23rd April: Southwark Bridge

The first stone of Southwark Bridge was laid on this date in 1815. Here are some facts about Southwark Bridge.

1. The bridge they started building in 1815 isn't the one that is there today. That one was an iron bridge designed by John Rennie (who also designed London Bridge). It consisted of three large cast-Iron spans supported by granite piers. The bridge was notable for having the longest cast iron span, 240 feet (73 m), ever made.
2. The first stone was laid by Admiral Lord Keith on April 23rd, 1815, and the opening on March 24th, 1819. For this, the bridge was lit with lamps, and declared open as the clock on St Paul's struck midnight.
3. It was originally known as Queen Street Bridge, and there was a toll. The bridge cost £800,000 to build, but the private company which built it went bust when the bridge failed to attract traffic. People preferred to use nearby Blackfriars and London bridges, which were toll free.
4. Today's bridge, even though the toll was abolished in 1864, still has the lowest traffic utilisation of any bridge in central London.
5. The bridge that is there today was designed by Ernest George and Basil Mott. It was built by Sir William Arrol and Co. and opened in 1921.
6. The current bridge was given Grade II listed structure status in 1995.
7. It is 800 feet (243.8 m) long and 55 feet (16.8 m) wide, carrying the A300 road across the Thames.
8. Under Southwark Bridge to the south is a pedestrian tunnel with a frieze depicting the Thames frost fairs. There is also a set of old steps which were used by Thames watermen for mooring up and waiting for customers. Tourist attractions nearby include Tate Modern, the Clink Prison Museum, the Globe Theatre and The Shard.
9. The bridge is owned and maintained by the City Bridge Trust, a charitable trust overseen by the City of London.
10. Southwark Bridge is the "Iron Bridge" mentioned in Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. More recently, it featured in the film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Related Posts: Bridges over the Thames

Albert Bridge
Battersea Bridge
Blackfriars Bridge
London Bridge

Wandsworth Bridge

Southwark Bridge

Waterloo Bridge

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22nd April: Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

Here are some quotes from scientist Robert Oppenheimer, who was born on this date in 1904.

1. The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
2. It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.
3. There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
4. Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
5. Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
6. The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.
7. Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
8. Genius sees the answer before the question.
9. The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.
10. In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything.

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21st April: Charlotte Bronte Quotes

Charlotte Bronte was born on this date in 1816. Here are some quotes by her:

1. Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
2. Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.
3. Better to be without logic than without feeling.
4. I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
5. There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.
6. I would always rather be happy than dignified.
7. Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.
8. I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.
9. It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
10. To prolong doubt was to prolong hope.

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20th April: Adolph Hitler

This date in 1889 saw the birth of the infamous Adolph Hitler. A timely one, perhaps, given the recent comparisons of certain current world leaders to him. I'm not going to comment on that, merely relate the most interesting facts I could find about Hitler and leave you to draw your own conclusions. There are also some explanations as to why he turned out to be such a nasty person.

