University of Leicester historian thinks Eilmer of Malmesbury saw two different comets: in 1018 and 1066
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Did a medieval flying monk spot Halley’s comet, twice? It’s complicated
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It is nice to see that someone was awake during history lessons.
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infernal666
Ars Praefectus
Also Estes model rockets with mods that would get you 10-15 these days, fun fact- you used to be able to buy tins of blackpowder as a juvenile.....
I am still shocked I have all my fingers.
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For a moment I thought you were referring to nasty surprises for the people infiltrating the Donbas in 2014.
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Judging from the stained-glass depiction, his contraption looks a bit like a hang glider, where he probably grasped a frame the wings were solidly attached to. Not a terrible design: at least it didn't kill him. The 4:1 glide ratio sucks by any modern standard; with a minimum of airflow-catching fabric, a skydiver's wing-suit tops out about 3:1, with 2:1 or 2.5:1 being more common.
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The finest one-handed tennis player I have known, lost more than just some fingers with his weedkiller and sugar concoction. OTOH "Spud" Baker got away with skin grafts after making the rather unwise decision to stuff the lighted firecracker back in his pocket rather than throwing it at the duck when he thought he was being observed. Sometimes I am surprised that enough of us boomers survived the late 50s and early 60s to be a major demographic force.
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Green army men hijinks escalated until In high school a friend and I filled a toilet paper tube with black powder, wrapped it in an entire roll of duct tape around it and buried it two feet deep in a sand pit near his house with a homemade fuse running to it. The size of the crater we produced genuinely frightened us so we turned our attention to doing dumb things with cars instead of explosives.
One day my dad walked into the living room and said, looking directly at me, "I was just out by the big rock in the field and there's a burned patch maybe ten feet in diameter."
"Oh? Weird," I replied.
That was the end of that conversation because we both knew what had actually been said. But I don't know if he ever knew how terrified I was two days earlier as I ran around in the late summer dry field grass stamping out those flames. I came way too close to disaster that time.
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My friends dad had a replica Colt Navy cap and ball 36 caliber. I won't say what we did with the powder for that and empty CO2 cartridges...
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As kids, we used to jump off reasonably high walls onto grass a lot in the 60s. Probably more 5 foot than 6. I can't recall anyone getting seriously hurt, not even a major sprain.
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Perhaps. But were they screams of terror or delight/wonder, that is the question?
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The closest call we had was experimenting with cannons. Did you know a size "C" alkaline battery makes a passable projectile for a cannon fabricated from threaded 1 inch steel galvanized pipe and end cap? A bit further from town, maybe a mile and a half was an abandoned gravel pit beside "the crick". Drilled a tap hole through the cap, loaded a quarter cup of black powder, cotton wadding (t-shirt rags), battery, laid a fuse (trail of black powder up the barrel) blocked the back of the device with a large river rock. Aimed at a 2 x6 fir board target*. Lit the fuse and ran behind the truck, watching through the window. Being young and not quite understanding Newtons 3rd law we were parked directly behind the cannon! Cannon goes off, splits rock shoots up at an angle and hits...the oblique edge of the rear view mirror on the 1964 chevy pickup that belonged to my friends dad (owner of the Navy Colt). The frame was bent into a "V". The mirror was a thousands shards of dangerous glitter. The rear view mirror probably saved our eyesight because absent that it was a clear shot into the side windows of the "glass shrapnel factory" on the truck. So ...after cleaning the poo from our undies we did "sanitizing". Hammered the mirror frame back into shape, bought rattle can paint to touch up, bought a chunk of mirror glass and a glass cutter. Cut and fitted and painted before his dad got off work that eve. We thought we were golden. About 3 days later he asks my friend "so...what happened with the mirror"? Answer "oh...we slid into tree mud-runnin' the other day...
*The 2x6 had a very round 1 inch hole clean through it.
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No, Santa Monica was the one the pilgrims sailed to Plymouth.
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I knew a couple who didn't. One older kid in my town evidently thought blasting caps and a hammer were a good combo. He quickly learned otherwise.
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Turns out that was Medimarket. The rest of the monks were down there taking bets on how far he would fly and whether God would protect him.
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Faeces sacrae?
Although he was 800 years too early for the emergence of Québecois sacres profanity, it seems to me this event would have been a perfect time to exclaim "Sacrament!" or even the strongest word of them all "Tabarnak!"
(And in the wrong place.)
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I made a hang glider out of bamboo and visqueen when I was a kid. I planned to jump out of a tree but my parents told me I had to jump off our single story roof instead. I ran down from the table and it lifted me into the air then snapped in half and I rolled off the edge of the roof. Glad I didn't try a tree first.
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I was also a kid in the “don’t come home until dinner” generation. We never made a parachute which may explain why my little brother broke his arm trying to leap from one tree branch to another.
That said, my middle school kid has his own hatchet, machete, and bow and arrows. If you don’t teach a kid self sufficiency, knife safety, and gumption you may as well put an iPad in the feed bag and leave them out to pasture. I would definitely help him make wings, but also quietly inflate the airbag under him before he jumps.
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"Hercules help me!" Not a literal translation but perhaps idiomatically similar. Although any 11th Century monk asking Hercules for divine intervention might have some 'splainin' to do.
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On the subject of spotting a revisit of Halley's Comet, there was a non-fiction historical book, "How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe" which told of how monasteries were the last depositories of Greek and Roman knowledge after the western Roman Empire went away. Given that Benedictine Monasteries were likely copying decaying manuscripts and Eilmer showed an inclination for engineering/science, I wonder if he 'chanced across' previous astronomical work during his monk duties...
Only tangentially related: MythBusters did an episode where the myth of "Holding a large sheet of plywood will slow a fall from a building enough to make it survivable" was tested. With a later revisit. No 'bird-wing' shaping for control, so only partially overlapping.
(I also loved the MythBusters episode where the myth of "It is impossible to separate two phonebooks interleaved page-to-page due to the massive amount of friction between the 800 pages of each book" was tested. Sooo over-the-top, but imparts a visceral understanding of friction.)
Only tangentially related: MythBusters did an episode where the myth of "Holding a large sheet of plywood will slow a fall from a building enough to make it survivable" was tested. With a later revisit. No 'bird-wing' shaping for control, so only partially overlapping.
(I also loved the MythBusters episode where the myth of "It is impossible to separate two phonebooks interleaved page-to-page due to the massive amount of friction between the 800 pages of each book" was tested. Sooo over-the-top, but imparts a visceral understanding of friction.)
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