14 April: Pigeons

The Pigeon is the creature celebrated in the French Revolutionary calendar on this date. Another sometimes maligned creature, here are 10 things you didn't know about pigeons:

1. Both pigeons and doves belong to the family Columbidae, which includes about 310 species. In fact, the extinct dodo belonged to this family, too, so a dodo was a type of pigeon. The pigeons common in cities such as London are feral pigeons. They are a subspecies of the domestic pigeon or rock dove.
2. The largest pigeon species is the crowned pigeon of New Guinea, which is almost as big as a Turkey and weighs 2–4 kg (4.4–8.8 lb). The smallest is the New World ground-dove, which is the same size as a house Sparrow and weighs as little as 22 g.
3. Racing pigeons are a specific breed bred for the sport, the Racing Homer. They can fly as far as 1,800 km (1,100 miles) and can also be worth a lot of Money. One sold for stud fetched $132,517.00.
4. Pigeon is a French word that derives from the Latin pipio, for a "peeping" chick. Dove is a German word which refers to its diving flight.
5. People often ask why you never see baby pigeons. This is because baby pigeons remain in the nest for up to two months, so by the time they leave it, they are juvenile birds, and it takes an experienced eye to distinguish them from full adults.
6. The Rothschild family has pigeons to thank for their fortune. In the early 1800s the Rothschild family set up a network of pigeon lofts throughout Europe and used homing pigeons to carry information between its financial houses. This was quicker and more efficient than any other means of communication available at the time. The speed of the service and the ability to send and receive information ahead of the competition helped the Rothschild family make a lot of money.
7. Pigeon guano used to be so valuable as a fertilizer and as a source of saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, that armed guards were stationed at the entrances to dovecotes (pigeon houses) to stop people from stealing it.
8. Pigeons are famous for their homing instinct. Scientists aren't sure exactly how this works. One study observed that the birds used roads and motorways to navigate and would actually use junctions as markers telling them when to change direction. However, one assumes pigeons were finding their way home long before there were motorways so there must be more to it than that. It's thought they also use the Earth's magnetic field and the Sun as well as visual landmarks. Man has exploited the pigeons' talent and used them to deliver messages since ancient times. The Romans used pigeons to announce the start of sporting events like the Olympic Games, which is the origin of doves being released during the opening ceremonies. In England, pigeons were often taken to Football matches and released to carry home the result of the game. As recently as 1977, pigeons were used in Plymouth to deliver medical samples and medication between two hospitals.
9. They've also been used by the military to deliver messages and plans in wartime, including both world wars. There are even pigeons which have been awarded medals for their contribution. Cher Ami, a homing pigeon in World War I, was awarded the Croix de Guerre Medal with a palm Oak Leaf Cluster for her service in Verdun and for delivering the message that saved the Lost Battalion of the 77th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Argonne, October 1918. Others include birds called Commando, G.I. Joe, Paddy, and William of Orange. Some of these birds, including Cher Ami, were stuffed when they died and are on display in museums.
10. Pigeons are highly intelligent. They are one of only six species of animal, and the only non-mammal, which is able to recognise its own reflection in a mirror. Pigeons have been taught to recognise all 26 letters of the alphabet and to distinguish between two photographs and recognise individual human beings. Their intelligence, plus the fact they see colour as well as people do, and can also see ultra-violet, has made them very effective at spotting survivors during sea rescue situations, as navy researchers have found.

April 13: Apollo 13

On this date in 1970, Apollo 13 ran into trouble. Here are ten facts about the ill-fated mission:

1. Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. Its original mission was to was to explore the Fra Mauro formation, a task later completed by Apollo 14.
2. The mission launched on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 CST from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
3. Prior to launch, there had been a considerable amount of chopping and changing regarding the crew. NASA's system of deciding well in advance who went on which mission originally had the crew down as L. Gordon Cooper, Jr (Commander); Donn F. Eisele (Command Module Pilot); and Edgar D. Mitchell (Lunar Module Pilot), because they had been the backup crew for Apollo 10. However, this particular crew had only been included as backups because there weren't enough astronauts. Cooper had a "lax attitude towards training" and Eisele had been having an affair - so they were out of favour and a different crew was suggested: Alan B. Shepard, Jr (Commander); Stuart A. Roosa (Command Module Pilot); Edgar D. Mitchell (Lunar Module Pilot). However, Shepherd had recently had ear surgery and wouldn't have had enough time to train after his recovery, so this crew was rejected as well.
4. The final choice was James A. Lovell as commander, Fred W. Haise as Lunar Module Pilot and Ken Mattingly as command module pilot. Even so, there was one more change before launch. One of Mattingly's kids had German measles and since Mattingly had never had the disease, and didn't have immunity, he was replaced by Jack Swigert. Lovell disagreed with the decision. Mattingly never did contract German measles.
5. What went wrong? Two days into the mission, 200,000 miles from Earth, an Oxygen tank exploded on the command module, Odyssey.
6. James Lovell never actually uttered the words "Houston we have a problem". It was Hollywood artistic licence in the film when Tom Hanks said it. It was Swigert who reported the problem and he actually said, "Houston, we've had a problem."
7. In order for the astronauts to survive, they aborted the landing on the moon and used the lunar module, Aquarius, as a lifeboat. There were backup oxygen tanks so oxygen supply was less of a problem than shortages of Water and power. The astronauts and ground control between them had to come up with a way to get rid of carbon dioxide by linking incompatible cannisters together with a suit hose. The resulting device was nicknamed "the mailbox."
8. Aquarius couldn't bring them all the way home, however, as it didn't have enough heat shields, so for re-entry, the astronauts returned to the command module and jettisoned it.
9. Lovell referred to the mission as "a successful failure". They didn't get to the moon, but it did show how astronauts and ground crew could remain calm and co-operate to solve problems in a highly stressful situation. The mission also achieved a record. Since Apollo 13 needed to swing by the moon before returning home, passing the far side of the Moon at an altitude of 254 kilometers (137 nautical miles) above the lunar surface, and 400,171 km (248,655 mi) from Earth, they hold the record for the farthest humans have ever travelled from Earth.
10. The three astronauts returned home safely on April 17 and were picked up by the recovery ship, USS Iwo Jima. Aside from having lost weight and one astronaut having a kidney infection caused by water rationing, they were all in good condition.

12th April: Horse Chestnut

In the French Revolutionary Calendar, today celebrated the Horse Chestnut, aka the conker tree. Here are some facts you may not have known about horse chestnut trees and conkers:

1. The Latin name for the common horse chestnut Aesculus hippocastanum. Linnaeus named the genus Aesculus after the Roman name for an edible acorn.
2. Not that the seeds of the tree are edible. They're toxic to people and some animals. Native Americans used to crush the seeds and throw them into water to stun or kill fish. They would then boil and drain the fish at least three times in order to dilute the toxin's effects. New shoots from the seeds have been known to kill grazing cattle.
3. That said, deer and wild boar eat them without ill effects, and in olden days, they were ground up and used as remedies for horses. This is possibly the origin of the common name for the tree - Horse chestnut.
4. Alternatively, the name could come from the fact that, when the leaves fall off in autumn they leave a scar on the stem, which looks like a Horseshoe, complete with nails.
5. The horse chestnut was first introduced to the UK from Turkey in the late 16th century.
6. The seeds from this tree are often referred to as "conkers" after the children's game in which conkers are threaded onto string and used to hit an opponent's conker until one of them breaks. The word conker may come from the verb, to conquer, or conk, to knock out.
7. The game of conkers wasn't always played with horse chestnuts. The first mention of the game is in Robert Southey's memoirs published in 1821 - this game was played with Snail shells or Hazelnuts, however. The first recorded game of Conkers using Horse Chestnuts was on the Isle of Wight in 1848.
8. A new conker is a none-er meaning that it has conquered none yet. If a none-er breaks another none-er then it becomes a one-er, if it was a one-er then it becomes a two-er, and so on. 2001 Eamonn Dooley from Freshford in Co. Kilkenny, Ireland had a 306-er (at least) after he broke a record breaking 306 conkers in one hour.
9. Horse chestnut trees grow to a height of around 40m, and can live for up to 300 years. They have distinctive leaves, with five or more long leaflets, clusters of flowers resembling candelabra, and in winter, the twigs have large red-brown buds covered in sticky sap, which protects them from damage from frost and insects.
10. Other uses of the conkers include additives in shampoos and starch substitutes. Chemicals extracted from conkers can be used to treat strains and bruises.

