My Science School

The Qutb complex in Delhi contains buildings and monuments from the Delhi Sultanate era. Amongst these is the Qutub Minar, built as a victory tower by Qutb-ud-din Aibak, who was once the Sultan of Delhi. The tower commemorates the victory of the Delhi Sultanate over the Hindu kings. Several monuments were added to the complex later by his successors and future rulers. Today, the complex is a popular tourist spot in the capital and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

1. Tallest brick minaret

Standing at 72.5 metres, the Qutub Minar is the tallest brick minaret in the world. It has a base diameter of 14.3 metres which reduces to 2.7 metres at the peak. The Minaret of Jam in Afghanistan is the next tallest brick monument at 62 metres. Interestingly, the Qutub Minar is said to have been inspired by the Minaret of Jam.

2. No more climbing to the top

There are 379 steps that lead to the top of the Qutub Minar. It was once allowed for the public to climb the stairs and catch a glimpse of the city from the top. However, on December 4. 1981, a power failure caused a blackout at the staircase, leading to a stampede. Nearly 300 to 400 people were inside when the blackout happened and in the rush to the exit. 47 people, mostly school children, were killed. Ever since, no one has been allowed to climb the monument.

3. The oldest mosque

The Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque, which is part of the Qutb complex was commissioned by Qutb-ud-din-Aibak. It was the first mosque to be built in Delhi after the Islamic conquest of India. The mosque is one of the oldest mosques in the country and the oldest surviving example of Ghurid architecture in the Indian subcontinent.

4. Khilji's incomplete dream

Emperor Alauddin Khilji of the Khilji dynasty enlarged the Quwwat ul-Islam Mosque during his reign. Post this, he wished to build a minaret of his own called the Alai Minar. This was to be double the size of the Qutub Minar. The construction of this minar was however abandoned after his death in 1316, and the 24.5 metre high first storey core of the minar still stands among the ruins of the Qutb complex.

5. The iron pillar

The Iron Pillar of Delhi is part of the Quth complex. It was constructed by emperor Chandragupta II and was erected elsewhere before being moved to its present location. The pillar is famous for the rust-resistant composition of metals used in its construction. Till date, the pillar has not corroded.

 

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Built in the year 1591 by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, a ruler of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, Charminar is an iconic monument in Hyderabad, India. This square-shaped structure is built out of granite and lime mortar, predominantly in an Islamic-style design. However, influences of Hindu architecture can be noticed in the ornamentations.

1. What's in a name?

The Charminar takes its name from the four pillars/minars that are part of the monument. However, its relation to the number four goes beyond just the four pillars. There are four main arches in the monument and each of the main arches has four smaller arches on either side. Each of the pillars is also divided into four parts and the number of galleries found at each level is also four. Apart from these, one can spot many more connections to the number four, according to experts.

2. Commemorates the end of an epidemic

There exist several theories about the purpose of the construction of the Charminar. But the one widely accepted is that the monument was built to commemorate the eradication of plague in Hyderabad. Plague was a widespread disease in Hyderabad at that time. Another popular theory, according to the 17th Century French traveller Jean de Thevenot, is that the Charminar was built in 1591 to commemorate the beginning of the second Islamic millenium year.

3. The centrepiece

When Qutb Shah moved his capital from Golconda to Hyderabad, he planned for the Charminar to be the centre of the Old City of Hyderabad. The Old City was spread around the Charminar in four different quadrants that were segregated according to the established settlements. The modern city of Hyderabad has expanded since, but the Charminar remains the centrepiece of the once walled Old City.

4. A secret tunnel?

It is believed Qutb Shah had built a secret underground tunnel from the Charminar to the Golconda Fort, his former capital. He is said to have built this tunnel as an escape route in case of a siege. However, till date no one knows the location of this secret tunnel.

5. On the state emblem

The Charminar features in the emblem of the state of Telangana. The logo was designed by noted Telangana artist Laxman Aelay in four days and has been in use since June 2014.

