17 November

November 14 – 1716 CE – Gottfried Leibniz, German Philosopher and Mathematician, Dies in HannoverRate this post *Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons If the Germans were looking for their own Renaissance man to compete with the likes of Britain’s Sir Isaac Newton, it is unlikely they would look any further than the brilliant Gottfried Leibniz, who died at the age of 70 on November 14, 1716. An expert in mathematics, insightful inventor and optimistic philosopher, Leibniz had done much to advance the Age of Enlightenment. The son of a Moral Philosophy professor at the University of Leipzig, Leibniz came into the world on July 1, 1646. His father, a respected academic […]

November 17th 1869 CE – The Suez Canal is Opened2 (40%) 1 vote *Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons Nearly 4,000 years after Pharaoh Senausert III dug the first waterway to link the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the Suez Canal opened in Egypt on November 17, 1869. Nicknamed “The Highway to India,” the decade-long project created one of the busiest and most vital shipping routes in the entire world. Though the first attempt to bridge the gap between the two chief bodies of water in the Middle East is said to have occurred in the 19th century BCE, modern interest in the possibility of a canal arose when Napoleon led the French […]