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 The
custom of wearing a wedding ring on the third finger of the left hand is
very old, and has been traced back to at least the 12th century, and may
even derive from betrothal rings given by the Romans as secular pledges.
Yet until the end of the 16th century the practice in England was to wear
the wedding ring on the right hand third finger. Right or left, why the
third finger? Because since ancient Egyptian times it had been believed to
contain either a special delicate nerve or a vein (vena amoris) that ran
directly to the heart.
At age
72, physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817-94) pulverized pieces
of dog testicles in water and injected himself with the filtered juice
thereof. His hope of experiencing a return of vigour seems to have been
realised, for he reported to the Société de Biologie in Paris, “Today I
was able to ‘pay a visit’ to my young wife.”
As was
the case with vinyl LPs, on a 74-minute music CD and a 680 million byte
CD-Rom there are actually no individual tracks. There is only a single
spiral track that has a positioning index pointing to the other segments
of music/data. It is nearly three miles long.
There was
no system of street numbering in London (or, in some districts, street
name signs either) until late in the 18th century. Until then, houses and
shops made do with hanging boards, which of course in the case of shops
served also an advertising purpose and/or signposts to other locations. It
was in 1895 that the Common Council in the City directed that the wards
must fasten name tablets to all streets, alleys, squares and courts. Two
years later Parliament legislated for the numbering of houses.
Most
computer users today, even PC owners, would acknowledge that the mouse
device first appeared on the Apple Macintosh (1984). Others, slightly more
knowledgeable, might assert that it was Apple’s Lisa (1983) that first
sported a mouse. “No,” might cry those far better informed, “it was Xerox
labs who invented it, in 1973 for their Alto computer.” At which point the
computing historian would have to retort smugly, “You’re all wrong. It was
actually invented by Douglas Englebart way back in 1964 at the Stanford
Research Institute. He called it the X-Y Position Indicator for a Display
System.”
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