History isn’t some dried-up old subject. No way. It is filled with things like bank robberies in the Wild West and golf balls hit on the moon. It is laced with treason and scandal, and deception. It is highlighted with honor and bravery.
Here’s an interesting piece.
Most of us know the tragic story of the Titanic. But few people have heard about Titanic’s older and goofier sister ship, the Olympic.
A sidebar here too. Most people don’t know about “sister ships.” A sister ship is a ship that is virtually identical in design to another ship. They are of the same class. These vessels share a nearly identical hull. Their layout is almost exactly the same. They usually share a common naming theme. It might be the same type of thing or person. Or places. Or constellations. You get the picture. A good example of this is the U.S. warship group of USS Iowa, USS New Jersey, USS Missouri, and USS Wisconsin. These are all sister ships.
So yes. The Titanic and the Olympic were sisters.
The Titanic, on her maiden voyage, hit that gall darn iceberg.
Well, the Olympic was every bit as bumbling, if not more so. It had a long and successful career, but it also spent an awful lot of time smashing into things.
Like all good ships, she needed some voyages. Bon Voyages. So one day, she left England to set out for her fifth Atlantic voyage. Once she was bobbing along, the Olympic sailed just a wee bit close to the Royal Navy warship HMS Hawke. By doing so, she scraped off the warship’s bow ram. I don’t know what a bow ram is, but the Hawke was severely damaged.
The Olympic didn’t seem to notice even though it had a hole in two places. It sailed on to Belfast under her own steam for repairs.
Another time, during the first World War, the Olympic’s mission was to transport British troops. During one crossing, they sighted a German U-boat. The Germans were attempting to torpedo her. So the Olympic took a very sharp turn in order to run over the U-boat. Which it did. The U-boat U103 was punctured by Olympic’s propeller and sunk. The liner suffered a few dents but was not severely harmed. And, to note. The Olympic earned the distinction of being the only merchant ship to sink an enemy vessel during the war.
She had several more crashes with other ships over the years. After 24 years of haphazard sailing, she was scrapped when she could no longer compete with more modern and efficient liners.
Another morsel of history comes with Alexander the Great.
Sure, he was great. In the way of conquering. Alexander, who was a Macedonian king, conquered the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, the Middle East, and parts of Asia in a remarkably short period of time. His followers were like, “Wow. This guy is great.”
Anyway. He may have been buried alive. Not so great.
But yes, a new theory suggests that Alexander the Great was probably still alive when they put him in the ground. He was suffering from paralysis. Doctors in those times used breathing to determine whether a person was alive. They checked for breath, and it was not perceptible. So his men declared him dead and dug the hole. And there went Alexander the Great.
Here is one more little piece of history that most people don’t know.
Get out your umbrellas because 252 million years ago, it rained for 2 million years straight.
About 232 million years ago, during a span known as the Carnian age, it rained almost everywhere. The Earth had seen millions of years of dry climates. But then everything turned the other way. Earth entered a wet period lasting one million to two million years. In nearly any place where geologists find rocks of that age, there are signs of wet weather.
Some little slivers of history from me to you, from our big, big past.
The Earth is 4.543 billion years old.
The Universe is 13.7 billion years old.
That is a big, big past. And I am just one woman with a little keyboard.
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“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
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“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
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“The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.”
― Harry S. Truman
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Big past. Lots of morsels.
