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� AMAZIG ANSWERS TO CURIOUS QUESTIONS ------------------

How did the

Great Fire of

London start?

n 1666 London was the largest city in
I England. Home to 500,000, its congested
design comprised an urban sprawl of
over-crowded wooden homes inside a
defensive city wall.
The Great Fire started on 2 September How did the mouldboard plough work?
1666 in the bakery of Thomas Farriner on
Pudding Lane, Eastcheap. It's thought his
maid forgot to ensure the ovens were put out, he first plough, the mouldboard's Ploughs simply moved aside the soil to
and just after midnight the fire took hold. The Tancestor, was no more than a stick break it up and create a furrow to plant seeds
summer had dried the housing timber and a dragged in the ground. The ancient Egyptians into. But in the 1600s, the Dutch improved
strong easterly wind fanned the blaze, developed the use of animals like oxen or ploughs using a mouldboard that turns over
ensuring it swept rapidly through the heart of cows to pull a plough, and the Greeks the top soil and deposits it over the previous
the city on a three-day rampage. added wheels to this design for greater furrow. This design was more efficient,
The fire-fighting method of the time control and manoeuvrability. allowing more land to be cultivated.
involved destroying the buildings in the path
of the fire to isolate and control it. However,
the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas What was the
Bloodworth, delayed in giving the order to
commence demolition.
Upon being woken by his servant in the first printing
early hours, MP Samuel Pepys who lived
nearby decided to climb the Tower of London press like?
to survey the destruction. When he
discovered the fire had begun to spread west, efore 1440 only a few thousand
he took a boat along the Thames to Whitehall B handwritten texts existed across Europe.
to inform King Charles II, who immediately Inspired by the growing demand for lower cost
ordered Bloodworth to start demolishing books, Johannes Gutenberg, a German
buildings and control the spread. goldsmith, created the printing press - a faster
The Tower of London garrison used form of semi-mechanical production that
gunpowder to create breaks and halt the revolutionised the world.
progression east, sparing the Tower and Based on the same principles of the
Charles ll's court itself, but medieval London screw-type presses used to squash grapes in
was already consumed. The fire was the Rhine Valley, Gutenberg fathomed a
quenched when the strong winds dropped, machine that applied pressure to an inked
but monuments including St Paul's Cathedral surface on text that rested upon a medium
and London's centre of commerce the Royal such as paper, thereby transferring an image
Exchange had already succumbed. 87 or text. The machine first featured moveable
churches were razed and 13,200 houses wooden letters carved by hand, but the
destroyed, rendering 90 per cent of the plucky inventor later developed an alloy from
population homeless. The city was rebuilt lead, tin and antimony that could be moulded
on roughly the same street plan and precisely and quickly into long-lasting printing
Londoners were encouraged to relocate by blocks. Handwritten tomes used water-based
the sovereign who feared a rebellion by ink, but Gutenberg devised the creation of
dispossessed refugees. oil-based inks which stuck better to the
metal types. These inky-surfaced type blocks
The Great Fire were arranged into words and sentences
and held by a wooden form, pressure was
started on 2 September applied and the letters were pressed onto the
surface of paper.
1666 in the bakery of It is thought that the German produced
hundreds of texts during his life, but his
Thomas Farriner on magnum opus is regarded as the Gutenberg
Bible, the very first book to be published as
Pudding Lane a volume.

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