According to legend, One Thousand, Four Hundred and Fifty years ago today, Saint Columba, an irish abbot, supposedly banished a ferocious, unidentified, water beast to the depths of the River Ness after it had killed a Pict and then tried to attack Columba’s disciple. This unidentified water beast has been equated with the Loch Ness Monster, affectionately known by the locals as Nessie.

Many believers speculate that Nessie was a plesiosaur, which, if it had a metabolism similar to modern reptiles, could allow it to live for hundreds of years. (Of course, considering how long dinosaurs have supposedly^* been extinct, it’s hard to know how long they could have lived.)

So maybe we should be saying, Happy Birthday Nessie VII!

^* Cryptozoologists have found evidence that certain dinosaur species may have survived in remote places of the planet where the climate has not changed in tens of millions of years up until recent times, at least until the time of the middle Egyptians in one case and until the time of the Aztecs in another. As this is not a blog on cryptozoology, we won’t discuss such evidence here but encourage you to do your own research if interested.

The world’s first underground tube railway opens in London, England. IN 1869, a 1,340 foot circular tunnel was dug under the River Thames, running from Tower Hill on the north side to Vine Lane (off Tooley Street) on the south. Then a 2 ft 6 in narrow gauge railway was laid in the tunnel and one hundred and forty five years ago today on August 2, 1870, Tower Subway was opened and a cable-hauled wooden carriage conveyed passengers from one end to the other.

And even though the company that was operating the underground carriage went bankrupt the following year (as it was uneconomical), which opened up the tunnel to pedestrian traffic, and even though the tunnel was closed to pedestrian traffic in 1898 (when it was bought by the London Hydraulic Power Company which used it for water mains), as the Tower Bridge (which was built in 1894) negated the need for traffic, it was still the first underground tube railway and laid the foundations for the City and South London Railway , which were built using the same method of construction.

And one hundred and forty five years later the fog still rolls off the River Thames, obscuring the fascinating history beneath.