Historical Diaries

     He was the first black President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who died in 2013 would have turned 102 years of age today. He is mostly remembered for his lengthily detainment and anti-Apartheid work.   Here are few facts on Nelson Mandela you probably might not know:   Nelson was not his first name. Both his parents were illiterate, but being a devout Christian, his mother sent him to a local Methodist school when he was about seven. Baptized a Methodist, Mandela was given the English forename of "Nelson" by his teacher. Given the forename Rolihlahla, a Xhosa term colloquially meaning "troublemaker" in later years he became known by his clan name, Madiba.   He escaped an arranged marriage. Coming back to Mqhekezweni in December 1940, Mandela found that Jongintaba had organized marriage for him; dismayed, he fled to Johannesburg by means of Queenstown, showing up in April 1941. Mandela's mom took him to the "Great Place" royal residence at Mqhek...

German Scientists Discover X-rays   On this day in the year 1895, a mechanical physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen becomes the first person to observe X-rays, a significant scientific advancement that would ultimately benefit a variety of fields, most of all medicine, by making the invisible visible. Rontgen’s discovery occurred accidentally in his Wurzburg, Germany, lab, where he was testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass when he noticed a glow coming from a nearby chemically coated screen. He dubbed the rays that caused this glow X-rays because of their unknown nature, an achievement that earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.      X-ray is an an electromagnetic wave of high energy and very short wavelength, which is able to pass through many materials opaque to light. It is a photographic or digital image of the internal composition of something, especially a part of the body, produced by X-rays being passed t...

A Philosopher is Born   Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian period. Spencer is most popular for the articulation "survival of the fittest", which he began in Principles of Biology (1864), in the wake of reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This term emphatically recommends natural selection, yet as Spencer expanded evolution into domains of sociology and ethics, he likewise utilized Lamarckism.   In the year 1902, shortly before the death of Spencer, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature, that was assigned to Theodor Mommsen, a man of German descent. He continued writing all his life in later years often by dictation, until he succumbed to poor health at the age of 83. His ashes are interred in the eastern side of London's Highgate Cemetery facing Karl Marx's grave. Herbe...