Questions tagged [history-of-science]
for questions about claims related to the history of science.
42 questions
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Did around 50% of sailors die from scurvy on long voyages?
Wikipedia's article on scurvy asserts:
During the Age of Sail, it was assumed that 50 percent of the sailors
would die of scurvy on a major trip.
This is cited to an article by Catherine Price, who ...
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Is this Nautilus Magazine article on Peter Putnam based on a real person?
I just came across an article on Peter Putnam, allegedly a 20th century physicist who invented something like reinforcement learning (though the details are unclear) and was forgotten until a recent ...
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Did Hume play a major role in the development of the theory of evolution?
According to the SEP page on David Hume (see my emphasis in bold):
"Kant reported that Hume’s work woke him from his “dogmatic slumbers” (Prolegomena, Introduction) and Jeremy Bentham remarked ...
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Did Pythagoras drown his student for showing that the square root of 2 is irrational?
On Page 54 of Simon Singh's best selling book Fermat's Last Theorem, he claims that Pythagoras sentenced one of his followers for death for showing that the square root of 2 is irrational.
Looking ...
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11
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Was voice scrambling by addition of noise stored on synchronized phonograph records actually used by Winston Churchill circa WW-II?
The Wikipedia article on scramblers currently has a section stating, without source:
The first voice scramblers were invented at Bell Labs in the period just before World War II. These sets consisted ...
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19
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Was Benjamin Franklin denounced for inventing the lightning rod?
This article and other which have cited it make the claim that upon inventing the lightning rod that Benjamin Franklin was denounced by parties unspecified in the sources.
While most people hailed ...
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Is Leon Eisenberg the "inventor" (or the "scientific father") of ADHD?
Related to this Q it's pretty easy to confirm from the meme the part that claim that Leon Eisenberg said what he said about ADHD, using e.g. his Wikipedia page where Der Spiegel is given as source for ...
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Was the ELIZA effect real?
ELIZA is an oft referenced early chatbot developed in the 1960's. The legend behind it is that the simplistic chatbot was so convincingly human to early users that they supposedly forgot it was a ...
9
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Did Archimedes really prove a goldsmith stole gold from Hiero II?
Skeptics, I'm tossing you a very old chestnut indeed. This is the story of "Eureka!", and how Archimedes sent a thieving goldsmith to the executioner. Every introductory chem class re-...
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Was the 1755 Cape Ann earthquake widely ascribed to Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod?
Andrew Dickinson White’s book “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom” contains the following anecdote
In America the earthquake of 1755 was widely ascribed, especially in ...
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Was ape tool use "well known and not the least bit controversial" in 1735?
Before Jane Goodall's discoveries in the 1960s, it had been widely asserted/believed that Man was the only animal that made and used tools.
However, Frans de Waal (2016) states that in 1735,
Ape tool ...
user62611
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2
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Did Rudolf Steiner prove the contagiousness of varicella in 1875?
Pages like those from the National Vaccine Information Center NVIC or the Centers for Disease Control CDC make the following claim:
In 1875, Rudolf Steiner discovered that chickenpox was infectious ...
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2
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Did a turkish man invent a steam engine 200 years before the industrial revolution and only made it to spin doner kebab? [closed]
I've seen this picture being reposted in many different places recently:
Is it true? Where can this machine be seen? What is it if it's not a steam engine?
Update: The pictures posted above show ...
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Did Newton "invent" Physics to perform better spells? [closed]
I know Atomic Robo is not exactly an authority on real history, but there's also some truth and interesting details intermingled. How true is the statement "Newton invented Physics so he could ...
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Did Louis Pasteur keep a gun in the laboratory while developing the rabies vaccine?
Is it true that while developing the vaccine for rabies Louis Pasteur kept a gun in his laboratory and had instructed all his lab assistants to shoot anyone in the head who accidentally got infected ...
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