On the outskirts of Sway, a village near Lymington, on Britain’s south coast, stands a peculiar Victorian tower. Visible for miles around, t...
Pankration was a violet sport. Practiced in ancient Greece, this brutal combination of boxing and wrestling had virtually no rules. The obje...
In the middle of the 19th century, British railway engineers realized that journey times could be appreciably shortened if trains didn’t hav...
Killing someone takes a lot of wickedness backed by an equal amount of temerity, none of which was lacking in Tony Marino, Joseph "Red...
More animals have flown to space than human beings. In the early years of space flight, all kinds of living beings from rodents to apes were...
The Old London Bridge that stood for 600 years over Thames was the river’s key crossing point, as well as the city’s prime real estate area....
There was once a great racehorse in 18th-century Britain named Potoooooooo, who was famed for his endurance and speed. He won over 30 races ...
At the beginning of the 19th century, London was one of the busiest river ports in the world, and the 600-year old stone bridge over Thames ...
Do you know how many British people were born between September 3 and September 13 in the year 1752? None. Absolutely no one was born, nobod...
Scores of hills dot the edges of many German cities, but these are not natural. They are known as Schuttberg, or “debris hill”. Schuttberg...
In many countries, owing a television involves more than one type of cost. First the device itself, which may cost, depending on your taste,...
One of Colorado Spring’s most famous visitors was electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla, who in the spring of 1899, set up a laborat...
The northern end of New Zealand’s South Island is a chaos of bays and sounds, and within this intricate coastline lies a narrow and treacher...
Hundreds of towns and villages have perished due to massive earth-moving projects such as the construction of dams. But the temples at Abu S...
For thirty five years, between 1941 and 1976, a company called New York Subways Advertising ran a city-wide beauty contest. Any New Yorker a...
One of the leading causes of death in Europe and in the United States during the 19th century was tuberculosis, a disease that has plagued h...
On the south-west corner of Carfax, in Oxford, a small, inconspicuous inscription on the side of an old building marks the site of one of th...
Humans and stegosaurus missed each other by more than 150 million years, but people have always wondered how difficult or terrifying life wo...
The world’s first communication satellite was remarkably unsophisticated—a big silvery plastic balloon coated with aluminum, soaring roughly...
Ask anyone, what won the war against Japan during the Second World War, and the answer would invariably be the ‘atomic bomb’, but truth be...
