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Another good graphic from "A history of commerce, 1907" - before and after the age of explorers (mid-15th century).


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...Greek mathematics introduced the quest for general propositions which could be proved in such a way as to be objectively persuasive. In other words, where the Egyptians had been able to calculate the volume of a certain cylinder and verify that the result was correct, or at least suitable for their, usually practical, purposes, the Greeks found ( Read more... )

Several of the Phoenician consonants encoded sounds not used in Greek, and at some point an unknown genius took a momentous step: he or she converted these unneeded letters into vowels. The new Greek vowels eliminated nearly all the ambiguity of a consonant-only script and thus enabled mastery of the alphabet by children as young as five or six ( Read more... )

But after years of experiments that actually bankrupted his family, Charles Goodyear finally realized his dream; he discovered, quite by accident, how to stabilize the sap he was so obsessed with and received his first patent for “vulcanizing” (from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire) rubber in 1837.
The narrative about a major invention follows the ( Read more... )

Now listen to what I did for the mortals to save them from their many miseries ( Read more... )