How did our system of counting begin?

It seems very natural to you taht if you have two pennies and you add two pennies to them, you have four pennies. But did you know it may have taken man millions of years to be able to think this way? In fact, one of the most difficult things to teach children is the concept of numbers.
In ancient times, when a man wanted to tell how many animals he owned, he had no system of numbers to use. What he did was put a stone or pebble into a bag for each animal. The more animals, the more stones he had. Which may explain why our word "calculate" comes from the Latin word Calculus which means "stone"!
Later on, man used tally marks to count. He would just scratch a line or tally mark for each object he wnated to count, but he had no word to tell the number.
The next step in the development of the number system was probably the use of fingers. And again we have a word that goes back to this. The word "digit" comes from the Latin word Digitus, which means "finger"! And since we have 10 fingers, this led to the general use of "10" in systems of number.
But in ancient times tehre was no single number system used all over the world. Some number systems were based on 12, others were based on 60, others on 20, and still others on 2,5, and 8. The system invented by the Romans about 2,000 years ago was widely used by the people of Europe until about the 16th century. In fact, we still use it on clocks and to show chapters in books. But it was a very complicated system.
The number system that we use today was invented by the Hindus in India thousands of years ago and was brought to Europe about the year 900 by Arab traders. In this system all numbers are written with the nine digits 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 to show how many, and the zero. It is a decimal system, that is, it is built on the base 10.

Where was Gold first mined?

Gold is so rare and precious that you would imagine man didnt't discover it until quite recently in his history. But the opposite is true! Gold was one of the first metals known to man.
We will never know when man first found it and began to desire it, since it was long before history was written down. But since gold is found in the free state, that is, it is not always combined with other metals or rocks, it was the first metal that man knew.
The first evidence we have of mining work to obtain gold comes from the Egyptains. They were mining gold more than 5,000 years ago! We also have records to show that the ancient Assyrians were conquering their neighbours to obtain gold about 4,500 years ago!
The Greek and Roman kings also loved gold. They obtained as much gold as possible by stealing from countries which they had conquered and by using slaves to dig in the mines. So you see, the mining of gold goes back to the very beginnings of man.
In the New World, gold must have been mined from very ancient times, too, because when the Spaniards came to Mexico, they found that the Aztecs had huge quantities of gold in their cities. In Peru, SOuth America, the ancient Incas also had collected gold for hundeds of years before the white man came.
The discobery of gold anywhere in the world had always caused a rush of adventurous people to the spot in search of the yellow metal. In the year 1848, a man named John Sutter was building a sawmill in California. James Marshall, who was helping him, noticed some flakes of yellow metal mixed with the gravel from the stream. Tests showed these flakes to be gold.The news of this discovery spread rapidly over the whole world and the "Gold Rush of '49" was on. It was the large number of settlers who came to California in 1849 that started the development of the Pacific Coast region of the United States.

Who wrote the first English Dictionary?

Do you know what the word "Dictionary" means? It comes from the Latin dictionarius, meaning "a collection of words". This word was first used in this way about the year 1225 by an English scholar called John Garland, as the title for a manuscript of Latin words to be learned by heart.
In fact, it wasn't for another 300 years that any English words appeared in any dictionary. Most of the "Dictionary" that had been written were really to help people to study Latin. They had all sorts of colorful names, such as Storehouse for the Little Ones and Gardens of Words.
Fianlly in 1552, the first real English dictionary appeared. It was compiled by a man called Richard Huloet and has this very long title: Abcedarium Anglico-Latinum pro Tyrunculis. As you can see, the name of this book was still in Latin. But what made this book unusual was that each word was first given in English, then defined in English, and then came the Latin translation. Because it listed English words first and gave the English definations, it can be regarded as an English dictionary, the first ever printed.
The abcedarium contained 26,000 words and was very popular, but it was quite expensive. As a result, many other works soon came out that were smaller in scope and intented for poorer people.
In those days, the compliers of the dictionaries made no attempt to include all the words; they were satisfied to define just the hard words. The first book with the title The English Dictionairie appeared in 1623, and was compiled by Henry Cockeram.
In the United States, Noah Webster began his great dictionary in 1807 and t was finally published in 1828. It contained 12,000 words and 40,000 definations that had never appeared in any similar list before. Webster Favoured simpler speelings, and because of this Americans write "color", "labor", and "honor" instead of "colour", "labour", and honour".

Who invented Cartoons?

You know that between the way something started years ago, and the way it is today, there may be quite a difference! There is no better example of this than the cartoon.
The word "cartoon" was originally used by painters during the period of the Italian Renaissance. And in fact, it is still used today by artists. What they are referring to, however, is the first sketch in actual size of any work of art which covers a large area, such as a mural, a tapestry, or a stained-glass window.
When newspapers and magazines began to use drawings to illustrate news and editorial opinion and to provide amusement, these drawings also came to be called "cartoons"!
In the days before newspapers, famous caricaturists like Hogarth, Goya, Daumier, and Rowlandson made series of drawings on a single theme. These drawings often pictured the adventures of one character. They were the ancestors of present-day cartoons and comic strips.In the 19th and early 20th century there were a number of magazines which specialized in cartoons- Charivari in Paris, Punch in London, and Life and Judge in the United States. When most newspapers and magazines in the United States began to include cartoons as regular features, the humorous magazines lost their appeal and many of them stopped appearing.
The first comic strips appeared in the early 1900's. Richard Outcault, the artist who created Buster Brown, published this comic strip in 1902. It was so popular that children all over the country wanted to dress in "Buster Brown" clothes.
Another of the early comic strips was Bringing Up Father. This came out in 1912. It has since been translated into 27 different languages, and published in 71 countries!

When were books first made?

Books as we know them didn't appear until the Middle Ages. The nearest thing to them were rolls of papyrus. Sheets of papyrus were glued together to form long rolls. The Romans called them volumen, from which we get our word "volume".
About the middle of the fifth century, parchment and vellum had replaced papyrus. Parchment is made from the skins of sheep and goats and vellum is made from calfskin. Sheets of this material, with writing on one side, were cut to uniform size and bound together at one side with leather tongs. So they were "books" in a way.
But it was in the Middle Ages that books were first made that resemble out printed books of today. Four pieces of vellum were folded in such a way so that each piece formed two leaves. These pieces were then placed inside one another so that there was a group of eight leaves, which is called "a section".
These sections were sent to a scribe to write the book. He took them apart and wrote a single page at a time. Vellum was thick enough so there could be writing on both sides.
The next step was to send the finished sections that made up the book to the binder. He sewed the sections through the back fold with cords. Wooden covers were made and the ends were laced through holes in the baords to bind together the sections and the covers. Then a large piece of leather was glued over the back of the sections and the wooden sides. Other steps were taken to decorate and preserve thses books, but these were the first books that resemble those we have today.
Most of the medieval books were Bibles, sermons and other religious books. Next came books of law, medicine, natural history, and later came a few chronicles and romances. Most books of the Middle Ages are in Latin.