Random Interesting Facts About Historical Things to Amaze You.

 Random Interesting Facts About Historical Things to Amaze You.

Here are many random interesting facts about many Historical things to amaze you with joy.

1. The Ink  of  ancient times.

 

1. According to the Roman naturalist Pliny and other authors, the basis of the ink used by earliest writers was produced by lampblack or the black taken from overcooked ivory and soot from furnaces and baths.

 2. Some also have assumed that the black liquor which the cuttlefish produces was frequently utilized.

 3. One thing is clear, that whatever were the component ingredients, from the blackness and solidity in the most ancient documents, from an inkstand found at Herculaneum, in which the ink becomes visible as thick as oil, and from chemical analysis, the ink of antiquity was much more opaque, as well as encaustic than that which is used in modern times.

4. Inks of different colors were much in vogue. Red, purple, blue, and gold and silver inks were the principal varieties.

5. The red was prepared from vermilion, cinnabar, and carmine; the purple from the murex, one kind of which, called the purple encaustic, was suitable to the exclusive use of the emperors.

 6. Golden ink was greatly   popular among the Greeks than among the Romans.

 7. During the middle or dark ages the production of silver ink was an extensive and profitable branch of trade, and the enlightened manuscripts which remain are a striking proof of the high degree of excellence to which the art was carried.

 8. The making of the inks themselves was an individual business, and another connected with it, and to which it owed its origin, was that of inscribing the titles, capitals as well as significant words, in colored and gold and silver inks.

2. Handwriting of Famous Authors.

 

1. Longfellow's handwriting was a confident, blunt, backhand.

2. Charlotte Bronte's handwriting seemed to have been traced with a needle.

3. Thackeray's penmanship was wonderfully neat but so small that it could not always be read with ease by any but microscopic eyes.

4. Joaquin Miller's writing is illegible in itself and is represented doubly difficult by the fact that the author's spelling is of the most unusual kind.

5. Bryant's was forceful and pleasing to the eye but had no poetical characteristics, and Keats' was rather too clerical for the most elegant of modern poets.

6. Napoleon's handwriting was not only badly written; it is said that his letters from Germany to Josephine were at first taken for rough maps of the seat of war.

7. Captain Marryat's handwriting was so fine that whenever the copyist rested from his labors he was obliged to stick a pin where he left off in order to find the place again.

 

8. Carlyle reconstructed with pen and anger what his mind and eyes had seen and in the patient but tetchy and oddly emphasized handwriting much of his temperament may be read.

9. Among the authors of the past, Gray, Moore, Leigh Hunt, Walter Scott and Buchanan Read obsessed a pleasing, running hand which failed to express any decided individuality.

10. Charles Dickens' writing was very microscopic, and his habit of writing with blue ink upon blue paper, with regular interlineations and cross lines make his copy trouble alike to the compositor and proof-reader.

11. Byron's handwriting was a mere scribble and his additions in the proof was generally greater than the original text.

 To one poem, which limited only 400 lines in the first draft, 1000 were added in proofs.

A rash compositor one day went to Jules Janin and asked him to read some pages of his own manuscript. The great man replied that he would rather rewrite than attempt to read over again what he had once written.

12. The authors, Howells, Holmes, Andrew Lang, William Norris, Frederick Locker and George MacDonald, write hands that are simple and legible, and often good-looking, without any strongly typical characteristics.

13. But no penman, either American or foreign, could have been worse than Horace Greeley. “Good God," said a new compositor to whom a " take " of the editor's copy had been handed, " if Belshazzar had seen this writing on the wall he would have been more disgusted than he was."

14. Few printers could read Balzac's copy and those who could make an express clause with their employer to work at it only one hour at a time. Even after the hieroglyphics had been converted into print, the proof sheets came back more unreadable than the first copy.

3. Fallacies about Insects.

1. It is considered as a death warning in Germany to hear a cricket's cry.
2. The Tapuya Indians of South America say the devil suppose the form of a fly.
3. Rain is, in some parts of our own country America, predictable to follow unusually loud chirping of crickets.
4. Flies are sometimes thought of as furnishing prognostications of the weather, and even of other events.
5. Spaniards, in the sixteenth century, assumed that spiders indicated gold, where they were found in large quantity.
6. Although a sacred insect among the Egyptians, the beetle receives but little notice in folklore. It is ill-fated in England to kill one.
7. In Germany, it is said to designate good luck to have the spider spins his web downwards toward you, but bad luck when he rises toward you.
8. The grasshopper is a sufficiently unwanted visitant of himself in this country, but in Germany, his presence is further said to broadcast strange guests.
9. A Welsh tradition says bees arrived from Paradise, leaving the garden when man fell, but with God's blessing, so that wax is necessary for the festivity of the mass.
10. The ancients generally believed that there was a close connection between bees and the soul. Porphyry speaks of "those souls which the ancients called bees."
11. It is supposed that upon the backs of the seven-year locusts, there sometimes become visible marks like a letter of the alphabet. When this looks like a W it is thought that a war is coming up.
12. German tribes regarded stag beetles as diabolic, and all beetles are disliked, in Ireland, more especially a bronze variety known as "gooldie." It is also believed that to see a beetle will carry on a rainstorm the next day.
13. There are said to be no spiders in Ireland, nor will spiders spin their web in Irish oak, nor on a cedar roof.

4. Safe Weather Indicators.

When you desire to know what the weather is going to be, go out and choose the smallest cloud you see. Keep your eye on it, and if it reduces and disappears it shows a state of the air that is confident to be followed by fine weather; but if it enlarges take your overcoat with you if you are going away from home, for falling weather is not away from you reason is this: When the air is becoming charged with electricity you will see every cloud magnetizing all lesser ones toward it until it gathers into a shower, and, in contrast, when the fluid is passing off or diffusing itself, then a large cloud will be noticed breaking into pieces and dissolving.

5. Why Flowers Sleep?

1. That flowers sleep is obvious to the most casual observer.

2. The beautiful daisy unwraps at sunrise and closes at sunset when its name “day’s eye."

 3. The morning glory opens its flower with the day. The “Four O'clock " awakes at four in the morning but closes its eyes in the middle of the day, and the dandelion is in full flower only during the hours of strong light.

 4. The habit of some flowers are surely very curious and furnish one of the many examples which prove the singular adaptability of everything in nature.

 5. The reason is found in the system by which this class of flowers is fertilized. It is clear, that flowers which are fertilized by night-flying insects would derive no benefit from being open by day; and, on the other hand, those which are fertilized by bees would gain nothing by being open at night.

 6. Nay, it would be  the disadvantage, because it would render them liable to be robbed of their honey and pollen by insects which are incapable of fertilizing them. 

7. It is possible, then, that the closing of flowers may have reference to the habit of insects, and it may be examined, also, in support of this, that wind- fertilized flowers never sleep.

6. The Origin of O. K.

More than a century ago the best tobacco and the best rum came from Aux Cayes (pronounced O K), and the best of anything was designated as Aux Cayes, or O. K. This meaning of the phrase is still retained. In the Jackson campaign every lie that could be invented was invented to blacken the general's character, and an endorsement that he had made, " this is O. K." (meaning the best), was taken by Seba Smith, and declared by him to be but an abbreviation of the general's customary endorsement of papers as " oll kerrect." The Democrats took up this statement and fastened the mystic letters upon their banners. The meaning "all correct" stuck to the letters, and since then they have been used in the two meanings of "the best " and " all right".