Beech Tree News Network

To most folks, perhaps the little things in history hold more interest than the ponderous, boring things – particularly to students studying history in school. Trying to memorize a bunch of dates is a poor way to begin to learn history. Just as trying to memorize the periodic table of elements in the study of Chemistry is a futile thing. The trick is to let happenings unfold around a date in history, or a chemical reaction in Chemistry. For instance, onions do not cause your eyes to burn. It’s an enzyme in the eye which converts the sulphur in onions into a mild sulphuric acid that causes the burning – this is the action which causes the reaction.
Rhymes also help us remember. It is easier to think of a simple rhyme than a complicated chemical formula in a reaction: “Little Johnnie dwells upon this earth no more, for what he thought was h2o (water), was h2o4 ( sulphuric acid).”
So, sulphuric acid is a chemical compound of: sulphur, (s); water (h2o), and oxygen (O2). All in varying amounts and strength.
Early lens grinder, Anthony Leevwenhoek, a Dutch naturalist, was known as “the father of microbiology”…way back yonder (1632-1723).
Students history may not remember the exact time in which he lived, but, they will come closer to remembering his looking at his own teeth scrapings, under a strong lens and seeing many microbes. However after drinking hot coffee and again looking, he found all the microbes were about gone. Thus excessive heat kills germs.
Also, students may not remember that Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president; that he was the vice-president under Warren Harding. But when president Harding died suddenly, vice-president Coolidge was visiting his parents in Massachusetts – helping his father put up hay.
The elder Coolidge was a county magistrate. They stopped work long enough for Calvin’s daddy to find a bible and swear his son in as president.
Later Calvin’s father allowed, “My not holding any kind of federal office, I didn’t know if it was legal for me to do that or not” – evidently it was. It stuck.
One of our most colorful presidents was Teddy Roosevelt, our 26th president. He did a bunch of stuff during his tenure as president, but perhaps it’s one of those little things he’ll best be remembered for.
It was told that he rigged up a basket and lowered his kids, one at a time in it, from a second story window of the White House… up and down – hours at a time.
One of his aides said, “what you need to know about Teddy is, he is about 6 years old.”
The passing parade…
Kindest regards…