12 November 2018

quacksalver

[kwak-sal-ver]

noun

1. a quack doctor.
2. a charlatan.

Origin of quacksalver

early Dutch

1570-1580; < early Dutch (now kwakzalver); see quack1, salve1, -er1

Dictionary.com

Today’s quote

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

– H.L. Mencken

On this day

12 November 1927 – Josef Stalin takes full control of the Soviet Union after Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party a few weeks earlier.

12 November 1944 – sinking of the German battleship, Tirpitz. The Allies had tried for two years to sink the ship. Finally, 32 British Lancaster bombers attack and sink the ship.

12 November 1990 – Swiss computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, publishes a formal proposal for hyper-text transfer, this followed his proposal for Information Management, published in March 1989. On 25 December 1990, he makes the world’s first successful communication between a hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) client and a server; and the world wide web is born. He is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which oversees the ongoing development of the world-wide web.