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ff66b3d
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Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister "She sells seashells on the seashore.")"
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Bill Bryson |
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589a372
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The confusion over the aluminum/aluminium spelling arose because of some uncharacteristic indecisiveness on Davy's part. When he first isolated the element in 1808, he called it alumium. For some reason he thought better of that and changed it to aluminum four years later. Americans dutifully adopted the new term, but many British users disliked aluminum, pointing out that it disrupted the -ium pattern established by sodium, calcium, and st..
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Bill Bryson |
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605dd40
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I would submit that if you think the only people you should have in your country are the people you produce yourselves, you are an idiot.
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Bill Bryson |
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734ae49
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Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about..
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Bill Bryson |
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87a2864
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a modern-day conservator of Monticello says that Woodmont Jefferson as an amateur architect rather than a professional was that he made things more complicated than they needed to be for any practical purpose.
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overcompensation
professionalism
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Bill Bryson |
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a4cbe9a
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A full moon rose in the pale evening sky and glowed with a rich white inner light that brought to mind, but perfectly, the creamy inside of an Oreo cookie. (Eventually on the trail everything reminds you of food.)
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Bill Bryson |
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0780aae
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Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements.
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Bill Bryson |
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5e45af9
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When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.
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Bill Bryson |
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0c7cf1b
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The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers "must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and not depart, until between seven and eight of the clock at night"--giving an eighty-four-hour workweek."
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Bill Bryson |
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a9ef70a
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On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: "I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun."
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science
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Bill Bryson |
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b2c1eb4
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Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids- to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted at to get things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time- till the 1600s- before it occurred to anyone to put drawers in and thus convert trunks into chests of drawers.
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history
trunks
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Bill Bryson |
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80f5cd4
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General admission for groundlings--those who stood in the open around the stage--was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that--all this at a time when a day's wage was 1 shilling (12 pence) or less a day. The money was dropped into a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping--the box office.
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Bill Bryson |
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6f13f05
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One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver's seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road. Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the l..
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Bill Bryson |
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ecb1c76
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And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains...
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Bill Bryson |
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cb43cd8
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The Super Constellations took three days to reach London [from Australia] and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but to put on the seat belt signs and bounce through them. Even in normal conditions they flew at a height guaranteed to produce more or less constant turbulence. (Qantas called it, without evident irony, the Kangaroo Route.) It was, by any modern m..
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interesting
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Bill Bryson |
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2e06ffd
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Working quickly was the trick of it. When Samuel Pepys underwent a lithotomy--the removal of a kidney stone--in 1658, the surgeon took just fifty seconds to get in and find and extract a stone about the size of a tennis ball. (That is, a seventeenth-century tennis ball, which was rather smaller than a modern one, but still a sphere of considerable dimension.)
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Bill Bryson |
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fb0b010
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In the 1960s, the Stanford historian Peter Laslett did a careful study of British marriage records and found that at no time in the recorded past did people regularly marry at very early ages. Between 1619 and 1660, for instance, 85 percent of women were nineteen
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Bill Bryson |
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8ca11dc
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We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested3 - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistribu..
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Bill Bryson |
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876a373
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Sulphuric acid was added to vinegar for extra sharpness, chalk to milk, turpentine to gin. Arsenite of copper was used to make vegetables greener or to make jellies glisten. Lead chromate gave bakery products a golden glow and brought radiance to mustard. Lead acetate was added to drinks as a sweetener, and red lead somehow made Gloucester cheese lovelier to behold, if not safer to eat. There was hardly a foodstuff, it seems, that couldn't ..
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Bill Bryson |
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7ca363c
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Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us - not so much as a stray molecule8 - that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters.
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Bill Bryson |
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fe581c8
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I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape.
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Bill Bryson |
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cdf1b28
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Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words--the length of a short novel--to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.
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Bill Bryson |
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73c06a4
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I left Los Angeles on 3 January and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on 5 January. For me there was no 4 January. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn't tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of Earth, it appears I had no being. I find that a little uncanny, to say the least. I mean to say, if you were browsing through your ticket folder and you saw a notice that said: 'Passengers are advise..
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Bill Bryson |
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114ad32
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to nonlocals
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Bill Bryson |
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3524a70
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My room had a balcony where I could watch the setting sun flood the desert floor and burnish the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges beyond - or at least I could if I looked past the more immediate sprawl of a K-Mart plaza across the road. In the two million or more square miles that is the Australian outback, I don't suppose there is a more unfortunate juxtaposition. Allan was evidently held by a similar thought, for a half hour later w..
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Bill Bryson |
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b850b3b
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I quite like Torquay and might one day come back, but I can tell you this now: where watch batteries are concerned, they can go fuck themselves.
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Bill Bryson |
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049bfc4
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Worse still, it isn't actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own.
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earth
space
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Bill Bryson |
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9e53379
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About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it - 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 - went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All o..
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Bill Bryson |
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9a82b54
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At first, the letters were arrayed in alphabetical order, an arrangement hinted at on modern keyboards by the sequences F-G-H, J-K-L and O-P, but the fact that no two other letters are alphabetical, that the most popular letters are not only banished to the periphery but given mostly to the left hand while the right is left with a sprinkling of secondary letters, punctuation marks and little-used symbols, are vivid reminders of the extent t..
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Bill Bryson |
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84f814c
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Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn't know what it was when they had found it, and hadn't described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until the..
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Bill Bryson |
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3ca544c
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Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
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Bill Bryson |
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ce98a59
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So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought that they may harbor wild beasts and armed, genetically challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus, there is something innately sinister about them, some ineffable thing that makes you sense an atmosphere of pregnant doom with every step and leaves you profoundly aware that you are out of your element and ought to keep your ears pricked. Though you tell yourself it's preposterous, you can't qu..
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Bill Bryson |
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e45593e
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When I say "most people" I mean, of course, me after my first cocktail."
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nuances
conventional-wisdom
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Bill Bryson |
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e6ae0e7
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Let us pause for a moment and consider the structure of the atom as we know it now. Every atom is made from three kinds of elementary particles: protons, which have a positive electrical charge; electrons, which have a negative electrical charge; and neutrons, which have no charge. Protons and neutrons are packed into the nucleus, while electrons spin around outside. The number of protons is what gives an atom its chemical identity. An atom..
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Bill Bryson |
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2b508d9
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Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it.
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Bill Bryson |
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07ce43c
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It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.
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Bill Bryson |
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05b225c
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He left to do whatever editors do.
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unity
leadership
supervision
submission
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Bill Bryson |
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17a4092
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The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan.
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Bill Bryson |
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39fbe95
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In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.
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Bill Bryson |
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e261098
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She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.
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education
maturation
graciousness
humility
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Bill Bryson |
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ca530a3
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Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.
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Bill Bryson |
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5b659c7
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The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal PS2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn't afford it. In the end, the visionaries were undone by the unmanageable scale of their own ambitions. It
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Bill Bryson |
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ac50cce
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The telephone," he wrote, "may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker's voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.... The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument."
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Bill Bryson |
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0e4fd38
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Out of all the incursions, the only permanent one so far is the present one, and that dates from just twelve thousand years ago, which means that Britain is actually one of the more recent places in the world to become inhabited by modern people. In this sense it is much younger than the Americas or Australia. The
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Bill Bryson |