Hameau de la Reine: Marie Antoinette’s Pretend Village
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 21, 2019
Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France, is often portrayed as a frivolous, selfish, and immoral woman whose decadent lifestyle emptied t...
Showing posts with the label Featured
Richard Trevithick And The Steam Circus
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 20, 2019
Twenty five years before Robert Stephenson decisively proved the superiority of steam locomotives over horse drawn carriages during the Rain...
The Zeppelin Spy Basket
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 19, 2019
One of the most perilous positions in the crew of a German Zeppelin during the First World War was that of the aerial lookout, whose job was...
The Rainhill Trials
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 13, 2019
Nearly two centuries ago, a small hamlet lying between Liverpool and Manchester became host to one of the strangest competitions ever held. ...
The Last Victim of Smallpox
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 12, 2019
In the summer of 1978, the World Health Organization stood on the brink of a remarkable achievement—smallpox, the disease that terrorized pe...
Kongo Gumi: The 1,400-Year-Old Company
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 9, 2019
Less than two months ago, the renowned British travel agency Thomas Cook laid off more than 21,000 employees the world over and liquidated i...
The Historic Hanford Reactor That Made Plutonium For The Nagasaki Bomb
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 7, 2019
Sitting squarely in the middle of the now decommissioned Hanford Site, a nuclear production complex on the Columbia River near Richland, Was...
The Legend of The Lost Cement Mine
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 5, 2019
Gold mining in California. Lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1871. Image courtesy: Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com Hundreds of million...
Why Mediaeval Europeans Slept Inside Boxes
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 1, 2019
For much of human history, privacy during bedtime was an alien concept. Many poor families lived in small houses, where there was only one o...
That Time When Britain Had Its Own Rocket
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 30, 2019
For a country as technological advanced as Great Britain, it sounds almost implausible when you say that the British do not have a space pr...
Soda Locomotives
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 29, 2019
An interesting type of locomotive engine that found very brief and limited use in Europe, as well as in America, was the soda locomotive. ...
The Submarine Sunk By Her Own Torpedo
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 28, 2019
The U.S. Navy submarine USS Tang off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, December 1943. Photo credit: U.S. Navy Throughout the Second W...
The Goiânia Radiological Accident
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 24, 2019
A radiation therapy unit in a hospital. Photo credit: Thomas Hecker/Shutterstock.com Radioactive isotopes have a very niche use in medicin...
Rotary Jails
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 23, 2019
Some problems require ingenious solutions. The rotary jail was not one of them. Designed by two American engineers, William H. Brown and Be...
Carl Wilhelm Scheele: The Unlucky Chemist
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 22, 2019
You know Bad Luck Brian. Now let me tell you about Hard-Luck Scheele. Carl Wilhelm Scheele was born in 1742 in Stralsund, in present day Ge...
The World’s First Skyscraper
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 15, 2019
The word “skyscraper” was used to describe a tall building for the first time during the construction boom that rippled across many America ...
Port Arthur And The Convict Tramway
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 15, 2019
In the middle of the 19th century, Tasman Peninsula, on the southeast coast of Tasmania, became home to one of Australia's most dreaded ...
Disposable Ships
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 12, 2019
Before the Industrial Revolution, the British shipbuilding industry was completely dependent on the countries around the Baltic Sea for timb...
Chinese Medicine Dolls
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 10, 2019
For hundreds of years until the early 20th century, getting medical help for a Chinese woman was tricky. In those times the Chinese placed e...
Bouvet Island: The Uninhabited Island With Its Own Top-Level Internet Domain
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 8, 2019
As far as islands go, Bouvet is pretty insignificant—a speck of rock located in the South Atlantic Ocean over 1,600 kilometers off the coast...
