MOTnews 28 (11/01/2002)

WEBSITE EXTENDED

The MOT is putting more information on line!

The website already contained an outline of what the Museum has to offer, as well as all sorts of technical information such as proverbs relating to technology and technical history, the catalogue of Flemish museums with a technical collection and the famous ID-DOC, the identification tool for unknown technical objects.

This year the MOT site also includes a copy of our first series of publications. Surf to www.mot.be and read all about "fighting caterpillars", "advertisements as a source of the history of technology" and "washing and ironing". These publications are also still available in paper form. If you wish to order one of them, the best thing to do is contact info@mot.be.

TRUE or FALSE

"Flanders" is quite well known: we have a real reputation as exuberant hedonists, we are - we say so ourselves - the inventors of chips and our sports stars appear in many surveys of the year 2001. In the past, too, certain Flemish things were already famous, although some of these products may now sound somewhat dubious. It so happens that in the past, Flanders was known for using human excrement as fertiliser in agriculture.

You can read the answer in the next MOT-news.

ANSWER to TRUE or FALSE in MOT-news 27 (07/12/2001)

Branding cattle with a branding iron is a typical custom of the American cowboys.

FALSE

The practice of branding cattle probably originated as soon as animals became property. After all, ownership has to be established one way or another. There are said to be even Egyptian tomb drawings dating back some 4000 years depicting the branding of animals. Branding, just like cutting a mark in the ears, was one of the only permanent forms of establishing a mark of ownership before the use of tattooing.

Spanish cattle breeders took the system to the New World and there the various sorts of brands developed into a very special 'symbolic language'.

SAY WHAT? In this MOT-news item we try to explain proverbs and sayings that have their roots in our technical history. Similar proverbs are found in different languages, but each language has it's own typical sayings. Therefore we do not translate this item in English.

KIDS news: something to tell your children this evening

Did you see a few more good old westerns on television over the Christmas holidays? Were you, too, impressed by the cowboys who managed to catch a bull in no time at all with their lassos? However, cowboys did not invent lassos. The system originally came from Europe and crossed the Atlantic when America was colonised. The lasso is still used in Europe even today, for instance by the Laplanders.