One way of looking at the history of plate tectonics is to identify people without whose intervention general acceptance of the theory might have been delayed by years. Some names emerge that are now almost forgotten. One name in particular springs to mind.
Throughout the Astrolabe voyage, Gaimard kept his former captain, Louis de Freycinet, informed of its progress. In the first of the letters that he sent to him he described the relatively uneventful voyage as far as New South Wales
In Atlas Shrugged, one of the passengers in the doomed Taggart Comet was a lawyer who had said, “Me? I’ll find a way to get along under any political system”. How would he have fared in John Galt’s dictatorship?
Every so often I trawl the internet in search of gravity information on East and Central Europe, with a particular focus on Croatia and the northern end of the Adriatic. Good maps of those areas have only recently become readily available.
In Atlas Shrugged, one of the people being carried to certain death on the Taggart Comet was a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing, to control giant industries, of which she had no knowledge. Was she justified in her belief?.
When the Uranie entered the roadstead of Port Louis, Mauritius, a British frigate was already there, and for Rose de Freycinet there was a surprise in store. She discovered the frigate captain’s wife often accompanied her husband on his voyages. Were French and British naval practices so very different in this respect?