History
Pigeons have been used to carry messages for centuries. However, during the Nineteenth Century, the communication value of the bird—especially for carrying messages during war—became appreciated. Breeders competed to develop ever faster birds. Competitions soon developed, with pigeon racing growing into a popular sport throughout Western Europe and, beginning in the early Twentieth Century, in the United States. Large purses are offered for race winners.
All participants in World War I made use of the Racing Homer's ability to carry messages, with the British alone employing approximately 9,500 birds. The Second World War once more saw the major powers make use of the Homing Pigeon.
Read more about this topic: Racing Homer
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)