With the exam season fast approaching, here are some bite-sized revision tips for busy students:
- Margaret Rutherford accidentally split the atom whilst messing around in the science lab between takes on the St Trinian’s film set
- A collaboration between John Harrison and Marie Curie led to the invention of chicken tikka masala
- Humphrey Davey invented the lava lamp to keep caged canaries amused after Thatcher closed all the mines
- Galileo Galilei invented daytime and night-time by making the world go round
- Marco Polo reinvented the wheel by adding a hole in the middle
- Alexander Graham Telephone invented the bell
- The rejected first draft of Pythagoras’s theorem was when he drew a square on a hippopotamus
- Richard Trevithick’s first attempt at a railway ended in failure because the “rails” were made of two short planks. Later, on a trip to Rome, he added two more to make the first fountain pen
- Nicolaus Copernicus created the world’s first self-heating underpants, using heat from the current flowing between his body and his underwear. His later invention of the thermostat arose when he started a new career as a bimetallic stripper.
- Archimedes’ Screw was the earliest design for a bath plug
- Captain Robert Hooke discovered Australia whilst on a fishing trip
- Charles Darwin’s rather disappointing sequel to his most famous book was written whilst suffering an attack of night fever in Massachusetts. It’s called “The Origin of the Bee Gees”
- Alessandro Volta once famously said “If batteries didn’t exist, we would have to invent them”. In his later life, he suffered badly from piles
- Albert Einstein weighed only 6.36kg
- Erwin Schrödinger’s cat faced an uncertain future after moving to Werner Heisenberg’s house
- After thousands of years, people will still be counting on BT Infinity
- The home page for the iPad is a site for core eyes
- Wolfgang Pauli was excluded from school after he got two of his teachers into a bit of a spin
- Joseph-Louis Lagrange’s younger brother Colin wrote the French version of Grange Hill
