This edited article about anaesthesia originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 702 published on 28 June 1975.

Dr Crawford Long renders a student unconscious

Regular readers of this series, who have noticed that some of the best ideas were originally branded as sinful or evil or against the will of God, are in for yet another shock. The prevention of pain was condemned by some as a wicked experiment and totally against the Divine will.

There is no need to dwell on the horrors of operations before the coming of anaesthetics. It needs no vivid imagination to visualise something of the agonies that patients and wounded men suffered. True, the victim could be hit on the head or encouraged to become insensible through drink; true, there were a few drugs on the market which slightly lessened ordinary, as opposed to ferocious, pain; true, some surgeons, contrary to legend, were very skilled at doing the job swiftly and scientifically; but the whole business was a nightmare, for all the extraordinary bravery which patients showed under the knife.

As usual, a number of people were involved in the discovery. The great chemist and inventor, Sir Humphry Davy, found that if one breathes nitrous oxide, unconsciousness and vivid dreams occur. His even greater pupil, Michael Faraday, thought that the liquid ether might stop pain, but neither went further with their researches. Nitrous Oxide is better known as laughing gas, as enough good whiffs of it causes laughter and apparently irrational behaviour.

Davy had published his findings in 1799, but it was not until 1842 that a doctor actually used an anaesthetic. He was Dr. Crawford Long of Jefferson, Georgia, U.S.A.

Ether had become a sort of party game with the young people of Jefferson after a travelling lecturer had demonstrated its effects in the town. Dr. Long, hearing of these experiments, asked a student called James Venable to act as a “guinea pig.”

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This edited article about Ferdinand and Isabella originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 701 published on 21 June 1975.

The reception of Columbus by Ferdinand and Isabella

Famous for uniting the whole of Spain under one ruling family, and for helping to make it a strong and powerful country, Ferdinand and Isabella started their reign as King and Queen of Aragon and Castile.

For centuries Spain had been divided into several separate kingdoms, each with its own rulers and by the 1400s the three main ones were Aragon, Castile and Granada.

In 1469 Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile, the two countries being united under their joint rule. As King and Queen they proved to be strong and able rulers, who succeeded in suppressing the powerful and rebellious nobles of Spain by defeating them in several battles and destroying many of their castles.

In 1492 Ferdinand conquered Granada, the last remaining Moorish part of Spain, and with this conquest, the whole of Spain was united.

It was during the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella that the Spanish Inquisition was set up. This was a court of law that sentenced to torture and death people who refused to obey the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Ferdinand and Isabella were determined to make all their subjects Christian. This meant that many Jews and Moors were expelled and persecuted.

It was also at this time that Spain began to build up a great new empire in the New World. In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered the continent of America. Because he had sailed from Spain with the help of Ferdinand and Isabella he returned there and Spain became the first European country to conquer territory in the New World.

Isabella died in 1504 and her husband died twelve years later.

This edited article about Alfred Nobel originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 701 published on 21 June 1975.

Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921

The uneasy conscience of a Swedish scientist, who slowly realised that his life’s work would create destruction and misery, led to the foundation of awards dedicated to the search for peace and the happiness of mankind.

All his life, Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, had investigated the chemical properties that released enormous waves of energy when detonated. His ambition was to make them safe to handle and he visualised his discoveries being used in peaceful pursuits such as blasting out harbours, clearing mines and demolition work of all kinds.

Maybe he was naive or perhaps he never found the time to contemplate the awfulness that his work might one day produce. And it seemed he never realised how much money he was making. His work encompassed his horizons completely.

Alfred Nobel, who was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833, was brought up in his father’s inventive aura. Emmanuel Nobel was a manufacturer of nitroglycerin and he had a genius for invention but it was not reinforced by training or education. The creative instinct was not restrained by the caution that comes from learning, with the result that many accidents occurred with his experiments with explosives.

Emmanuel went to Russia where he made steamships and underwater explosives for the government. The rest of the Nobel family joined him in St. Petersburg – now Leningrad – in 1842.

Alfred Nobel spent only two terms in school and then tutors were brought in to help him study to become an engineer. He never went to university. But by his 16th birthday, he was a competent chemist and fluent in French, German and Russian with enough knowledge of English to write poetry in the language.

