7th November: Marie Curie

Marie Curie was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw on 7 November 1867. 

1. When Marie Curie was a young woman, it was almost impossible for a woman to receive a university education. However, in Poland, there was a clandestine "Flying University," where she and her older sister were able to study.
2. Pierre Curie wasn't her first love - in Warsaw she worked as a governess (part of an arrangement with her sister that while one studied, the other would work to finance it) and Kazimierz Żorawski was the son of the family she worked for. His parents refused to let him marry a penniless woman, so they went their separate ways - but Żorawski never quite lost his feelings for her - as an old man he used to sit in front of the statue of her in front of the Radium Institute which she founded in 1932.
3. She left for France at the age of 24. Living in a rented garret, she studied by day and and worked as a tutor in the evenings. Her income was so meagre that she would sometimes faint from hunger.
4. In 1894, Professor Józef Kowalski-Wierusz learned that Marie was looking for a larger laboratory space for her experiments, and he was sure he knew someone who might be able to help with that - an instructor at the School of Physics and Chemistry, the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris, a man by the name of Pierre Curie. He introduced them - Pierre did indeed have some space she could use. Their mutual interest in science brought them close together. They also had a mutual love of cycling and foreign travel.
5. However, when Pierre proposed marriage, Marie at first refused, because she wanted to go back to Poland. Pierre said he would be willing to move to Poland with her, give up his scientific studies and become a French teacher. That must have convinced her - they were married in 1895. For her marriage, Marie wore a dark blue dress which she continued to wear to work for many years.
6. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person (and only woman) to win twice, the only person to win twice in multiple sciences - but the Nobel Committee at first intended only to honour Pierre and their associate, Becquerel. However, one member of the Committee disagreed - Swedish mathematician Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler, who was an advocate for women scientists. He told Pierre of the Committee's decision - Pierre complained and got Marie's name added to the nomination.
7. Although she lived in France for most of her life, the French public and scientific community never really accepted her. They saw her as a foreigner, and disliked her because she was an atheist and because they believed she was Jewish (she wasn't). When, a few years after Pierre's death, she had an affair with a younger, married man, they added home-wrecker to their list. It got so bad that she came home from a conference one day to find an angry mob outside her house and was forced to move in with a friend.
8. During World War I, Marie worked tirelessly to set up mobile X-ray machines to assist military surgeons on the battlefield. It is estimated that over a million wounded soldiers were treated with her X-ray units, but even then, the French government refused to formally recognise her efforts. The French National Bank refused to accept her Nobel Prize medals for the war effort, although she was able to use some of her prize money to buy war bonds.
9. At that time, people didn't know about the damaging effects of radiation, so health and safety didn't exist. Even Marie Curie herself had no idea - she would carry test tubes of radioactive isotopes around in her pockets, and keep them in a desk drawer, noticing how they would glow faintly in the dark. When working with X-rays in the war, she didn't shield herself or the equipment. Radiation is likely to have caused her death from anaemia, not to mention a number of other chronic illnesses she suffered from in later life. Today, her notes and papers are still highly radioactive and have to be kept in a lead lined box and anyone wanting to read them must wear protective clothing! This includes her cookbook!
10. She and Pierre have a number of things named after them - an element, with atomic number 96, was named curium; three radioactive minerals: curite, sklodowskite, and cuprosklodowskite; since 2007, a Metro station in Paris; a Polish nuclear research reactor is named Maria; the 7000 Curie Asteroid, and a bridge over the Vistula in Warsaw.

6th November: Basketball day

Celebrates the birth in 1861 of James Naismith, the Canadian physical education instructor. He was working at the YMCA Training School (now Springfield College) in Massachusetts when the principal asked him to invent a safe indoor game to replace boring exercises during winter. Naismith came up with the game of Basketball. 10 things you might not know about basketball:

1. The first baskets were Peach baskets and did not have a hole in the bottom, so every time anyone scored, someone would have to climb up a ladder to get the ball out of the basket. When people got fed up of this, the bottoms were removed from the baskets, but it was still necessary to poke them out with a long stick.
2. The first balls were soccer balls - then specially made brown balls. Orange balls were only introduced in the 1950s.
3. The back board behind the basket was introduced because in early games, the basket would be nailed to a mezzanine balcony and the audience had a tendency to interfere with shots.
4. Dribbling, or repeated bouncing of the ball, was actually illegal in the original rules. When it was first allowed, it wasn't used much because the balls were asymmetrical, but around the 1950s, when it became possible to manufacture perfectly round balls, it caught on to become a major part of the game.
5. According to his diary, Naismith had tried inventing several games before, but these games had all failed - so he was nervous about introducing yet another one.
6. The first ever game was played with nine players in the YMCA gymnasium in Albany, New York on January 20, 1892. The court was smaller than the ones used today, and only one point was scored.
7. Most professional basketball players are very tall. According to a survey given to all NBA teams, the average height of all NBA players is just under 6 feet 7 inches (2.01m). The tallest players ever in the NBA were Manute Bol and Gheorghe Mureşan, who were both 7 feet 7 inches (2.31m) tall. The tallest player now is Sim Bhullar, who is 7 feet 5 inches (2.26m). The tallest female player was Margo Dydek at 7 feet 2 inches. At the other extreme, the shortest player ever to play in the NBA is Muggsy Bogues at 5 feet 3 inches (1.60m).
8. Men's basketball has been a Summer Olympic sport since the Berlin Olympics in 1936. The USA has won the most Gold medals - 14. The USSR won twice and Argentina and Yugoslavia once each. Women's basketball became an Olympic sport in 1976.
9. Basketball is the national sport of Lithuania and Georgia. It is the summer national sport in Latvia, where ice hockey is the winter national sport.
10. One of the many variations of the game is unicycle basketball, where the game is played with the players all riding unicycles.