 

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1. Built over a Pagan city

The Notre-Dame was built over the ruins of what was once the Gallo-Roman city of Lutetia. Before the cathedral was built there were four other churches that stood at the same place one after the other over centuries. And before the churches, there stood a Gallo-Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter. In 1160, when the Bishop of Paris. Maurice de Sully decided to build the Notre-Dame, he called for the demolition of the earlier church and chose to reuse some of its material for the Notre-Dame.

2. When Victor Hugo saved the cathedral

The cathedral was in a degraded state since the French Revolution. Some of its statues had been destroyed, while most of its bells had been melted and used as cannon balls. Not much importance was given to the Notre-Dame until Napoleon decided to crown himself the Emperor of France in the cathedral.

In 1831, French writer Victor Hugo published his masterpiece The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Notre-Dame de Paris, which revolved around the cathedral and served as a tribute to the monument. The book became so popular that the public demanded restoration of the Notre-Dame, ultimately leading to massive renovations directed by French architect Viollet-le-Duc in the mid-19th century.

3. The Gargoyles are not so medieval

The famous Gargoyles that can be found around the cathedral are not from the medieval times, as many think. They were in fact added during the 19th Century restoration work by Viollet-le-Duc, inspired by the creatures that appear in Victor Hugo's book.

4. All roads lead to the Notre-Dame

On the square in front of the Notre-Dame, is a tiny plate engraved with a compass, embedded in the cobblestones. It is marked Point zero des routes de France or Point Zero of French Roads. This is the point from which all distances to and from Paris are measured.

5. Fire, destruction and restoration

On April 15, 2019, the roof of the Notre-Dame caught fire while undergoing renovation and restoration. The fire burned for around 15 hours and destroyed many parts of the cathedral. It also led to the contamination of the site and the surrounding environment. Following the fire, many companies and individuals made donations to restore the monument and on July 29, 2019, the French National Assembly passed a law stating that the restoration must preserve the cathedral's historic, artistic and architectural interest. In November 2020, the structure was stabilised to prevent any possible collapse and reconstruction of the cathedral commenced again in January 2021.

 

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Zips are less than a hundred years old, and safe zips which did not burst open at embarrassing moments have only been around for sixty years. Before the zip, clothes and footwear had to be fastened by buttons, laces or hooks and eyes. Getting dressed was fiddly, time-consuming and likely to put you in a bad mood right at the start of the day. Then came the 'slide fastener', as the inventor of the first working zip called his brain wave. By today's standards it looks clumsy and crude. It was not very reliable either. But to Whitcomb L. Judson, the Chicago engineer who came up with the idea, it was a stroke of genius.

The first zips were designed to fasten boots and shoes. It is just as well they weren't intended for clothing because they came apart easily and tended to catch on things like socks or stockings. The real breakthrough came ten years after Judson's slide fastener. In 1913 a Swedish engineer named Gideon Sundback had the idea of making a zip from a pair of identical locking strips attached to a flexible backing. On each locking strip there are small teeth that hook with eyes under the teeth on the other strip. Try pushing a zip together with your fingers and you will find that the teeth are too wide to slot between the adjoining ones on the other side. When you use the slide though, the teeth are splayed open to let the ones opposite lock into place. Unless you are very unlucky, a zipped zip will stay firmly closed for as long as you want it to. When you unzip it the process is reversed and the slide splays the teeth open to let the ones opposite unlock and spread apart.

 

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Almost anything we manage to do three times in a row is called a hat trick today. The one thing you can be fairly sure of is that it seldom, if ever, involves a hat. However, a hundred years ago a hat gave rise to the expression. In those days hat tricks only occurred in games of cricket.

Back in the 1880s a bowler who took three wickets with three balls bowled one after the other was given a new hat by his club. The feat became known as a hat trick and, as it caught on, people began applying the term to all sorts of other sports and activities.

 

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The honest answer is that no one knows. Not that that has stopped plenty of people putting forward ideas. One suggests that as 25 March used to be New Year's Day, 1 April was the day when all the fun and games that followed it came to an end. Another theory is that our April Fool's Day may be a survivor from the ancient Roman ceremony of Cerealia. This was also held at the beginning of April. According to the legend it was based on, the goddess Ceres went in search of her daughter Proserpina, who had been carried off to the underworld by the god Pluto. Ceres heard the echo of Proserpina's screams and went in search of these. It was a fool's errand, of course - chasing after an echo. Well, that is the theory anyway.

