The Ansel Bourne Identity
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 27, 2026
In January 1887, a mild-mannered itinerant preacher named Ansel Bourne left his home in Greene, Rhode Island, to travel to nearby Providence...
Caroline Hampton's Rubber Gloves
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 22, 2026
In the late nineteenth century, modern surgery was still emerging from an era in which hygiene was, by today’s standards, startlingly poor. ...
The Disappearance of The Waratah
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 20, 2026
On the evening of 26 July 1909, the SS Waratah sailed from Durban, South Africa, bound for Cape Town. A luxury passenger liner, she was coa...
Rupes Nigra: The Fabled Magnetic Mountain at The North Pole
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 17, 2026
In 1577, the Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator wrote a letter to his friend, the English scientist, occultist and royal advisor John Dee...
Barbara Thompson: Prisoner of the Aboriginal
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 15, 2026
When Captain Joseph Frazer rescued Narcisse Pelletier from Aboriginal people in 1875, it was not the first time a white captive had been re...
The Green Stone of Hattusa
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 12, 2026
The Green Stone of Hattusa is one of the most intriguing and enigmatic objects from the Hittite capital, largely because of how little we ca...
Edmond Locard And The First Forensic Laboratory
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 8, 2026
In 1910, the Lyon police offered criminologist Edmond Locard the opportunity to form the first police laboratory. He was given two assistant...
Interstate 19: America's Only Metric Highway
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 6, 2026
The United States is often ridiculed for clinging to seemingly unintuitive units of measurement such as inches, miles, Fahrenheit, and pound...
The Antarctic Snow Cruiser
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 5, 2026
Somewhere on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, buried beneath hundreds of feet of snow (or perhaps at the bottom of the ocean), lies an enor...
The Best Stories of 2025
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 25, 2025
As another year draws to a close, let us look back at some of the most memorable stories we published over the past twelve months. From curi...
The Bombay Docks Explosion of 1944
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 25, 2025
On the afternoon of 14 April 1944, the city of Bombay, then the jewel of British India’s western coast, was shaken by a catastrophe so viole...
England's Coffeehouses and the Birth of Public Debate
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 22, 2025
When coffee first arrived in England in the mid-17th century, it brought with it far more than a new beverage. It introduced a radically new...
Charles-Henri Sanson: The Prolific French Executioner
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 17, 2025
In the violent upheaval of the French Revolution, few figures stood closer to death than Charles-Henri Sanson. Kings, queens, nobles, priest...
The Heroic Deed That Earned Karl-Heinz Rosch a Statue
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 16, 2025
In the autumn of 1944, as World War II raged across Europe, a moment of extraordinary humanity occurred in the Dutch village of Goirle. On ...
The Lost Forty: How an 1882 Surveying Error Saved a Patch of Forest from Logging
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 11, 2025
In the northern reaches of Minnesota, within the sprawling Chippewa National Forest, lies a rare remnant of America’s ecological past—a 144 ...
The Song of Seikilos
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 10, 2025
Humans have been making music for thousands of years, as evidenced by fragments of ancient instruments unearthed by archaeologists, such as ...
Britain's K-Class Submarines And The Battle of May Island
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 9, 2025
In the years leading up to the First World War, Britain’s Royal Navy faced an existential challenge. Germany’s naval expansion, and especial...
Ambrose Channel Pilot Cable
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 4, 2025
The Ambrose Channel pilot cable was an early 20th-century navigational aid installed on the seabed of New York Harbor’s Ambrose Channel, the...
Alain Bombard: The Biologist Who Shipwrecked Himself to Prove a Point
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 3, 2025
In the autumn of 1952, a small black rubber dinghy drifted out of the Canaries and into the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. Its lone occupa...
Wilhelm Voigt: The Amiable Scoundrel
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 1, 2025
On a crisp October morning in 1906, a man in an immaculate Prussian captain’s uniform marched into the Berlin suburb of Köpenick and coolly ...
