benjamin Harrison was president between Clevelands non-consecutive terms.
Answer :
The purpose of a cape was to ward off arrows when riding away in battle. The billowing cape acted like a curtain to slow and stop the kinetic energy of the arrow. These defensive measures worked well for bows and arrows at that time because the cloths were very thick at that time period, the bows were made of wood and animal intestines and not the nylons and plasics of today.
Rodney Peete is married to actress Holly Robinson who is the daughter of actor who played "Gordon" on Sesame Street.
Mission impossible had an affiliation with Star Trek, what is the third show that had a close affiliation with these two shows?
No. I belive that was a British series, it had no affiliation at all with Star Trek and Mission Impassible.
Bummer
I would have thought the fact Leonard Nimoy joined MI in 1969 and Barbra Bain who not only stared in MI but also stared in Space 1999 would have tied the two together.
My bad.
Oh and the fact that Mark Lenard stared on MI and also played Spock's dad on Star Terk was a tie too.
Law & Order, all three were led by the actor Steven Hill in their first episode.
No, all three shows ran at the same time, so it was not L&O
..............and show me Steven Hill in the first episode of Star Trek.
