Nineteenth Century
In 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War, when Paris was surrounded by Prussian troops, the French military used hot air balloons to transport homing pigeons past enemy lines. Microfilm images containing hundreds of messages allowed letters to be carried into Paris by pigeon from as far away as London. More than one million different messages travelled this way during the four month siege.
Read more about this topic: War Pigeon
Famous quotes related to nineteenth century:
“In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events—marriage, children, the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman’s life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Why does he not know how to select servants? The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)