Another explanation links April Fool's Day with Lud, the Celtic god in charge of fun. And some people try to match it with the trial of Jesus Christ. But no one knows for certain.

 

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History, in the sense of everything that has ever been recorded about the past, is unbelievably recent when you compare it with the age of the earth. In fact it is so young that one of the simplest ways of understanding this is to imagine the entire age of the earth - that's about 4700 million years as just one single year. OK?

Using round figures on that scale, a month would equal just over 391,000,000 years. A day would equal getting on for 13,000,000 years. And an hour would amount to more than 500,000 years.

Right. Imagine that it's New Year's Eve at the end of that year covering the world's entire existence. Imagine that the clock has started chiming twelve to mark the beginning of the new year. How did the old year shape up?

In a word – slowly. In two words - very slowly! It didn't start to show any signs of life until May. The first mammals didn't appear until around Christmas. Our earliest ancestor didn't arrive until about six hours ago. In the last hour there have been no fewer than four separate ice ages. The last of these ended just ninety seconds ago. Our earliest wall-painting ancestor only got to work at one minute before midnight.

That does not leave a lot of time for history. No, we have had to pack in a lot since the clock started striking twelve. Christopher Columbus sailed to America during the eighth stroke. And space exploration, televisions, video-recorders, microwaves and McDonald's were all invented a split second ago.

 

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Kites have been in use for three hundred years and not only as great things to play with on windy days. The first kites were invented in China, where they were used for religious purposes, for fishing, for sending signals and for lifting people into the air. This last use makes the kite the first real air craft in history. It is also the longest lasting. As recently as 1904 the British Army began using kites to lift observers up in the air to get a good view of a battlefield or see what enemy troops were doing.

Kites are still used today to hoist radio aerials from life-rafts and save shipwrecked sailors or pilots who have been forced down over the sea.

 

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The numerals that are most widely used around the world are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0. These are known as Arabic numerals, because European scholars first came across them in books written by Arab scholars. Just to confuse matters, the Arab scholars discovered them in maths books, written by scholars in India. And it is in India that the story of our numerals begins.

They were first used there about 2500 years ago. We would not recognize those early numerals if we saw them. But if you trace their development over the centuries, you can see how one shape led to another, ending up with the ones that we know and use today.

The '0' representing zero appeared much later than the numerals 1-9. To begin with, zero was indicated by a dot. The circle symbol that is now used did not arrive in Europe until the twelfth century two hundred years after the numerals 1-9.

 

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The alphabet we use is called the Latin alphabet. It is more or less the same as the alphabet used in ancient Rome. We might find it a bit difficult reading some of the old Roman letters, but scholars have worked out that our letters developed from them.

The Romans did not invent these letters. They adapted them too. The alphabet they copied was the Greek one. The word 'alphabet' comes from the names of the first two Greek letters - 'alpha' and beta'. And where did the Greek alphabet come from? Well, the first alphabet used in the western world was devised by traders from north Africa called the Phoenicians. They got their ideas from the people of Sumeria, in what is now called southern Iraq. So it is fair to say that our alphabet has developed over 3500 years, or more, from the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

Which of the letters do you think has had its present shape the longest?

The answer is 'O'. Language experts have decided that this has remained unchanged since the Phoenicians were writing it.

 

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OK was first used in America - OK? Its earliest recorded use dates from 1839, when it appeared in a Boston newspaper. At that time several journalists in the city were amusing themselves by abbreviating phrases they had deliberately misspelled. OW was used for 'oll wright', meaning 'all right'. OK was the abbreviated form of 'oll korrect', or 'all correct'. Not long after, a group of politicians in New York used the word in the name of a club they formed. They called this the Democratic O.K. Club and 'OK' became a sort of password between members.

In the same year, 1840, the American people voted for a new president. One of the candidates was President Martin Van Buren, who wanted to be re-elected. His nickname was Old Kinder hook - Kinderhook being the place where he was born. The coincidence was too good to miss and all over the country his supporters took up 'OK' as their rallying cry. OK was OK to his supporters everywhere, and the expression came all the more to mean all right, all correct'. It was just a shame that Martin Van Buren lost the election!