BTW, my novel, Death and Faxes is out now. 

It's about a young psychic who is asked by a detective to help track down a serial killer. At first, she is reluctant - but the ghosts of the victims won't leave her alone...

Go to Amazon Kindle Store for the e-book and a free "Look inside" excerpt;

CreateSpace or Amazon for the paperback. (The link takes you to Amazon.co.uk, but it should be available in other countries' Amazon sites as well).

There's more information on Goodreads also.

Or visit my other blog which showcases my writing for an excerpt of Death and Faxes and other stuff. http://juliehowlinwriter.blogspot.co.uk/

5th November: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot

Guy Fawkes was one of a bunch of Catholic conspirators who planned, in 1604, to blow up the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder while the Protestant King James was inside, so that a Catholic monarch could be brought to the throne. Guy Fawkes is sometimes toasted as "the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions". 10 things you may not know about Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot:

1. Guy Fawkes was brought up a Protestant. His parents were Church of England, although his mother's family were Catholics and one of his cousins was a Jesuit priest. It isn't known whether it was the influence of his mother's family or Catholic teachers at his school that led him to convert.
2. He was a soldier - he sold the estate he inherited from his father so he could go abroad and fight for Spain in the Eighty Years War. He became an officer and fought at the siege of Calais in 1596.
3. The first meeting of the conspirators took place in a pub called Duck and Drake, in the Strand district of London.
4. According to the confession of one of the conspirators, the original plan was to dig a tunnel from a nearby house to Parliament, but although Fawkes himself eventually cracked under torture and allegedly admitted they had started digging, no trace of a tunnel was ever found. A tunnel did not prove necessary, because the plotters found out that there was a disused storeroom directly under the House of Lords, which they could lease and use to store all the barrels of gunpowder.
5. But for the plague, we could have been holding Bonfire Night in late summer. The opening of Parliament was delayed because of a plague threat, to the fateful date of 5 November.
6. Fawkes' role in the plot was to light the fuse and then flee across the Thames, while others would stage a revolt in the Midlands, during which the Princess Elizabeth, King James' Catholic daughter, would be captured. Fawkes intended to go to Europe and plead to the Catholic authorities that it had been his holy duty to assassinate the Protestant king.
7. The plot was discovered due to an anonymous letter sent to the Catholic Lord Monteagle on 26 October, warning him to stay away. The plotters' big mistake was to continue with the plan, because they assumed everyone would believe the letter was a hoax. The King took the threat seriously, though, and ordered Sir Thomas Knyvet to conduct a search of the cellars underneath Parliament, which he did in the early hours of 5 November. Fawkes was arrested as he tried to leave the cellar.
8. King James rather admired Guy Fawkes and his steadfast manner while being questioned. He described Fawkes as having "a Roman resolution", but that was not enough to save Fawkes from torture and execution.
9. Executions in those days were brutal. Mere hanging was not enough. The plotters were sentenced to be dragged through the streets, hung, but only until they were half dead - then their genitals would be cut off and burned in front of them, they'd be disembowelled and their hearts removed. Finally, their heads would be cut off and their body parts put on display to be eaten by birds of prey. Fawkes, however, managed to jump to his death before being hung, and although his body still had to be subjected to the same indignities, at least he was dead when it happened.
10. Until 1859, November 5 was designated by law as a day of thanksgiving for "the joyful day of deliverance", and people were encouraged to light bonfires, provided it was done carefully "without any danger or disorder".

Eternal Flame

The Freedom League's numbers have dwindled to three - but leader Unicorn knows his team isn't finished yet. The turning point comes with Russell, a boy with bright red hair and a genetic variant ability to start fires. He's the first of an influx of new members who will take the League into the future. 