1. Hitler would have been called Adolf Schicklgruber had his father not decided, for unknown reasons, to change his name in 1877. The name Hitler means “small holder”. The meaning of Schicklgruber is less clear but it may have meant "ditch digger" or "grave digger". The name “Adolph” means “noble wolf.” Hitler knew that, and if he wanted to be incognito as a young man would use the name Herr Wolf. He named his headquarters “Wolf’s Lair” and also called his dog (a German shepherd, naturally) Wolf.
2. Hitler fought in World War I, during which he suffered a couple of injuries. A gas attack temporarily blinded him and damaged his vocal chords giving him a raspy voice. It's possible this is the reason for Hitler's trademark moustache, for the larger one he sported back then prevented his gas mask from sealing properly and he was ordered to shave it off. The toothbrush moustache was a compromise. It's thought that during his time as a soldier in WWI, Hitler had an affair with a 16 year old French girl and got her pregnant. Her son Jean-Marie Loret fought the Nazis in WWII. Incidentally, Hitler's nephew, William Patrick Hitler, also fought against him as a member of the US Navy.
3. Hitler was born in Austria, not Germany, at half past six in the evening on Easter Saturday 1889. As a youngster, he wanted to be a priest (thanks to a priest saving him from a freezing lake as a boy). As a child he took singing lessons and sang in the church choir. Later, he aspired to be an artist but was turned down twice by an art school in Vienna. He tried to make a living as an artist anyway, but wasn't very successful, and lived in homeless shelters for a while. There was also a delay between his renouncing Austrian citizenship and becoming German, which meant he was stateless and under threat of deportation for a while as well.
4. He may have gone down in history as the cruellest dictator ever, but he was totally against cruelty to animals. He was a vegetarian and when the Nazi party first came to power, they passed a number of animal protection laws, with Hitler saying, “In the new Reich, no more animal cruelty will be allowed.” He didn't drink or smoke, either, and his government led the first public anti-smoking campaign.
5. So Hitler was a clean living type of guy then? Not really. He was on all manner of drugs, all prescribed by his doctor. He took opiates, barbiturates, morphine, amphetamines ("Hitler speed" is still a nickname for Pervitin, a type of crystal meth) and cocaine. He took about 80 different drugs a day including 28 to combat his chronic flatulence. His doctor confessed to all this when captured and the Allies accused him of criminal negligence, although a theory was put forward that the doctor was a double agent who was trying to make Hitler dysfunctional by giving him a load of dodgy drugs. His drug use is one theory put forward to explain why Hitler was such a horrible person. Hitler was also said to be terrified of getting cancer and going to the dentist. He also had hepatitis, and some say, Parkinson's disease in later life which might have caused memory loss and affected his thinking and decision making.
6. Another of Hitler's vices was Chocolate - he would eat a kilogram of chocolate a day. He assumed his nemesis, Winston Churchill, shared his love of chocolate - and hatched a plot to kill Churchill with exploding chocolates. Small bombs were covered in chocolate and wrapped in Black and gold Paper. The plot, which sounds to me not unlike the ones hatched in the comedy show 'Allo 'Allo, was foiled by British agents.
7. Another theory put forward as to why Hitler was a horrible person was that he was sexually dysfunctional. Researchers have found evidence that he really did only have one ball and possibly a deformed penis as well. He would refuse to undress for medical examinations which supports that theory. It's also known that his doctor prescribed extracts from prostate glands and testicles of young bulls and testosterone for Hitler to take when he planned a night with Eva Braun.
8. Hitler was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize in 1939 - as a joke. EGC Brandt, a member of the Swedish parliament nominated Adolf Hitler for the peace prize as a satirical criticism of the Swedish government. He was forced to withdraw the nomination. Hitler banned the Nobel Prize and created his own German National Prize for Art and Science. One recipient was Ferdinand Porsche. Hitler was also Time Magazine's man of the year in 1938.
9. Copies of Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, and his artwork still sell copies today. Bavaria owns the rights and gives the money to charity, although charities won't always accept it, as it's widely seen as “blood money.”
10. There were 42 known assassination attempts on his life before he did everyone a favour and shot himself in his bunker. I came across an interesting fact about the bunker - the grandson of the woman who created Hitler's bunker created Saddam Hussein's bunker.

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19th April: Plutonium

Today was the birthdate, in 1912, of Glenn Theodore Seaborg, the Nobel Prize winning chemist who was the co-discoverer of ten elements: plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and element 106, which was named seaborgium in his honour. As plutonium is the one more people will have heard of, here are ten facts about plutonium.

1. It's silvery Grey in appearance, looking a bit like nickel, but tarnishes quickly when exposed to air and turns a dark grey,
2. Unlike most metals, it is not a good conductor of heat or Electricity. It is not magnetic, either.
3. Its melting point is 912.5 K (639.4 °C, 1182.9 °F); its boiling point is 3505 K (3228 °C, 5842 °F), and its atomic number is 94. Twenty different isotopes have been found which have half lives ranging from 80.8 million years to less than a second.
4. Plutonium was first produced and isolated on December 14, 1940 by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg and his colleagues, Joseph W. Kennedy, Edwin M. McMillan, and Arthur C. Wahl.
5. There had been a couple of newly discovered elements named after planets at about that time - Uranium was named after the planet Uranus and neptunium after the planet Neptune - so this group of scientists continued the trend, and named this stuff after Pluto, which was classified as a planet back then. Originally, it was going to be called "plutium", but Seabourg thought "plutonium" sounded better. He also chose the chemical symbol, which logically should have been "Pl" but he chose "Pu" because it sounded like what someone would say when they smelled something bad - "Pee-You!" He expected this to be challenged, but nobody else seemed to notice it was a joke and so Pu it became.
6. "Ultimium" or "extremium" were also considered as names, because, at the time, they really thought they'd discovered the last possible element on the Periodic Table.
7. Plutonium is the heaviest element to occur in nature as trace quantities. It used to be so rare that scientists didn't believe at first that it did exist naturally. There's a lot more of it about these days thanks to its use in nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation.
8. The Fat Man bombs used in the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and in the bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945, had plutonium cores.
9. To find out what effect plutonium would have on the human body, between 1945 and 1947 scientists did something quite despicable. They injected plutonium in to hospital patients who were terminally ill or very old, without their informed consent. It was all covered up until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies made records of the experiments available. What the scientists did is now considered a serious breach of medical ethics and of the Hippocratic Oath. At one time, plutonium was used to power heart pacemakers! Not any more, needless to say.
10. As well as bombs and power, plutonium has been used to power spacecraft, such as the Pathfinder Mars robot lander and the Curiosity Mars rover. 

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18 April: Launderettes

On this date in 1934 the first launderette, called a 'washeteria', was opened in Fort Worth, Texas. Here are ten things you might not know about launderettes.

