@wtfhistory / wtfhistory.tumblr.com
Slang: Victorian English
Crinkum-crankum.
TALLYWAGS
I get the feeling the Victorians would have been fans of “frickle-frackle”
I was gonna make a Thot joke but im ready for that word to be dead and gone, dead and gone.
Ay girl, let me see your crinkum-crankum.
pink is countries britain has invaded
All right we were a young country everyone has trouble growing up everyone has rebellious stages some countries skateboarded and didn’t listen to their mothers and we just happened to go for world domination everyone’s different
December 27, 1831: The HMS Beagle embarks on its second voyage, with Charles Darwin aboard.
Twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle, a sloop captained by one Robert Fitzroy, an amateur naturalist and a prospective parson. The expedition was to last two years, though it ended up lasting five, taking the Beagle and its crew across the Atlantic, around the coasts of South America, and eventually around the Earth. The main objective of the voyage was to conduct hydrographic surveys, but it was the ship’s young “gentleman naturalist”, hired almost as an afterthought, who cemented the trip’s place in history.
The Beagle set sail from Plymouth on December 27, 1831. Darwin was ill-suited for life at sea, commenting that “the misery I endured from seasickness is far beyond what I ever guessed”; luckily, he spent much of his time exploring and theorizing on land rather than sailing at sea. In Punta Alta, Argentina, Darwin discovered giant fossils of extinct mammals. On an island near Chile, he witnessed a volcano and earthquake that levelled cities and altered the coastline. In 1835 he arrived at the Galápagos Islands where he briefly observed his famous finches without bothering to label and categorize them properly. On the islands he noted that “by far the most remarkable feature in the natural history of this archipelago” was “that the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings”.
By the time he returned to England, Darwin had established his reputation as a respected up-and-coming geologist among the country’s elite scientific circles. In the years following his return, Darwin wrote extensively on his five-year journey. Between 1838 and 1843 The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, a book Darwin edited, was published in five different parts, and in 1839 he published The Voyage of the Beagle. Neither work directly addressed evolution or natural selection, although Darwin was most certainly formulating his theories by that time, and in fact he may have been pondering the idea during the voyage. Although it would take years of further research, when he finally published his 1859 work On the Origin of Species, which presented his theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin conceded in the introduction that his travels with the Beagle played a key role in formulating the theory:
WHEN on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle,’ as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.
THE FUCKING GALAPAGOS, THO. IT IS FREAKY AS FUCK.
GO RESEARCH IT. AND FIND THE MARINE IGUANA. BECAUSE IF GRENDEL WERE AN ANIMAL, SHE WOULD BE ONE OF THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS.
December 10, 1815: Ada Lovelace is born.
Today’s Google Doodle honors Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate child and the woman who is popularly credited as “the world’s first computer programmer”. Lady Byron, who separated from Ada’s father just a month after she was born, sought to raise her daughter in a manner that ensured she would not end up like her volatile poet father. Ada, often ill as a child, began studying mathematics at a young age and soon discovered her natural flair for the subject, so strong that one of her tutors, Augustus De Morgan, suggested that she become a mathematician “of first-rate eminence” later in life. In 1833, Ada attempted to elope with another one of her tutors, although her attempt failed, and the entire incident was covered up.
That year, she also met Charles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor with whom Ada shared a close correspondence for the rest of her life. Over a nine-month-long period in 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an Italian memoir regarding Babbage’s Analytical Engine; she supplemented her translation with her own set of notes (which actually ended up longer than the memoir itself) explaining in detail the differences between Babbage’s machine and his Difference Engine. Ada was optimistic about the future of these engines and machines. Although a mathematician, she was not limited by numbers and predicted that someday a more complex descendant of Babbage’s engines “might act upon other things besides number… the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. She also provided what is today recognized as “the world’s first computer program” - a proposed algorithm that would generate Bernoulli numbers using the analytical machine. Whether Ada formulated the plan herself, or whether it was the product of close collaboration between herself, Babbage, and associates, or whether it was someone else’s work entirely, remains subject to debate to this day. Babbage, at least, was as impressed by Ada as she was by him; in 1843 he wrote of her:
Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans – every thing in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.
Fun fact: Grendel shares a birthday with a wildly cool woman of history.
