David livingstone why is he famous
When the first Opium War broke out in September , his plans changed, and Livingstone focused his ambitions on Africa instead. However, he believed his spiritual calling lay in exploration with the aim of finding commercial trade routes to displace those of the slave trade , rather than preaching. Also, with only one convert — a tribal chief named Sechele — Livingstone was a pretty terrible missionary, and he eventually resigned from the London Missionary Society.
During his explorations, David Livingstone survived malaria, dysentery, sleeping sickness and several other diseases, even concocting a malaria cure along the way. Livingstone actually suggested the association between mosquitoes and malaria some 30 years before Ronald Ross established the link. He also observed the connection between relapsing fever and tick bites, as well as the link between environment and diseases such as pneumonia, typhoid and dysentery.
Livingstone became great friends with local tribal chiefs, and spoke several African languages. His advantage over other explorers; he travelled lightly. While other expeditions included dozens of armed soldiers and scores of hired porters carrying supplies — and were subsequently seen as military threats or mistaken for slave-raiding parties — Livingstone travelled with only a few servants and porters, bartering for supplies along the way.
During his Zambezi Expedition, which lasted from until in which time Lake Malawi was discovered , Livingstone was criticised by his expedition members for being secretive, self-righteous and moody. During his first visit back to the British Isles, Livingstone became a national hero. He was awarded a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society, an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, and a private audience with Queen Victoria.
Those eager to shake his hand also mobbed him in the streets as he became somewhat of a celebrity. Toth Associates , the technology company that decoded the Archimedes Palimpsest, along with many other historic documents. All of that heritage would be lost. Wisnicki, however, had not yet caught the digital humanities bug.
When he went in search of the diary, he was a traditional scholar, trained in the art of research and critical thought, not spectral imaging and metadata collection. But when Wisnicki finally managed to track down its scattered pages, which were tucked away in several forgotten boxes in the David Livingstone Centre just outside of Glasgow, he found that they were completely unreadable. On a whim, several years after beginning his search, he contacted a friend involved in digital humanities, who directed him to a listserv.
Within a day, he had received 30 responses, half of which advised him to reach out to the team behind the Archimedes Palimpsest. On the second day, however, Roger Easton, an imaging scientist from the Institute of Technology who worked on that famous project, contacted Wisnicki himself.
As it turned out, digital humanities was indeed the solution for transcribing the diary. And more importantly for Wisnicki, his own scholarship would never be the same. Once he embarked down that technologically enriched path, he was hooked. Toth soon got involved, too, and began scanning the pages of the diary, looking for the precise wavelengths that would reveal the writing underneath, and several other experts based in locations ranging from Baltimore to Scotland helped with the post-imaging processing and metadata cataloguing.
The project, Toth says, was unique. After subjecting the diary to spectral imaging, the team was left with more than 3, raw images, totaling gigabytes of data. All of this needed to be processed by imaging scientists so that the text could actually be read. Easton handled the first phase of processing, which involved a technique called principal component analysis. PCA uses statistics to find the greatest variances between an original text and the spectral images of it.
When those images are combined—from most to least variance—they can reveal details lost to the human eye. With those images in hand, Knox was able to crack the legibility puzzle by adding a false color to the pages—light blue, the color that turned out to best mute the printed newspaper text—so that the darker written text stood out.
Wisnicki opened up his email one morning to find those pages, an experience that he describes as extraordinary. From an early age, David was intrigued by geology, science and the natural world. He was concerned that science would clash with religion.
He reached Robert Moffat's station, Kuruman, at the time an outpost of European penetration in southern Africa, on July Livingstone soon moved north to the Khatla people. It was here that he permanently injured his left shoulder in an encounter with a lion. In , he married Mary Moffat, the daughter of the missionary Robert Moffat and sister to the missionary transformed imperial agent, John Smith Moffat, and settled further north at Kolobeng.
He moved across central and Southern Africa at a time when the risks were high due to the prevalence of diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness and dysentery — as well as hostile African rulers. Livingstone dispelled much of this ignorance and opened up Africa's interior to further exploration.
His expeditions became famous throughout the world. He alerted the world to the tremendous potential of Africa for human development, trade, and Christian missions and uncovered the horrors of the East African slave trade.
He was also one of the first Europeans to make expeditions along the Zambezi River in Over the years, Livingstone continued his explorations, reaching the western coastal region of Luanda in Livingstone was the first to make a transcontinental journey across Africa from Luanda on the Atlantic, reaching Quelimane Mozambique on the Indian Ocean by Unlike other explorers who attracted suspicion because of their numbers and ammunition, Livingstone travelled with a small group and had just a few guns for protection.
He secured most of his provisions by bartering with local Africans.