1. The first launderette was opened by JF Cantrell in Fort Worth, Texas in 1934. He charged people by the hour to use his four Washing machines.
2. The first one in the UK was in Bayswater, London, in 1949, and it's still there. It's called Central Wash.
3. The number of launderettes in the UK peaked in the 1980s. Then, there were about 12,500 across the UK.
4. The peak of launderettes in the 1980s is reflected in popular culture of the time. There is a 1985 film called My Beautiful Launderette, about a gay couple who run a launderette. There was the Levi's 501 advert where a good looking young man (Nick Kamen) walks into a launderette, strips down to his underwear and puts his clothes in the machine. In Eastenders, a soap which began in the 80s, the launderette, run by Dot Cotton, was a key location for characters to meet.
5. Now, there are only about 3,000 launderettes in the UK. More people can afford washing machines at home, and to set up a launderette would cost an entrepreneur between £60,000-£100,000 so many are put off.
6. This doesn't mean they're no longer important or useful. In large cities, where living space is at a premium, people may decide they don't want to use precious space for a washing machine; and there are still people who can't afford one. They are still used by students, tourists and people whose washing machine has broken down. Even people who have a functional washing machine may use the launderette to wash things that don't fit in it, such as duvet covers.
7. Some, but not all, launderettes have staff who will watch unattended machines and sell things like washing powder. Some provide service washes, where a busy person can pay a little extra to drop off their laundry and have the staff wash it and fold it for them to pick up later.
8. Launderettes are starting to adapt to the modern age. There is one in Manchester called The Laundernet, which is basically an Internet cafe with washing machines. It has comfy chairs and a Coffee machine.
9. The brands of washing machine you are most likely to find in a launderette are IPSO. Electrolux, Primus, Maytag, Speed Queen and Frigidaire.
10. The American singer Nivea had a hit with a song called Laundromat in 2003. In the song, written by R Kelly, the laundromat is a metaphor for the end of a relationship and an effort to wash a cheating lover out of her life.

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17 April: Pansies

The Pansy is celebrated in the French Revolutionary Calendar on this date - so here are some things you may not know about pansies:

1. The pansy is a close relative of the violet, or viola, and the names are often used interchangeably. The difference between the two is that pansies have four petals pointing upwards, and only one pointing down, while violets have three petals pointing up and two pointing down.
2. The word "pansy" comes from the French word, pensée, meaning "thought". The name came from the markings on the flower, which resemble a human face, possibly deep in thought. Hence thought and thinking is a common attribute surrounding the symbolism associated with the flower. In the Victorian language of flowers, if a woman received a pansy it would mean “I am thinking of our forbidden love”. The French believed that pansies could make your lover think of you. Pansies are also the emblem of the freethought movement, which advocated coming to conclusions about truth through thought and logic rather than religious dogma.
3. Pansies may be all one colour, or may have lines radiating from the centre as well as the human face markings. Common colours are Purple, Blue, White and Yellow. In the language of flowers, a blue pansy means “I’ll always be true, faithful and watchful,” and white means “let’s take a chance.” Yellow and blue pansies have the strongest scent. It is considered bad luck to give a pansy to a man.
4. Which brings us to another use of the word "pansy" to mean a weak or effeminate man. The word "ponce" comes from the same root. It is, however, a misnomer as pansies are actually very tough plants. They are hardy, disease resistant and do well in cooler climates.
5. These flowers are often associated with love, too, because they have heart-shaped leaves. The leaves used to be seen as a cure for a broken heart, while the Celts used the leaves to make love potions. According to seventeenth century writer Nicholas Culpeper, a syrup made from the flowers was a cure for venereal disease.
6. You can eat the flowers. They can be added to salads or desserts, and taste slightly minty.
7. King Arthur's knights used pansies for divining their futures. They'd pick a petal and look at the markings. A petal with four lines meant hope. If the lines were thick and leaned towards the left, it meant a life of trouble. Lines leaning to the right meant prosperity. Seven lines meant constancy in love. Eight streaks meant fickleness, nine meant a change of heart. Eleven was a bad number of lines to get as that signified disappointment in love and an early grave.
8. Other common names for the pansy are heartsease, because of its association with love and herb trinity, because of its three upward pointing petals. In Italy the pansy is known as flammola (little flame); in Hungary it is known as árvácska (small orphan); and in Israel it's called "Amnon and Tamar" after the children of King David.
9. According to legend, the first pansies were white, but gained the other colours when pierced with Cupid's arrow, whereupon they also gained their powers over love. Another legend says they used to have an amazing scent, too, which was so good people would travel from miles around just to smell the pansies, trampling the grass all around them. This meant the cattle had nothing to eat, and the pansies prayed to God for a solution to this. God took away most of the scent and made the flowers beautiful to look at, instead.
10. The pansy is the city flower of Osaka, Japan.

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