11th April: Pillar Boxes

On this date in 1855, the first pillar boxes appeared in London. Here are ten things you may not know about pillar boxes.

1. How did people post letters before there were pillar boxes? They took them to a post office, or a coaching inn where coaches would stop to let passengers off, and pick up the mail.
2. The pillar box was invented by the novelist Anthony Trollope. His day job at the time was Post Office Surveyor for the Western District. His boss, Sir Rowland Hill, Secretary of the Post Office, sent him to the Channel Islands to sort out the mail problems there. The difficulties were around the irregular sailing of the Royal Mail boats due to the tides.
3. The solution Trollope came up with, a “letter-receiving pillar”, was inspired by a similar device he had previously seen in Paris.
4. The Channel Islands got pillar boxes in late 1852 and 1853. It is recorded in the Post Office archives that the first box in the UK was erected in Botchergate, Carlisle in 1853. The first six in London were installed on 11 April 1855.
5. Pillar boxes weren't always round and red. The first ones in London, designed by Grissel and Son of Hoxton Ironworks were rectangular, although surmounted by a decorative ball. Londoners didn't like them - they said they were ugly, and so they were replaced. Only one survived, and was to be kept for posterity - but was destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz.
6. Other shapes have been used such as hexagonal Penfolds, and an oval shape that is used mainly for the large "double aperture" boxes most often seen in large cities like London. According to the Letter Box Study Group, there are more than 150 recognised designs and varieties of pillar boxes and wall boxes, not all of which have known surviving examples.
7. There wasn't a standard colour until 1859. Even then, they weren't red. Green was chosen because green would be unobtrusive. They were unobtrusive all right - people kept walking into them! So in 1874 it was decided that unobtrusiveness wasn't the way to go, and all pillar boxes should be painted red. It took ten years to repaint every pillar box in the UK.
8. Today, there are also a few gold ones. In the home towns of every Team GB member who won a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics, there is a gold pillar box. Originally, they were going to be repainted red eventually, but now they will stay gold.
9. Royal Mail estimates there are over 100,000 post boxes in the United Kingdom.
10. Pillar boxes are fitted with a brass security lock. The contractor for these locks has been the Chubb Locks company for many years. There is no skeleton key for these locks. Each post box has its own set of keys, so postal workers have to carry large bunches of keys when clearing the boxes.

10th April: Safety pin patented

The safety pin was patented on this date in 1849. Here are 10 things you may not know about safety pins:

1. The first safety pins were brooches called ‘fibulae’, which were worn by the ancient Greeks to hold their clothes together. They didn't have any kind of spring mechanism.
2. The safety pin as we know it today was invented by Walter Hunt in 1849. He was a prolific inventor who also invented a machine to spin flax, a fire engine gong, a forest saw, and a stove that burned hard coal.
3. The safety pin came about because Hunt owed his friend $15, so decided to invent something new in order to pay his friend back. He sold the rights to the safety pin for $400 to W R Grace Company, who went on to make millions from it.
4. Hunt didn't call his invention a “safety pin” but described it as “a new and useful Improvement in the Make or Form of Dress-Pins”.
5. Safety pins are generally made of a metal wire such as stainless steel or brass, and the length of wire is curled in the middle to form a basic spring.
6. Meanwhile, in England, Charles Rowley was also thinking up the same idea and patented a safety pin in October of the same year.
7. "Safety pin" may be a misnomer. An estimated 103 people had to be treated in hospital in the UK in 2002 for safety pin injuries. They are frequently swallowed by small children, especially in countries like Turkey, where good luck charms are often made from the pins. It has been such a common problem that the laryngologist Dr. Chevalier Jackson devised special instruments for removing swallowed safety pins.
8. Safety pins are commonly associated with the punk fashions of the 1970s. Some claim the look was taken originally from Richard Hell, although Johnny Rotten insists it was for much more practical reasons, ie to stop "the arse of your pants falling out".
9. There is a safety pin at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, California. It is a sculpture, 21 feet high.
10. The longest chain of safety pins ever measures 1,091.8 m (3,582 ft 0 in) and was created by Misha Collins at Central Park, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, on 15 August 2013. The number of safety pins in the entire chain - 43,098.

