Showing posts with the label France

The Giant of Castelnau

Jan 14, 2022

Legends of giants permeate folklore of cultures around the world. The ancient Greeks had Gigantes who were born of Gaia (Earth) when blood f...

The Longest Sightlines on Earth

Jan 10, 2022

Last year around April, residents in the state of Punjab in northern India were astonished to see the Himalayas from the rooftop of their h...

Eustace The Monk Who Became a Pirate And Inspired The Figure of Robin Hood

Jan 5, 2022

Every good comic book fan will have read some of the adventures of Corto Maltés and if so, will remember that one of the characters that the...

The Burning of Tuileries Palace

Dec 15, 2021

Directly in front of the Louvre, between the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile in Paris, where there is n...

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot And The World’s First Automobile

Dec 14, 2021

The world’s first self-propelled mechanical vehicle, in other words, the world’s first automobile, was built by the largely unknown French i...

The Last Public Execution by Guillotine

Dec 1, 2021

On the morning of 17 June 1939, a crowd gathered outside the doors of the Saint-Pierre prison, in the center of Versailles. They had come to...

The First Photograph in History

Oct 20, 2021

It doesn’t look like much, but this is the world’s first photograph, or rather, the oldest surviving photograph, or both. It was taken by ...

The Chain Boats of Europe

Oct 4, 2021

In his travelogue, A Tramp Abroad , Mark Twain describes an encounter with a curious boat on the River Neckar in Germany.  We ra...

The Tiara of Saitapharnes

Jul 2, 2021

For the better part of a decade, the widely celebrated and esteemed Louvre Museum of Paris proudly displayed a supposedly ancient tiara made...

That Time When The French Divided The Day Into 10 hours

Jun 28, 2021

For centuries we have used the sexagesimal system of measuring time, where each day is divided into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and ...