His defeat did not affect the popularity of the word, though, and it has been spreading around the world ever since.

 

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There have been some massive bangs in history. Man-made ones like bombs are deafening for people close to them. But even they are puny when judged against some of the noises created by nature. The loudest of these are almost certainly the eruptions of volcanoes. And the greatest of these in recent times is reckoned to be the eruption of the volcano on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa. Krakatoa used to be an island of twenty-eight square kilometres. It had a volcano that rose to a height of 820 metres. The volcano had been quiet for over two hundred years when it erupted in May 1883. Three months later it erupted again - on 26 August. Then on the following day it blew open with an eruption so violent that the whole island split in two. Two-thirds of it disappeared in a gigantic cloud of dust and rock! This was blown fifty-five kilometres into the air. The sun was blot ted out and an area 280 kilometres across went dark.

As if that wasn't bad enough, a huge wave, or tsunami, towering thirty metres high, rocketed off across the sea, destroying everything in its path. The wave travelled at an estimated 1120 kilo metres per hour. It wiped out over 160 villages and killed more than 36,000 people. Remnants of it even washed up on the shores of Australia and California thousands of kilometres away.

The noise from such a monumental eruption was heard over one-thirteenth of the earth's surface. People nearly 5000 kilometres away thought they were hearing a naval battle when the blast reached their ears.

The eruption of Krakatoa was well documented, so we know a lot about it. Even so, scientists believe that an eruption in ancient times was five times greater even than that. This was the eruption on the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea. It blew a large part of the island to smithereens more than 1600 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.

 

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Teddy bears have been around since 1902. That was the year they first appeared in both the USA and Germany. No one knows for sure which country was first with the bear.

There is a question mark over the name teddy bear too. The likeliest explanation seems to be that it is named after the American president at the time. He was Theodore Roosevelt and his nickname was Teddy. He liked bear hunting. But he also respected bears and once refused to shoot a captive bear cub. This story appeared in a cartoon in November 1902 and the teddy bear was born.

 

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We have the Romans to thank for these. They dedicated January to the god Janus. He looked after the entrance to the year. To do this Janus had two faces. With one he could look back over the old year while the other looked forward to the new year. February was the month of purification in ancient Rome and February comes from the Latin word meaning ‘to purify by sacrifice’. March got its name from Mars, the god of war.

Spring starts to appear in the fourth month. Plants and trees start to unfold then. The earth begins shooting forth new life. So this one was called April, which probably got its name from the Latin word meaning to open. Maia was the lovely Roman goddess in charge of growth and she seemed a good bet for the month we now call May. Another Roman goddess called Juno, probably gave her name to the sixth month – June. However, there is a bit of doubt about this. The name Junius, connected with youth, may have been the origin as well.

You are on safer ground with July and August. Both of these were named after famous Roman leaders. July was named in honour of Julius Caesar. He conquered Britain, among other places. August took its name from the emperor Augustus. He was the first emperor of Rome and this was his lucky month.

After Augustus the Romans seemed to have run out of original ideas. September, October, November and December are named after the Latin words for seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth. The earliest Roman calendar had only ten months, the year used to begin in March. Therefore September was the seventh month and so on until the end of the year.

 

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We have been eating sausages for a very long time. The ancient Greeks enjoyed them, and sausages have been popular all over Europe for hundreds of years. By the late 1600s a type of sausage called a ‘dachshund sausage’ was being made in Germany. When German immigrants started going to live in the USA, ‘dachshund sausages’ went with them. And about a hundred years ago they started being sold on the streets of New York, shoved into bread rolls with sauerkraut.

On a cold in 1901 one street seller was calling out to his customers, ‘Red-hot! Buy your dachshund sausages while they’re red-hot’! A cartoonist passing by took up the idea and drew cartoons of dachshund dogs wrapped in bread rolls. But the cartoonist didn’t know how to spell ‘dachshund’. He called the sausages and rolls ‘hot-dogs’ – and the name caught on.

 

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