Maritime history
History
22 rabbit holes · 11 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Why was longitude so hard to find at sea?
- Who made the first weather forecast?
- What did the Antikythera mechanism do?
Rabbit holes
- Japanese curry probably came via the British navy, and the Japanese navy still eats it every Friday
Curry reached Japan in the Meiji era via the British, as curry powder rather than anything directly from India, which is why it's a thick roux stew. The navy adopted it, and the JMSDF still serves curry on Fridays.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- 28,000 rubber ducks fell into the Pacific and taught us about ocean currents
A container of bath toys went overboard in 1992. Oceanographers tracked them for years as they washed up in Alaska, Hawaii, South America, and supposedly some made it into the Atlantic.
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources
- navigators used to shoot the stars through a bubble in the roof of the plane
Saw a photo of a B-29 with a little glass dome on top and had to know what it was for. Ended up back at Harrison's clocks, as one does.
Moira Gallagher · 6 sources
- the Franklin expedition wrecks were found in 2014 and 2016
129 men vanished looking for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s. Inuit testimony about where the ships went was ignored for 150 years and turned out to be right.
Marcus Thompson · 6 sources
- only a handful of people have been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench
Desmond Achebe · 5 sources
- the Dutch traded Manhattan for a nutmeg island
The Dutch wanted a monopoly on nutmeg so badly that in 1667 they let the English keep New Amsterdam in exchange for a tiny island in the Bandas. The history of the Bandas themselves is a lot darker.
Tomás Rinaldi · 5 sources
- the Vasa sank 1,300 m into its maiden voyage
Top-heavy warship, the king kept wanting more guns, a stability test (30 sailors running side to side) almost capsized it and they launched anyway. Raised in 1961 almost intact because the Baltic has no shipworms.
Nikolai Volkov · 4 sources
- pirate ships were weirdly democratic
Elected captains who could be voted out, written constitutions, fixed shares of loot, compensation for injuries. Leeson's argument is that it was just the most efficient way to run a criminal enterprise.
Clara Novak · 5 sources
- Fresnel lenses made lighthouses visible for miles
Nikolai Volkov · 4 sources
- the shipping container changed the whole world economy
Before containers, loading a ship took days and armies of dockworkers, and theft was routine. Standard boxes made shipping so cheap that it reshaped where everything is manufactured.
Desmond Achebe · 6 sources
- tea clippers raced each other to London
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- how a clockmaker solved longitude
Moira Gallagher · 7 sources
- a mountain of silver in Bolivia and a century of European inflation
Started with a documentary clip about Cerro Rico and somehow ended at monetary theory and the Ming dynasty's appetite for silver.
Maren Holt · 7 sources
- the Beagle's captain invented the weather forecast
FitzRoy coined 'forecast' in the weather sense, set up storm warnings for ports after a terrible storm in 1859, and got the first daily forecasts printed in The Times in 1861. Then he got mocked in the papers every time they were wrong.
Nikolai Volkov · 6 sources
- why bananas are bad luck on boats
A bunch of theories: fast banana ships meant no fishing en route, spiders hiding in bunches, fermenting fruit giving off fumes in the hold. Fishermen in Hawaii and Florida still take it seriously.
Clara Novak · 3 sources
- Shackleton's Endurance was found in 2022, 3 km down
The name 'ENDURANCE' still readable on the stern. Then I reread the whole expedition and the open-boat journey is still one of the most insane things humans have done.
Alistair Grant · 5 sources
- We've mapped Mars better than our own ocean floor
Only roughly a quarter of the seafloor has been mapped at high resolution. Most of what you see on Google Earth is estimated from satellite measurements of the sea surface.
Nikolai Volkov · 5 sources
- the internet is mostly cables on the sea floor
Something like 99% of intercontinental data goes through cables about as thick as a garden hose. Sharks used to bite them. Ship anchors still cut them.
Nils Eriksson · 5 sources
- scurvy: they had the cure and lost it again
Clara Novak · 5 sources
- USS Constitution is a real-life Ship of Theseus
Only a small fraction of its original timber is left, but it's still commissioned and still 'the' Constitution. Grandfather's axe, Trigger's broom, etc.
Nikolai Volkov · 4 sources
- Mary Celeste and how Arthur Conan Doyle made it a mystery
A real ship found abandoned and seaworthy in 1872. Conan Doyle's fictional story about it was so popular that a lot of the 'facts' people repeat (half-eaten breakfast, warm tea) come from the story.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- The Antikythera mechanism
Alistair Grant · 6 sources