History
Allusions to transient optical phenomena above thunderclouds can be found in anecdotal reports from as early as 1730 (see Johann Georg Estor). Nobel laureate C. T. R. Wilson had suggested in 1925, on theoretical grounds, that electrical breakdown could occur in the upper atmosphere, and in 1956 witnessed what possibly could have been a sprite. They were first documented photographically on July 6, 1989 when scientists from the University of Minnesota, using a low-light video camera, accidentally captured the first image of what would subsequently become known as a sprite. Several years after their discovery they were named sprites (air spirits) after their elusive nature. Since their 1989 discovery, sprites have been imaged tens of thousands of times, from the ground, from aircraft and from space, and have become the subject of intensive investigations.
Read more about this topic: Sprite (lightning)
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“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)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)