9th April: Winston Churchill Day

Winston Churchill Day - on 9 April 1963, US President John F. Kennedy – acting under authorisation granted by an Act of Congress – proclaimed Sir Winston Churchill an Honorary Citizen of the United States. Churchill and Mother Teresa are the only people to have been made honorary US citizens during their lifetimes. Here are ten more fascinating facts about Winston Churchill:

1. He was in fact half American. His mother was Jennie Jerome, the daughter of a wealthy financier. She was born in Brooklyn. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, the third son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough. He also had a brother, Jack, and is also related to Diana, Princess of Wales.
2. Anyone encountering Churchill when he was at school probably wouldn't have foreseen the statesman he was destined to become. He had red hair and a lisp (all his life he had trouble pronouncing the letter S, and many of his famous witticisms where planned well in advance for this reason). His schoolmates called him "Copperknob". He didn't exactly excel in lessons, either. He did okay in history and English composition, but was rubbish at everything else. In his memoirs he described taking a Latin test and leaving it completely blank except for his name, the number of the first question, and “a blot and several smudges.” He failed the entrance exams for Sandhurst twice.
3. Churchill proposed marriage to three different women in his twenties before meeting his wife, Clementine Ogilvy Hozier (He took her to church! Sorry. Couldn't resist).
4. Some of the things he said and did as a politician and some of his views would not go down well today, AT ALL. He was against votes for women, thought mentally deficient people should be sterilised and that Zulus, Afghans and Dervishes were “savages and barbarous peoples.” He famously didn't like Gandhi, and favoured letting him die when he went on hunger strike. When Churchill visited a siege in 1911 where two burglars were hiding in a house with 200 police officers outside, and the house caught fire, Churchill ordered the fire brigade not to put the Fire out and let the two men burn to death.
5. He was nevertheless very emotional, and would sometimes break down in tears during his speeches. He suffered from clinical depression throughout his life, calling it his "Black Dog".
6. He would find relief from the pressures of his work and his depression in his hobbies. He'd paint (produced almost 600 works of art during his lifetime), write (he wrote many books, mostly history, but also one novel, and won a Nobel Prize in literature) and bricklaying (he built several walls at his house at Chartwell). He even started learning to fly a plane, but had to give that up after he was hurt in an aeroplane crash at Croydon aerodrome – and his wife made him give it up.
7. He was notorious for his smoking and drinking - yet still lived to be 90. His mother tried to make him give up smoking when he was 15 by promising to buy him a gun and a pony if he quit. He quit for just long enough to cash in on the deal. He he has a cuban cigar named after him - the Churchill is approximately 7inches long and 19mm wide. It is said that Winston Churchill was the only person whom Field Marshal Montgomery would allow to smoke in his presence. As for drinking, his luggage when he set off for the Boer War, included 60 bottles of booze. Later, his daily drinking routine comprised a weak whiskey and soda at 9.30am, a pint of champagne and a cognac with his lunch, sherry and another pint of champers with his dinner followed by 90 year old brandy - after which he would go back to work for another four hours!
8. When staying at the White House in 1941, he'd wander around starkers in his room, and wouldn't cover up when the servants came up with his brandy. Nor would he when President Franklin D Rooselvelt himself paid him a call. Churchill is alleged to have said: ‘The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States.’ Churchill also claimed to have seen the ghost of Abraham Lincoln in the White House. The ghost's reaction to a naked Winston Churchill is not recorded.
9. Elizabeth II offered to create Churchill Duke of London, but he declined.
10. Winston Churchill is the only prime minister to enter the music charts (eat your heart out, Tony Blair). He first charted in 1965, shortly after his death, with ‘The Voice Of‘ – a collection of his most famous speeches. He charted a second time with a record marking the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain: ‘Reach For The Skies‘, by The Central Band of the Royal Air Force.

8th April: Barbara Kingsolver

10 quotes from Barbara Kingsolver, who was born on this date in 1955.

1. Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
2. Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
3. Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.
4. The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
5. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
6. Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
7. Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.
8. People often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
9. I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.
10. Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.