by John Lloyd
Substances that do this are called ‘radioactive’, a term coined by the Polish chemist Marie Curie (1867–1934) in 1898. Although she invented the word, the French physicist Henri Becquerel (1852–1908) had accidentally discovered the actual process two years earlier, while working with uranium. Following in his footsteps, Marie discovered something a million times more radioactive than uranium: a new chemical element she called ‘radium’.
Becquerel, Marie and her husband Pierre shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for their discovery and the ‘invigorating’ effects of radium salts were soon being hailed as a cure for ailments from blindness to depression and rheumatism. Radium was added to mineral water, toothpaste, face-creams and chocolate and there was a craze for ‘radium cocktails’. Added radium to paint made it luminous, a novelty effect that was used to decorate clock and watch faces.
This is the origin of the radioactive ‘green glow’. It wasn’t the radium glowing, but its reaction with the copper and zinc in the paint, creating a phenomenon called ‘radioluminescence’. The phrase ‘radium glow’ stuck in the public mind. When the true consequences of exposure to radioactivity were revealed in the early 1930s, glowing and radioactivity had become inseparably linked.
Hundreds of ‘radium girls’, who had worked in factories applying paint containing glow-in-the-dark radium to watch-faces (and licking the brushes as they did so) were to die from painful and disfiguring facial cancers. And in 1934 Marie Curie herself died of anaemia, caused by years of handling the ‘magic’ substance she had discovered.
Which part of the food do microwaves cook first?
Microwave ovens don’t cook food ‘from the inside out’.
Microwaves are a form of electromagnetic radiation that sits on the spectrum between radio waves and infrared light. They are called ‘micro’ waves because they have much shorter wavelengths than radio waves. They have a wide variety of uses: mobile phone networks, wireless connections like Bluetooth, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), radio telescopes and radar all rely on microwaves at differing frequencies. Although they carry more energy than radio waves, they’re a long way from the dangerous end of the electromagnetic spectrum where X-rays and gamma rays reside.
Microwave ovens don’t directly cook food; what they do is heat water. The frequency of microwaves happens to be just right for exciting water molecules. By spreading their energy evenly through food, the microwaves heat the water in it and the hot water cooks the food. Nearly all food contains water, but microwaves won’t cook completely dry food like cornflakes, rice or pasta.
The molecules in the centre of your soup aren’t heated any quicker than those on the outside. In fact, the opposite is true. If the food is the same consistency all the way through, the water nearest the surface will absorb most of the energy. In this regard, microwave cookery is similar to heating food in a normal oven, except that the microwaves penetrate deeper and more quickly. The reason why it sometimes appears that the middle of microwaved food has ‘cooked first’ is to do with the type of food. Jacket potatoes, for instance, and apple pies, are drier on the outside than the inside; so the moist centre will be hotter than the outside skin or crust.
Because microwaves work by exciting the water molecules, it also means that the food rarely gets much hotter than the 100 °C temperature at which water boils. Meat cooked in a microwave can be tender, but it is more like poaching than roasting. To break down protein and carbohydrate molecules rapidly and form a caramelised crust as in pork crackling (or to get the crisp exterior of a chip) requires temperatures of 240 °C or higher.
Microwave ovens are a by-product of the invention of radar in 1940. In 1945 Percy Spencer, a US engineer working for the defence systems company Raytheon was building a magnetron (the device at the core of radar that converts electricity to microwaves) when he noticed that a chocolate peanut bar in his pocket had completely melted. Guessing it was caused by the magnetron, he built a metal box and fed in microwave radiation. The first food he cooked in his improvised oven was popcorn; his second experiment, with a whole egg, ended in an explosion. The water in the egg had rapidly vaporised.
Raytheon was quick to introduce the first commercial microwave oven in 1947 and, by the late 1960s, smaller domestic versions had started appearing in American homes. Despite the various myths they have gathered down the years, they now occupy pride of place in 90 per cent of US kitchens.
Where did the British government plan to drop its second atomic bomb?
