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39157be
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The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: "My dear, why is the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg pruning your hedges?" Late"
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Bill Bryson |
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2dc643c
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The Eiffel Tower wasn't just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing. It wasn't a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn't even commemorate a fallen hero. Eiffel gamely insisted that his tower would have many practical applications--that it would make a terrific military lookout and that one could do useful aeronautical and meteorological experiments from its upper..
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Bill Bryson |
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f3bbda8
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Edison pressed on and designed a range of concrete furnishings--bureaus, cupboards, chairs, even a concrete piano--to go with his concrete houses. He promised that soon he would offer, for just $5, a double bed that would never wear out. The entire range was to be unveiled at a cement industry show in New York in 1912. In the event, when the show opened, the Edison stand was bare. No one from the Edison company ever offered an explanation. ..
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Bill Bryson |
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d92f8cc
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They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.
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Bill Bryson |
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ffd7c78
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It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a r..
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Bill Bryson |
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baac158
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It really doesn't pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it's unlikely they will delight you now. I
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Bill Bryson |
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69971e3
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Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf." --
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Bill Bryson |
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f1b2f72
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A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman's warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman's warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman's warbler. But there are almost certainly oth..
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Bill Bryson |
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b0298af
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I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people--teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub--drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that?
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Bill Bryson |
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4f28080
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Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn't a single kind of fish that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does.
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silverware
dining
ettiquette
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Bill Bryson |
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04fb20d
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It was all a long time ago and at this stage we just don't know.
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Bill Bryson |
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c528601
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The grouse were almost certainly released a few at a time from cages. For all the sport in it, Walsingham might just as well have fired into the cages and given himself more time for tea.)
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Bill Bryson |
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7372925
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It's not even possible to say quite where the outback is. To Australians anything vaguely rural is "the bush." At some indeterminate point "the bush" becomes "the outback." Push on for another two thousand miles or so and eventually you come to bush again, and then a city, and then the sea. And that's Australia."
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Bill Bryson |
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03b2744
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and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of "gone" and "all gone."
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Bill Bryson |
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382fb7b
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I read once that the furthest distance the average American will walk without getting into a car is six hundred feet, and I fear the modern British have become much the same, except that on the way back to the car the
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Bill Bryson |
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3b0e08f
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As a known entity, DNA has been around longer than you might think. It was discovered as far back as 1869 by Johann Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss scientist working at the University of Tubingen in Germany.
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Bill Bryson |
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f357ffb
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Most people think they want Main Streets but won't make the small sacrifices in terms of time, cost, and footpower necessary to sustain them. The sad fact is that we have created a culture in which most people will happily-indeed, unthinkingly-drive an extra couple of miles to walk thirty less feet.
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BILL BRYSON |
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e367bd0
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Here is an extract from the Pentagon's Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type 2 sandwich cookie: "The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with a layer of filling between them. The weight of the cookie shall be not less than 21.5 grams and filling weight not less than 6.4 grams. The base cakes shall be uniformly baked with a color ranging from not lighter than chip 27885 or darker than chip 13711. . . . The ..
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Bill Bryson |
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5ff2231
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John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design, suggests that all fall-injury figures are probably severely underestimated anyway.
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Bill Bryson |
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9a15ce8
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Rat bites are almost certainly under reported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United States are attacked by rats each year.
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Bill Bryson |
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2ac851c
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As furniture makers, Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness,..
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Bill Bryson |
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0bce686
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Two of the casters contained salt and pepper, but what went into the third caster is unknown. It is generally presumed to have been dried mustard, but that is really because no one can think of anything more likely. "No satisfactory alternative has ever been suggested" is how the food historian Gerard Brett has put it. In fact, there is no evidence to suggest that mustard was ever desired or utilized in such ready fashion by diners at any t..
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Bill Bryson |
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4bdd92b
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In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue, or dull gray.
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Bill Bryson |
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a02fae3
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Death duties in Harcourt's time were a comparatively modest 8 percent on estates valued at PS1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions who didn't have to pay them, that they were raised again and again until by the eve of the Second World War they stood at 60 percent--a level that would make even the richest eyes water. At the same time, income taxes were raised repeatedly a..