Judith and Wil are child prodigies - Judith in physics and electronics, and Wil in medicine. They have another thing in common - they are both genetic variants. And another thing - they both have fiery red hair. They are drawn to one another as their destinies intertwine, but the course of true love doesn't always run smoothly!

Richard is not a variant. He's an Olympic athlete who has picked up useful knowledge from his unusual friends to add to his own natural abilities. A chance encounter with a dying alien throws him into a Freedom League mission in which his skills are put to the ultimate test, along with theirs.

The Freedom League's arch-enemy, the super-villain Obsidian, wants his family fortune all to himself. One person stands in his way - his niece, Fiona. Fiona, devastated by a family tragedy and her failure to get in to her first choice university, is miserable and has few friends. When she realises her brother's death was no accident, and his killer is also after her, she fears it may be too late to gather allies around her and learn how to use her own genetic variant powers.

Available from Amazon and Amazon Kindle

4th November: King Tut Day: Discovery of King Tut's tomb

King Tut Day Marks the discovery of King Tutankhamun's Tomb in 1922. 10 things you may not know about the boy king:

1. He wasn't known as Tutankhamun before he became king. As a young child, he was known as Tutankhaten. "Living Image of Aten". Tutankhamun means "Living Image of Amun".
2. He changed his name because he rejected his father's religion. His father, Akhenaten, worshipped the god Aten, and banned worship of the god Amun. King Tut lifted the ban, restored the priesthood and moved the capital of Egypt back to Thebes from Akhetaten.
3. Some serious inbreeding went on in his family. He was the result of an incestuous relationship between Akhenaten and one of his sisters, rather than being the son of one of Akhenaten's queens. Then when it was time for Tut himself to marry, his bride was his half sister.
4. The ancient Egyptians didn't know about the dangers of inbreeding, but King Tut paid the price. He was found to suffer from a number of congenital defects including a cleft palate, a club foot and buck teeth. It's also thought he had a mild case of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. Despite probably being slightly disabled, artwork and other artefacts found in his tomb suggest King Tut was an avid hunter, charioteer and a skilled archer.
5. Tutankhamun was slight of build, and was roughly 180 cm (5 ft 11 in) tall.
6. He and his wife had two children - but they were both stillborn. Two foetuses were buried in King Tut's tomb with him, and DNA testing confirmed at least one of them was his child - and probably both of them, although testing is not yet complete. Scientists think the excessive inbreeding meant that it would have been impossible for the royal couple to produce a child which would survive.
7. Although very young, Tutankhamun seems to have been a skilled diplomat. His father had neglected diplomatic relations, but Tut worked at restoring them, with some success, as evidenced by gifts from other countries found in his tomb. It didn't always work - there are records of battles with Nubians and Asiatics during his reign.
8. The curse of the Pharoah doesn't exist. A recent statistical study found there was no evidence that people who entered the tomb died any younger than those who did not. The idea of a curse was probably down to the newspapers of the time who published stories about a curse to sell more copies!
9. He died aged just 19, but nobody really knows what caused his death. Theories put forward include assassination by a blow to the back of the head (although more recent studies have cast doubt on this); an infection resulting from a broken leg which was caused by an epileptic fit; a chariot accident; or a Hippopotamus bite (not as crazy as it sounds - hippopotamus would have been an animal hunted by the young king).
10. Some Egyptian kings were worshipped as gods after their deaths. Tutankhamun was one of these. Archaeologists have found evidence of a cult which believed that Tutankhamun could forgive their sins and heal them. People as far away as Nubia built temples to him.

3rd November: Panama Independence Day

Panama  gained independence from Colombia on 3 November 1903. 10 things you might not know about Panama:

1. The name Panama could have come from a common species of tree in the area, or it could mean "many butterflies" as early settlers noticed lots of the insects there in late summer; or it could have come from a fishing village, "Panamá" which means "an abundance of fish". Yet another theory is that the word Panama comes from the Kuna word "bannaba" which means "far away".
2. The capital is Panama City.
3. The country is located on the isthmus that separates North and South America, so it is narrow - only 80 kilometres across at its narrowest point.
4. Hence, Panama is the only place in the world where you can see the sun rise on the Pacific and set on the Atlantic.
5. The Panamanian currency is officially the balboa, fixed at parity with the United States dollar since independence in 1903.
6. A third of the country's economy is generated by the Panama Canal. Ships wishing to take the short cut between the two oceans have to pay a toll based on their size and cargo. Tolls for the largest ships can reach up to $450,000. About $1.8 billion in tolls are collected every year.
7. The smallest toll ever paid was 36 cents, in 1928 by Richard Halliburton, who swam through.
8. The oldest continually operating railway is in Panama. It travels from Panama City to Colon and back.
9. Panama has over 500 rivers, but most are unnavigable.
10. The Panama Hat is really made in Ecuador. They became called Panamas because they were shipped from Ecuador to Panama before being sent to their destinations worldwide, so people believed that they were actually from Panama.

