The first talking movies were produced in France before 1900 by Leon Caumont. They were short films, starring great performers such as Sarah Berhard, in which the movie pictures were synchronized with a gramophone record. By 1912 Eugene Lauste had discovered the basic method for recording sound on film, while Thomas Edison produced several one-reel talking pictures in the United …

Regular mail coaches began to run in England in the 1780s. Armed guards travelled on them to protect them from highwaymen. By 1800 regular stage coach services were running between all the big towns and those carrying mails ran to a fast timetable. ‘Fast’ meant an average of 8 km an hour.

Rio Grande in Spanish means big river. Two different rivers bear the above name: the first is the river flowing through the eastern part of Jamaica, and the second, the river originating in the US and flowing through the southern United States and Mexico. Rio Grande of Jamaica is the largest source of fresh water in Jamaica and provides water …

In China and Japan eel is not only eaten as food but is also known for its medicinal properties. Ancient Koreans believed eel helped relieve fatigue and sexual debility. Eel skin or kadaagel also has medicinal properties. Its tightening ability makes it useful as a type of brace to relieve sprains.

The doomsday vault is a Noah’s Ark of sorts which would store samples of the world’s important seeds. It was inaugurated at Longyearbyen, Norway. The vault is a trident-shaped tunnel bored into the permafrost of the Arctic mountain range. It comprises three cold chambers and can hold 4.5 billion batches of seeds from the main crops. This is to ensure …

The bellows is the flexible part which controls the air for musical notes in an accordion. This is made of leather, rexine, etc. Bellows is also used by goldsmiths for gilting purposes and shaping metals by heating as the air let out of bellows fans the fire.

The physical and chemical properties of elements are determined by the atomic structure. This, in turn, is determined by electrons and the shells, sub-shells and orbitals they reside in. The rules of placing electrons within shells is known as the Aafbau principle, which originally means ‘building up’.

The encoded cylinder refers to the Cyrillic Projector sculpture by American artist James Sanborn which was created in the early 1990s. The 32-character Cyrillic alphabet has been used on it with the Russian word for ‘shadow’ — TEHb —appearing several times. For long, no one was able to crack the code but it was finally solved in 2003. The sculpture …

A geometric progression, also known as a geometric sequence, is a sequence of numbers in which each term after the first is found by multiplying the previous one by a fixed non-zero number called the common ratio. Books VIII and IX of Euclid’s Elements analyse geometric progressions and give several of their properties. A geometric progression gains its geometric character …

Ada Lovelace wrote a rudimentary programme for the analytical machine designed by Charles Babbage in 1827, but the machine never became operational. In 1949, the language short code appeared. It was the first computer language for electronic devices and required the programmer to change its statements into 0s and 1s by hand.