Search Results: Longitude prize

John Harrison (1693-1776) invented an accurate marine chronometer after several decades of research and development. While the pendulum clock had already been invented in the 17th century, a clock that could withstand the vagaries of the...

Chariot-racing was the only Olympic sport in which women could take part, as owners of teams of horses. Kyniska, a princess of Sparta, was the first woman to win the Olympic crown in this sport. British Museum curator Judith Swaddling describes...

One of the most famous images of the Second World War, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, was taken 23 February 1945 on the Japanese Island of Iwo Jima in the late stages of the Pacific War. The image...

Written and presented by D. Fairchild Ruggles A production of Twin Cities Public Television A presentation of the National Endowment for the Humanities in cooperation with the American Library Association Producer: Jeffrey Weihe Music...

CC: Cultures are often revealed through the stories they hand down through generations. Every civilization has foundational ones. Among the stories many cultures tell, we find tales of a great flood, but the story of Noah’s flood captured...

Anthony Bale, editor of the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Book of Margery Kempe, describes the life of a remarkably unremarkable medieval woman. http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199686643.do Anthony Bale studied at the...

Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. A leading figure of the Scientific Revolution, Huygens combined research into mathematical-based theories, such as the movement of light waves, with practical...

Edmond Halley (1656-1742) was an English astronomer, mathematician, and cartographer. Halley's Comet is named after him since he accurately predicted its return in 1758. One of the early globetrotting scientists, Halley led several maritime...

Keeping good time proved an elusive objective for centuries, and it was only in the second half of the 17th century, during the Scientific Revolution (1500-1700), that clocks were made which lost seconds rather than minutes each day. The...

Lugalbanda: The Boy Who Got Caught Up In A War is a fine re-telling of the ancient tale by Kathy Henderson with beautiful illustrations by Jane Ray. The fly leaf of the book states, "Older than the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran, the...