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Bill Bryson |
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8456d14
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Now this little gal isn't much of a singer," she would say. "She learned singing by a correspondence course, and she missed a coupla lessons, but she's the nicest little gal in the whole show, so I want ya to give her a big hand." --
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Bill Bryson |
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83c355b
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Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of "gone" and "all gone."
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Bill Bryson |
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2898fc0
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English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. "Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist" [The Miracle of Language, page 54]."
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Bill Bryson |
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2313a29
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New Hampshire is guys in hunting caps and pickup trucks with number plates bearing the feisty slogan 'Live Free or Die.
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Bill Bryson |
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a6148df
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So I thought it might be interesting, for the length of a book, to consider the ordinary things in life, to notice them for once and treat them as if they were important, too. Looking around my house, I was startled and somewhat appalled to realize how little I knew about the domestic world around me. Sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon, playing idly with the salt and pepper shakers, it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea wh..
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Bill Bryson |
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53e1811
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Buffon's observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especially those whose conclusions were not complicated by actual familiarity with the country.
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Bill Bryson |
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8110fb1
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At the far end, a shop called the Boscombe Antique Market had a big sign in the window that said 'We Buy Anything!', which seemed an unusually generous offer, so I went inside, gobbed on the counter and barked, 'How much for that then?' I didn't, of course - it was shut - but I'd have liked to. It
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Bill Bryson |
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73fcdf7
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while--for a couple of minutes--it's actually
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Bill Bryson |
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09ada6f
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At depth, microbes shrink in size and become extremely sluggish. The liveliest of them may divide no more than once a century18, some no more than perhaps once in five hundred years. As The Economist has put it: 'The key to long life, it seems, is not to do too much19.
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Bill Bryson |
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e160220
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Isn't it amazing how many people in the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don't like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer phones at Expedia.
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Bill Bryson |
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8a44575
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The greatest part of the tragedy is that there was actually plenty of food in Ireland itself. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.
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Bill Bryson |
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429c2de
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Poor lighting, absence of handrails, confusing patterns on the treads, risers that are unusually high or low, treads that are unusually wide or narrow, and landings that interrupt the rhythm of ascent or descent are the principal design faults that lead to accidents.
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Bill Bryson |
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9d1c44d
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Stairs incorporate three pieces of geometry: rise, going, and pitch. The rise is the height between steps, the going is the step itself (technically, the distance between the leading edges, or nosings, of two successive steps measured horizontally), and the pitch is the overall steepness of the stairway.
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Bill Bryson |
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17808fe
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As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps.
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Bill Bryson |
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2046b7b
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From the outset wallpaper was often colored with pigments that used large doses of arsenic, lead, and antimony, but after 1775 it was frequently soaked in an especially insidious compound called copper arsenite, which was invented by the great but wonderfully hapless Swedish chemist Karl Scheele.* The color was so popular that it became known as Scheele's green. Later, with the addition of copper acetate, it was refined into an even richer ..
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Bill Bryson |
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edd5a47
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The people of Cody like you to think that Buffalo Bill was a native son. In fact, I'm awfully proud to tell you, he was an Iowa native, born in the little town of Le Claire in 1846. The people of Cody, in one of the more desperate commercial acts of this century, bought Buffalo Bill's birthplace and re-erected it in their town, but they are lying through their teeth when they hint that he was a local. And the thing is, they have a talented ..
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Bill Bryson |
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d529251
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If one's husband had been married before and widowed--a fairly common condition--and a close relative of his first wife's died, the second wife was expected to engage in "complementary mourning"--a kind of proxy mourning on behalf of the deceased earlier partner."
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Bill Bryson |
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c6895ef
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canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure that they didn't lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to
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Bill Bryson |
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7ca3737
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The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether--very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life.
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Bill Bryson |
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d7aafed
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In the early Tertiary, if you were the size of a bobcat you could be king.
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Bill Bryson |