Yorkshire.
In 1953 British scientists seriously considered detonating a nuclear weapon next to the tiny village of Skipsea, on the East Yorkshire coast road between Bridlington and Hornsea. Home to just over 630 people, it has a medieval church and the remains of a Norman castle but not much else.
It was exactly this isolated, sleepy character – plus its convenient proximity to the RAF base at Hull – that commended the village to the scientists at the Atomic Research Establishment at Aldermaston. They were looking at various coastal sites in the UK for an above-ground atomic bomb explosion following their successful test detonation under the sea off the Monte Bello Islands, north-west of Australia, in 1952. Skipsea ticked all the boxes.
Unsurprisingly, the local community leaders were unanimously opposed to the idea, pointing out that the test site was dangerously close to bungalows and beach huts and that a public right of way ran through it. The Aldermaston team eventually relented and switched their plans back to Australia.
The results of the Maralinga tests in South Australia, in which seven above-ground atomic devices were detonated between 1956 and 1957, show just how close Skipsea – and the rest of the UK – came to total disaster. The interior of the whole Australian continent was severely contaminated, with testing stations 3,200 kilometres (2,000 miles) apart reporting a hundredfold increase in radioactivity. Significant fallout even reached Melbourne and Adelaide.
Maralinga was a site of great spiritual importance to the local Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples (its name means ‘Place of Thunder’) and their evacuation was incompetently managed. After the detonations, there was little attempt to enforce site security and all the warnings signs were in English. As a result, many Aboriginals returned to their homeland soon afterwards.
Even more shocking, British and Australian servicemen were intentionally sent to work on the site to gauge the effect of radioactivity on active troops. It is estimated that 30 per cent of the 7,000 servicemen who worked at the location died from various cancers before they turned sixty. The effect on the Aboriginal inhabitants has been even worse – with blindness, deformity and high levels of cancer reported across the local population.
After pressure from the troops’ veterans’ association and aboriginal groups, the McClelland Royal Commission was set up in 1984. It concluded that all seven tests had been carried out ‘under inappropriate conditions’ and ordered a comprehensive clean-up of the site, which was eventually completed in 2000. In 1994 a compensation fund of $13.5 million was set up for the local people and limited payments have been made to Australian veterans.
At the time of writing, the UK government has produced no formal compensation scheme for British survivors of its nuclear testing programme.
STEPHEN Where did Britain originally plan to test their atomic bombs?
SANDI TOKSVIG Was it Paris?
Which two counties fought each other in the Wars of the Roses?
Neither the Yorkists nor the Lancastrians were based in the counties that bear their names, and neither side called the conflict ‘the Wars of the Roses’.
The Houses of York and Lancaster were branches of the House of Plantagenet, which had ruled England for 300 years. They were unconnected with either Yorkshire or Lancashire. If anything, more Lancastrians than Yorkists came from Yorkshire and the remainder of the Duke of Lancaster’s estates were in Cheshire, Gloucestershire and North Wales. Most Yorkist supporters were from the Midlands, not from Yorkshire, and the Duke of York’s estate
s were mainly concentrated along the Welsh borders and down into south Wales.
The ‘Wars of the Roses’ weren’t wars in the traditional sense. The people involved certainly didn’t think of them as such. They were really just an extended bout of infighting between two branches of the royal family. The event that provoked this rivalry was the overthrow of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, who was crowned Henry IV in 1399. There followed half a century of intrigue, treachery and murder, peppered with minor skirmishes, but it wasn’t until 1455 that the first real battle was fought. And, even though the throne changed hands between the two sides three times over the period – with Edward IV (York) and Henry VI (Lancaster) getting two goes each – most of England was unaffected by the strife.