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This edited article about chocolate originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 697 published on 24 May 1975.

Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, liked drinking cocoa

The Aztecs liked drinking cocoa almost as much as they enjoyed a good fight. Their last emperor, Montezuma, used to get through fifty golden cups every day, as Hernando Cortez and his band of Spanish adventurers noted, after they had invaded Mexico in 1519 and conquered the remarkable Aztecs.

It was certainly a better habit than tearing out human hearts as a sacrifice to the gods to ensure that the sun came up each day, another local custom.

Not that Cortez and his men discovered the humble cocoa bean, for, a quarter of a century earlier, Christopher Columbus had shipped a number of beans back to Europe. But the story of chocolate really begins with Cortez and his daring band of adventurers.

The Aztecs believed that their gods had provided them with cocoa trees, and they made chocolate from crushed cocoa beans, corn and water, and proceeded to spice it with pepper. This was too much for the Spaniards. But one of them had the bright idea of putting sugar into the brew, and it rapidly became so popular that women had steaming cups of it brought into church to sustain them during the sermon.

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This edited article about Louis Pasteur originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 689 published on 29 March 1975.

Observing inherited characteristics of plant life led to Mendel’s Laws by L R Brightwell

Soup simmered merrily, its smell wafting appetisingly around Louis Pasteur’s laboratory in 19th century France. But Pasteur, the great chemist, was not cooking his lunch but conducting an experiment designed to dispel an illusion that had persisted for centuries.

Life, people had thought, sprang magically from rotting meat. They believed this because they had seen maggots crawling on bad meat and did not know that they had been hatched from flies’ eggs.

This is why Pasteur was boiling his soup in a long bottle with a neck so curved that dust could not enter it. The steam was so hot that it killed any bacteria in the neck of the bottle. And there were no bacteria in the soup because the heat had killed them.

After he had allowed the soup to cool and left it, Pasteur saw that no bacteria grew upon it. Then he broke the neck of the bottle so that dust in the air could settle upon it.

Bacteria then began to grow upon the cold soup because small bacterial spores had settled upon it.

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This edited article about Rene Caillie originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 689 published on 29 March 1975.

Rene Caillie in search of Timbuktu by Angus McBride

The young French boy read on, lost to his humdrum surroundings. His imagination, through the pages of the book, had already transported him to mysterious, far-off places. Little did he know that one day, he would actually be setting forth on a journey that other travellers had declared to be impossible.

The most comfortable place to curl up with a good book was the bakehouse. It was warm, the smells were inviting and the ten-year-old Rene had a secret hideout behind the sacks of flour where he could read undisturbed for hours. His father grumbled that he did not help more in the bakery but Rene knew the exact time to come out of hiding and work hard for half an hour in order to avoid a beating.

On this day, however, his usual good sense deserted him. He was so absorbed in his book that he quite forgot the time and even failed to hear the shouts of rage when he did not appear. Only when the sacks were suddenly shifted and his father’s angry face appeared, did he realise that he was in trouble.

“Give me that book!” roared his father. Rene reluctantly handed over his precious copy of Robinson Crusoe, only to watch, horrified, as his father muttered “Trash” and sent it spinning towards the ovens. Regardless of the consequences, Rene bounded over and rescued it, shaking with fear and anger. But the expected fight to keep his most valued book never came. He was saved by the urgent need to get on with the jobs he should have done over the last half hour.

Rene Caillie never forgot the incident because it was reading Robinson Crusoe, he said, which changed the course of his life. Although he was only the son of a poor family in Western France, he determined to find fame as a traveller and explorer. In an era when well organised parties, backed by learned societies and rich patrons were filling in the empty spaces on the maps of the world, Rene set off, alone and almost penniless, to tackle the dangers of the Sahara desert.

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This edited article about Devon originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 686 published on 8 March 1975.

Drake’s Drum by John Millar Watt

“If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.”

So wrote Henry Newbolt in Drake’s Drum, describing the greatest Devon sea-captain of all time.

Everyone knows the story of Drake’s famous game of bowls on the pleasant, green strip of Plymouth Hoe when the Spanish fleet was sighted off the West Country coast.

