Category Archives: Science

July 28

Beatrix Potter: Nature as First and Last Resort

On the 28th of July 1866, Helen Beatrix Potter, English author of the Peter Rabbit children’s books, was born in Kensington, London. Less known is her career as a naturalist and realist artist. Botany and nature study were passions of most Victorians and Potter tried her hand at various naturalist pursuits from an early age: […]

June 17

The Guillotine: Does death by decapitation equal instant death?

On the 17th of June 1939, Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, was guillotined in Versailles outside Saint-Pierre prison. He was the last person to be guillotined in public. Since then, until the 10th of September 1977 and the last ever execution by guillotine performed on Hamida Djandoubi, all executions by guillotine were done in private. […]

May 21

Disability and Creativity: Alexander Pope

On the 21st of May 1688, English poet Alexander Pope was born in London, England. At twelve, Pope composed his earliest extant work, Ode to Solitude; the same year saw the onset of the debilitating bone deformity that would plague Pope until the end of his life. Originally attributed to the severity of his studies, […]

April 12

Jim Gary’s Junk Yard Animals

On the 12th of April 1990, Jim Gary (1939 – 2006) opened his exhibition Twentieth Century Dinosaurs at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Gary was the only sculptor ever invited to present a solo exhibition at the prestigious museum; he became known for his large, colourful creations of dinosaurs […]

March 21

The Beginning of the World According to James Ussher

On the 21st of March 1656, the archbishop of Armagh in Ireland, James Ussher, died in Reigate, Surrey, England. He was one of the few scholars who attempted deciphering biblical chronology and placing it within historical context . As strange as it may all sound, he managed to calculate the beginning of the world, using the Hebrew […]

March 10

Is There One True Inventor of the Telephone?

On the 10th of March 1876, three days after his patent was issued, Scottish-born Canadian scientist Alexander Graham Bell (1847 – 1922) succeeded in communicating with sound, using a liquid transmitter similar to Elisha Gray’s design of an early telephone. Controversy reigned over who was the first actual inventor of the device, and recent books […]

November 29

Thomas A. Edison: Invention as a Cognitive Process

On the 29th of November 1877, Thomas Edison, an American inventor and businessman, demonstrated his phonograph for the first time. It is difficult for us to imagine the kind of stir it caused as we have become so used to listening to music in practically every sphere of our everyday life that we take it […]

November 23

Who is the Doctor? A Question of Identity in Doctor Who

On the 23rd of November 1963, just one day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the BBC broadcast the very first episode of Doctor Who – the television sci-fi series, which by now has entertained more than one generation of TV viewers. The first actor to play the famous Time Lord was William Hartnell, […]

November 08

Art into Science in Rorschach’s Psychiatry

On the 8th of November 1884, Swiss Freudian psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach was born in Zürich. He was famous for devising the inkblot test which he believed helped reflect unconscious parts of the subject’s personality as projected onto the visual stimuli. Following his art teacher father Ulrich, from an early age, Hermann found himself strongly drawn to painting […]

October 19

Quincunx, Electricity, Computer… The Mastermind of Sir Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne was an English author of numerous medical, religious, scientific and esoteric works. He was born on the 19th of October 1605 and died exactly 77 years later on the 19th of October 1682. This numerological symmetry seems in his case more of a necessity than a coincidence for it supports his theory […]