After the murder of Henry VI in 1471, there were three Yorkist kings in a row: Edward IV (again), Edward V and Richard III. Although Henry Tudor, the man who wrested the throne from Richard III to become Henry VII, was nominally a Lancastrian, his real intention was to start a new dynasty named after himself. The creation of the red-and-white Tudor rose was a brilliant bit of marketing on his part, supposedly merging the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster to symbolise a new united kingdom. In fact, until then, the roses had been just two of many livery signs used by either side. Most of the troops were conscripts or mercenaries who tended to sport the badge of their immediate feudal lord or employer. Even at Bosworth Field in 1485, the climactic battle that finally ended the conflict, the Lancastrian Henry fought under the red dragon of Wales, and the Yorkist Richard III under his personal symbol of a white boar.
But Henry’s image manipulation was so successful that, when Shakespeare wrote Henry VI Part I in 1601, he included a scene where supporters of each faction pick different coloured roses. This so inspired Sir Walter Scott that – in Ivanhoe (1823) – he named the period ‘the Wars of the Roses’. So it was 338 years after the conflict ended that the phrase was used for the very first time.
Even if they weren’t really wars, or much to do with roses, and didn’t involve inter-county rivalries, they were neither romantic nor trivial. The Yorkists’ crushing victory at Towton in 1461 remains the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on British soil. Some 80,000 soldiers took part (including twenty-eight lords, almost half the peerage at that time), and more than 28,000 men died – roughly 3 per cent of the entire adult male population of England.
Who led the English fleet against the Spanish Armada?
It wasn’t Sir Francis Drake – he was only second-in-command. The top man was Lord Howard of Effingham, who later led the peace talks with Spain.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was the major engagement in the nine-year war between Protestant England and Catholic Spain that had begun in 1585. The Armada (Spanish for ‘fleet’ or ‘navy’) was the largest naval force ever assembled in Europe, with 151 ships, 8,000 sailors and 15,000 soldiers. It sailed from Lisbon in May 1588, with the intention of invading England.
Bizarrely, only thirty years before, Philip II of Spain had been King of England. He had co-ruled the country with his Catholic wife Mary I until her death in 1558. When Mary’s younger Protestant sister, Elizabeth, succeeded her, Philip saw her as a heretic and unfit to rule. At first he tried to unseat her by guile, but his best hope ended when Elizabeth executed Mary, Queen of Scots (a Catholic, and the next in line to the throne) in 1587. His patience exhausted, Philip decided to resort to violence. He asked Pope Sixtus V to bless a crusade against the English so he could reclaim the benighted realm for the true faith.
Although it’s often described as the greatest English victory since Agincourt, a full-blown battle never really took place. Instead, over several days there was a series of inconclusive skirmishes, in which no ship on either side was sunk by direct enemy action, although five Spanish ships ran aground in August at the minor battle of Gravelines, off what is now northern France. Drake’s famous fire ships failed to ignite a single Spanish vessel – although they caused enough panic to break up the Armada’s disciplined formation, allowing the smaller and nimbler English ships to get in and scatter them.
Eventually, both sides ran out of ammunition but Effingham had just enough shot left to harry the invaders northwards up the eastern coast of Britain. As the Spanish fleet, thirsty and exhausted, rounded Scotland and sailed down the west coast of Ireland going the long way home, many of their huge ships succumbed to unseasonably fierce storms. Only half of the ‘invincible’ Armada (and fewer than a quarter of the men) made it back. Although the English lost only a hundred men during the fighting, an estimated 6,000 English troops died in the months afterwards, from typhus and dysentery contracted while on board.
Drake may not have been commander on the day but, to the English, he was already the foremost hero of the age. In 1581, he became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, returning with enough plundered Spanish gold and treasure to double the Queen’s annual income. King Philip, of course, regarded him as no more than a common pirate and set a price of 20,000 ducats on his head (£4 million in today’s money). The Spanish called the despised Drake by his Latin name ‘Franciscus Draco’ – ‘Francis the Dragon’.
Did Drake really finish his leisurely game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe as the Spanish sailed into the Channel? We’ll never know. The story is first mentioned in a pamphlet of 1624, which merely said that various ‘commanders and captaines’ had been playing; but such was Drake’s mythic status that, by the 1730s, the story was told exclusively about him.
