Vive la conflagration

[pallas_athena]

allandaros gives a concise summary of the French Revolution for your amusement and enlightenment.

If you don't have Kate Beaton and her amazing historical comics on your Friends list, you should.

Finally, an interesting article: we know about the Victorian obsession with electricity being the "spark of life" in Frankenstein and such. But from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, this vital flame was often equated with gunpowder. There was fire in the blood: not electric, but pyrotechnic fire.

Which brings us to: insane people who do research on stuff that explodes.

Comments

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

I love things like this:
[...] the rubidium salt, which they tried to prepare several times. In every case, the solution detonated spontaneously on standing. And by “spontaneously”, they mean “while standing undisturbed in the dark”, so there’s really just no way to deal with this stuff. ... The cesium salt actually did give a few crystals, which they managed to pluck from the top of the solution and get X-ray data on. A few hours later the remaining batch suddenly exploded [...]