“We’ve plenty of time to finish the game and to beat the Spaniards, too,” said Drake. He and his friends went on playing. Then, when the tide was full, he sailed out of Plymouth Sound and utterly routed the Armada, putting an end to all fear of a Spanish invasion of England.

It is not surprising that the sea has made many Devon men famous throughout the world for their courage and daring, for the county stretches across the West of England from coast to coast. On the north lies the rugged Atlantic coastline; on the south, the softer bays of the English Channel.

The sixteenth century was the golden era of Devon seamen. From the ports and fishing towns of this beautiful, hilly county they set out to sail round the world, discover new lands and found an empire for England.

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This edited article about the Klondike originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 685 published on 1 March 1975.

Embarking for the Klondike gold rush by Graham Coton

Gold fever! In the 19th century it could sweep whole continents like a raging forest fire, and the pattern was always the same. There would be a rumour of a strike, and a stampede would begin, first a local, then a worldwide one.

Ships were deserted. Clerks in offices in New York, London and elsewhere headed for the docks. Good men and bad men and even women and children set out for the goldfields.

The first fabulous strike was in California in 1848; the last was the equally fabulous “Klondike Stampede”.

Gold was discovered in vast quantities in the Klondike region of Canada’s Northwest near the Alaskan border in 1896. It was so remote an area that the great stampede did not begin until 1898, being triggered off by the arrival of steamboats at ports on the West coast of America, crammed with gold-rich Bonanza Kings and their loot.

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This edited article about William Boyd originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 685 published on 1 March 1975.

Gold prospectors in the Australian wilderness recently opened up by William Boyd. Picture by Angus McBride

William Boyd was well aware of the dangers that he and his small party faced as they set out to cross the Great Stony Desert in 1875. The unconquered deserts of central Australia are still among the most inhospitable regions of the world. One hundred years ago, they offered an even grimmer prospect even to the most determined traveller.

It had been over thirty years since John Eyre had completed his nightmare crossing of Australia from east to west, a journey that took him a year and almost cost his life. But others had not been so lucky. Captain Charles Sturt had set out on a great exploration of the bone dry continent only to return, 14 months later, blind and unable to walk. He had been horrified at the heat which made screws fall out of boxes and nails out of shoes, and even stopped men’s hair and finger nails growing.

In 1861, Burke and Wills had managed to cross the continent from south to north, but both had died of starvation on the return journey. Central Australia was still a trackless, waterless wilderness, and it needed men like William Boyd to open up the great unknown for the hardy settlers who would, with their sheep, wrest a living from this vast territory.

The outback held a fatal fascination for Boyd who, for over twenty years, had completed an incredible series of journeys across the continent he loved. On several occasions, he had returned to civilisation months overdue, to read reports of his death in the newspapers. After this had happened for the fifth time he earned the nickname “The most-killed man alive”. The difficulties encountered on this, his first great journey, were a foretaste of things to come.

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This edited article about Easter Island originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 682 published on 8 February 1975.

A sun-worshipping ceremony on Easter Island by Andrew Howat

Easter Island was a mystery from the moment the look-out of a ship spotted it in 1722. And it has been a mystery ever since to the people who have explored it and tried to unravel its strange secrets.

People have long puzzled over the intriguing story which began to unfold when the observant sailor saw the green blob of land and reported it to the skipper of his ship, Admiral Roggeveen, a Dutchman. Bewildered, the admiral consulted his charts, but no land was marked at that point.

The admiral inked a blob of land on his map and wrote beside it “Easter Island”, for it was Easter Day. Little did he know that by this action he had given a name to the most puzzling island in the world.

After he and some of his men had explored the island, the admiral wrote a report to his superiors, saying, “The island contains about six thousand souls. All over the island stand huge idols of stone, representing the figure of a man with big ears and bearing a head covered with a red crown.”

One can imagine how that report intrigued other adventurers. Many made landings. They tramped the island and counted the statues. There were 230 standing all over the place. And apart from size – varying from five to twelve metres high – the statues were all identical.

Legless, they rose from the earth at hip level. The faces were expressionless, with receding foreheads, tight lips, prominent chins and a curious tilt at the end of the nose.

But more curious still were the ears. Long and thin, they hung down to the jaw. On each statue was a hat-like crown of red stone.

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