Posts Tagged ‘Tower of London’
“A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England”*…
With his collaborator John Morrison, Harold Burdekin photographed the streets of the city of London in the dark for his book London Night, published in 1934. In a time before stricter air pollution controls, the pair chose foggy nights to make their images, giving the light in the photos a sense of weighty presence.
The book was printed a year after the much more famous photographer Brassaï published his influential project Paris de nuit (Paris at Night). Unlike Brassaï and the British photographer Bill Brandt, who published a book of nighttime photos of London in 1938, Burdekin and Morrison chose to record only scenes with no people in them. The resulting images are forebodingly empty…
More (photos and background) at “Spooky, Beautiful 1930s Photos of London Streets at Night.”
* Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed
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As we penetrate the pea soup, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940, during the Battle of Britain, that the German Luftwaffe launched a massive attack on London as night fell. For nearly 24 hours, the Luftwaffe rained tons of bombs over the city, causing the first serious damage to the House of Commons and Tower of London.
One year later, on this date in 1941, the day after the air attack on Pearl Harbor, Great Britain joined the United States in declaring war on the Empire of Japan.
The House of Commons, Parliament, after the attack
Experiments you can eat!…
From io9, “Use Your Microwave to Measure the Speed of Light“…
Can your microwave oven really measure the speed of light? Yes, it can be done. And since many of the suggested experiments also involve chocolate, it will be done. Oh yes, it will be done.
Step-by-step instructions (and an accessible account of the physics involved) here.
Also from io9, “A Drug That Causes One Animal’s Brain to Transform Into Another.”– “Does this mean you could treat a chimp embryo and make its brain human? Possibly – as long as you started very early in the process of development.” Fascinating.
And further to yesterday’s Evolution Timeline, a tee-shirt that sums up the whole process concisely:
As we say “Hello, Mr. Wizard,” we might recall that it was on this date in in 1671 that Thomas Blood, an Irish Colonel and a “noted bravo and desperado,” dressed as a clergyman and attempted to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.
Blood was frustrated in the attempt, apprehended, and taken in chains before King Charles. Despite the attempted robbery, prior involvements in kidnapping and attempted murder, and the fact that Blood had forsaken the Royalist cause for the Roundheads, the King not only pardoned Blood, but endowed him with land in Ireland. Blood died of natural causes nine years later.
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