PS I also write novels. My first novel, Death and Faxes, is available now. It's about crime, ghosts and romance. More details from the links below:

Paperback - CreateSpace or Amazon 

Or the E-book: Amazon Kindle (Where you can use the "Look Inside" function and read the first few pages for free!)

Like my Facebook Page

Read short stories and book excerpts on My writing blog

Follow me on Twitter: @JulieHowlin

2nd November: Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette, Austrian princess and Queen Consort of Louis XVI of France, was born on this date in 1755. Here are some things you may not know about her:

1. As a girl, she was a poor student in academic subjects. She struggled to read and write in German, her native language, when she was ten, and struggled even more with the foreign languages, French and Italian, that she was required to learn. She did reasonably well in music and excelled in drawing and dance.
2. She could play the harpsichord, spinet, clavichord and harp.
3. Her marriage to Dauphin Louis-Auguste might never have happened but for a war, the Seven Years War, in which France and Austria, usually enemies, briefly united; and a smallpox outbreak which killed some of her eligible older sisters.
4. Before she could be married, she had to undergo extensive dental surgery to straighten her teeth - without anaesthetic.
5. She was married at 14, but her groom was not present at the legal wedding ceremony. It was another month before the ceremonial wedding.
6. It was several years before the marriage was consummated. Louis, it turned out, believed that sex would damage his sporting prowess, and Marie-Antoinette simply wasn't that interested. Marie's brother eventually put them straight and called them "a couple of complete blunderers". The couple went on to have four children, although rumours persisted that Louis wasn't actually the father of any of them.
7. Pretty and graceful, Marie was popular with the French public at first, since their last queen had died two years earlier. But her failure to produce an heir, and her spending on clothes and her appearance eventually alienated them to the extent that they started referring to her as "L'Autrichienne" (which literally means the Austrian woman, but also suggests the French word "chienne", meaning bitch.
8. There is no evidence that she ever uttered the words, "Let them eat cake". This could be just a libellous rumour spread by journalists at the time.
9. Her last words were "Pardon me sir, I meant not to do it", to Henri Sanson the executioner, whose foot she had accidentally stepped on after climbing the scaffold.
10. After her execution, she was buried in an unmarked grave, but lduring the Bourbon Restoration, she and her husband were given a proper Christian burial at the Basilica of St Denis.

P.S. My book, Death and Faxes, is available to buy now.

Paperback - CreateSpace or Amazon 

Or get the E-book: Amazon Kindle (Where you can use the "Look Inside" function and read the first few pages for free!)

1st November: LS Lowry and National Author's Day

L S (Laurence Stephen) Lowry was born on this date in 1887. Here are 10 things you might not know about Lowry:

Photo: A. Carty at en.wikipedia

1. He never gave up his day job. After leaving school with no qualifications he joined Pall Mall Property Company as a rent collector, and stayed there for 42 years, until he retired. All his art studies were on a part time basis, although the firm allowed him extra annual leave to pursue his art.
2. Although he depicted working class scenes, he was a lifelong Tory voter.
3. He holds the record for turning down honours - he refused an OBE, a CBE, appointments to the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) and a knighthood.
4. He never married, and claimed he was a virgin at the age of 88.
5. He was an official war artist in 1943, and the official artist at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
6. Lowry enjoyed attending Football matches and was an ardent supporter of Manchester City.
7. An intensely private person, there are numerous tales about his eccentricity although they may not be true. When he became famous, strangers would call at his house and he hated it. His strategy for getting rid of them was allegedly to leave a suitcase by the front door so he could pretend he was about to leave. Until one day a particularly helpful young man insisted on giving him a lift to the railway station, forcing him to actually go through the charade of buying a ticket and hoping the young man didn't notice it was only for the next station. Another story is that he had a collection of clocks in his home, all set to different times. He would say to some people that he didn't want to know what the real time was, and to others that he didn't want to be deafened when they all chimed at once.
8. Prime Minister Harold Wilson, used Lowry's painting The Pond as his official Christmas card.
9. In February 2011 a bronze statue of Lowry was installed in the basement of his favourite pub, Sam's Chop House.
10. Not all his paintings were of industrial scenes and "matchstick men". After his death, a series of erotic drawings was found. These are kept at the Lowry Centre but are not on display. If you want to see them, you have to ask.

Today is also National Authors Day This celebration was first proposed by Mrs. Nellie Burt McPherson to celebrate American authors and to encourage and inspire new authors. It has been celebrated on November 1, since 1928. 

I'll be celebrating now that I'm officially an author, and have sold some books, even though I'm not American! 

You can help me celebrate by buying my book, Death and Faxes, a ghostly crime story: 

Paperback  Amazon 

Or get the E-book: Amazon Kindle (Where you can use the "Look Inside" function and read the first few pages for free!)