Showing posts from October, 2021

Arkadiko Bridge: The World’s Oldest Bridge

Oct 28, 2021

One of the oldest arch bridges still in use is the Arkadiko Bridge or Kazarma Bridge, located near the modern road from Tiryns to Epidauros ...

The 100 Ton TNT Test

Oct 28, 2021

By the spring of 1945, the United States had completed building the world’s first nuclear device, nicknamed The Gadget . It was an implosion...

One-Armed Versus One-Legged Cricket

Oct 27, 2021

In 1861, Charles Dickens reported, in his magazine All the Year Round , a rather eccentric cricket match being played at Peckham Rye in the ...

The Woman Who Was Hit by a Meteorite

Oct 26, 2021

At the Alabama Museum of Natural History located in the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, there is a small chunk of black space ro...

How Two Families Escaped East Germany in a Homemade Hot Air Balloon

Oct 22, 2021

At 2:40 a.m. on the morning of 15 September 1979, constables Walter Hamann and Rudolf Golkel of the Bavarian State Police were patrolling ...

The First Photograph in History

Oct 20, 2021

It doesn’t look like much, but this is the world’s first photograph, or rather, the oldest surviving photograph, or both. It was taken by ...

Agent 355: The Mysterious Female Spy of The American Revolution

Oct 18, 2021

Agent 355 sounds like a comic book character or the protagonist of a television series, but in reality it is the nickname of a real figure: ...

Post Mortem Photography

Oct 8, 2021

In the olden days before photography, people used to hire painters to create portraits of those who had recently died as a way to keep the...

Itacolumite: The Flexible Rock

Oct 6, 2021

Ever seen a piece of rock bend? Itacolumite is unique kind of sandstone that does when cut into thin strips. If a foot-long piece, a few cen...

Tripitaka Koreana

Oct 6, 2021

The Tripiá¹­aka Koreana is the oldest surviving version of the Buddhist canon and the most complete collection of Buddhist texts, laws and tre...

The Chain Boats of Europe

Oct 4, 2021

In his travelogue, A Tramp Abroad , Mark Twain describes an encounter with a curious boat on the River Neckar in Germany.  We ra...

Otto von Guericke's Magdeburg Hemisphere Experiment

Oct 2, 2021

The Magdeburg Hemispheres is a classic physics experiment that demonstrates the incredible pressure the atmosphere around us exerts on our b...