What did Cornish wreckers do?
They stole things that were washed up on beaches. There’s no evidence to suggest that any Cornish wrecker ever actually caused a shipwreck.
The traditional picture of swarthy Cornish brigands on cliff tops, luring ships to their doom by waving lanterns or lighting signal fires, was invented in the mid-nineteenth century. It seems to have originated with Methodist preachers and then to have been fleshed out in graphic detail by Daphne du Maurier’s romantic novel Jamaica Inn (1936).
During the great Methodist revival in Victorian times, clergymen used reformed ‘wreckers’ as living examples of the miraculous transformations that their brand of Christianity could effect; even the most debased sinners could be saved from their criminal pasts and go on to lead decent lives.
But such dramatic propaganda only worked inland. Coastal dwellers knew exactly what the ancient practice of ‘wrecking’ involved. It meant going down to the site of a wreck and scrounging anything you could get your hands on. It wasn’t legal, but it was hardly murderous barbarism either.
Although an Act was passed in 1753 explicitly outlawing the setting out of ‘any false light or lights, with intention to bring any ship or vessel into danger’, no Cornishman was ever charged with the crime, and no authentic mention of the alleged practice has ever been found in contemporary Cornish documents.
The only such case ever to reach the courts involved the wreck of the Charming Jenny on the coast of Anglesey in 1773. Captain Chilcote, the sole survivor, claimed his ship had been lured to shore by false lights, after which three men had stripped his dead wife naked on the beach, and stolen the silver buckles from his shoes as he lay exhausted. One of the men was hanged and another condemned to death, his sentence later commuted to transportation.
The reason why this is the one known example of the crime in English history is because it doesn’t make any sense for communities making a living from the sea – including working as pilots, helping ships reach shore safely – to set out to create shipwrecks. They could never be sure that vessels approaching on stormy nights were crewed by outsiders, rather than by sons or neighbours.
The belief that wreckers used false lights (sometimes allegedly tied to the tails of donkeys or cows) probably arose because smugglers used cliff-top lights to signal to their comrades offshore when it was safe to land. Luring fellow mariners to a watery end is no more authentic than the ‘traditional Cornish wreckers prayer’: ‘Oh pl
ease Lord, let us pray for all on the sea. But if there’s got to be wrecks, please send them to we.’ In fact, these words are part of an original song lyric written by London musician Andy Roberts in 2003.
Today, those who harvest the fruits of the sea in Cornish wrecker style can even avoid breaking the law entirely, provided they report their finds to the Office of the Receiver of Wrecks in Southampton.
How did the USA react to the sinking of the Lusitania?
Not by declaring war on Germany, as many people think. The Lusitania was sunk in May 1915. America didn’t enter the First World War until April 1917.
From the summer of 1914 most of Europe was at war. Germany routinely attacked merchant shipping en route to Britain in an attempt to starve the country into surrender, but the US was determined to remain neutral.
At first, German submarines followed the so-called ‘Cruiser Rules’ laid down at the 1907 Hague Convention, by which civilian ships could only be sunk after all those aboard had been given an opportunity to evacuate. But when the British started disguising naval vessels as merchantmen and using merchant ships to transport arms, Germany adopted a ‘sink on sight’ policy. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, actually welcomed this, hoping that the Germans would sink a neutral ship, dragging America into the war. In a now infamous memo to the President of the Board of Trade, he wrote: ‘We want the traffic – the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.’
The Lusitania was a magnificent luxury liner, the jewel of the Cunard line. (She wasn’t, as a common misconception has it, the sister ship of the Titanic, which was owned by the White Star Line.) As the Lusitania prepared to set off from New York to Liverpool, Germany placed adverts in US papers warning that passengers sailing through a war zone did so ‘at their own risk’. Captain Turner of the Lusitania described this as ‘the best joke I’ve heard in many days,’ and reassured his passengers that with a top speed of 26 knots (nearly 50 kilometres per hour or 30 miles per hour) she was too fast for any German U-boat.