The Lombardians were the first to use effectual quarantine methods against the plague and infectious diseases, and mention of a quarantine is made in Lombardy and Milan in 1374, 1383, and 1399. Prior to that time Christian communities resigned themselves to the visitation of the plague, regarding it as a divine punishment.
J.H. Schultze, a German, obtained the first actual photographic copies (of writing) in 1727; and to Thomas Wedgwood is due the honor of first producing pictures on sensitized surfaces in 1802. Between 1826 and 1833 Louis Jacques Daguerre and Nicéphore Nièpce perfected the daguerreotype process, the first practical photography. Their discovery was communicated to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839.
The turkey is an American bird. Lucullus and the Epicureans did not know about him. He was found in his wild state after Columbus's time. About a hundred years after the discovery of America broiled young turkeys became great delicacies on the Frenchman's table.
A telegraphic line, consisting of twenty-four wires, each representing a letter, was established by Lesage, at Geneva, in 1774; and in the same year Bishop Watson made experiments over a two-mile wire near London. In Germany the invention is credited to Sommering—1809.
Cork was known to the Greeks and Romans, and was put to almost as many uses as at present, although there is no mention in Rome of linoleum, notwithstanding its Roman sound. Glass bottles, with cork stoppers, for wine and beer did not come into use until the middle of the fourteenth century.
Water-mills were used in the time of Julius Cæsar. In Roman times slaves were condemned to the corn-mills, which were propelled by treads. Afterward cattle were used. In the third and fourth centuries there were as many as three hundred cattle-mills in Rome.
Corn-mills are often mentioned in the Bible. The original corn-mill much resembled the modern druggist's pestle. Moses forbade corn-mills to be taken in pawn, for that, he thought, was like taking a man's life in pledge.
Joseph Henry was the first to construct electro-magnets in a useful form. In 1832, at the Albany Academy, he succeeded in ringing a bell over a mile of wire.
Wire was first beaten out by a hammer, but the artisans of Nuremberg, in 1350, began to draw it, which was the great step forward in that art.
The first camera-obscura was invented by Giambattista della Porta, an Italian philosopher, during the latter half of the sixteenth century.