Trivia I Wanted to Know

"Lenticchie"

For those of us who need help with our eyesight in old age, we have two Italians from Pisa to thank for the invention of spectacles sometime in the 1280s. Although there is no definitive answer, it is believed that the two were Alessandro Spina and Salvino Armato, glass blowers. The lenses were convex, helping only farsighted individuals. It would be more than 100 years before concave lenses would be ground to help nearsighted people.In the mid-forteen century, Italians called these glasses, "lenticchie" or glass lentils because they resembled the legume "lentil." So "lentil" is the origin of the word "lens."
Cardinal Giovanni de Medici bought several pairs of concave-lens eyeglasses to correct his nearsightedness. When he became Pope, he hired Raphael to paint his portrait. It is the first depiction of a person wearing concave corrective lenses.

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Denis Papin steam digester
Photo: Wikipedia

The pressure cooker was invented by a Frenchman, Denis Papin, a pioneer of steam power. He called his invention the "steam digester." As an assistant to the Irish physicist Robert Boyle, formulator of the the laws governing gases, Papin had developed his steam digester in 1679. It was a metal container with a safety valve and tightly fitting lid, which increased internal steam pressure, raising a cooking liquid's boiling point. He cooked the first meal in his contraption for a London dinner party of the members of the Royal Society.






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Miracle plastics in the order in which they were developed: cellophane, acetate, vinyl, plexiglas, acrylics, melmac, styrene, formica, polyester, nylon, and polyethylene (a synthetic polymer, one of the most important household plastics as in Tupperware). (1912-1942)

Great Pacific Garbage Gyre (Patches of rotating trash)

Mostly plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris

Photo: Wikipedia

 

Unfortunately, today we are drowning the ocean's creatures in tons of plastics which float at the top or under the water, endangering and strangling marine life. Satellite images of major rivers emptying into oceans show an alarming sea of trash and plastics that grow each day; these plastics and trash should have been recycled or captured and burned to generate energy, not dumped into rivers. Lakes are equally abused, especially in third world countries.