The Sculpted Rocks of Rothéneuf
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 10, 2022
In 1879 in a small town in the south-east of France called Châteauneuf-de-Galaure, a postman began the construction of a fantastic palace, w...
Showing posts with the label France
The Field of Cloth of Gold
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 4, 2022
Situated just ten miles south of Calais, Balinghem is an unremarkable little village, but five hundred years ago this quiet countryside play...
Tarrare: The Man Who Ate Too Much
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 1, 2022
If gluttony is a sin, then perhaps the worst offender was a man named Tarrare who lived in 18th century France. He had such an insatiable ap...
Giuseppe Fieschi’s Infernal Machine
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 24, 2022
On July 28, 1835, Giuseppe Marco Fieschi positioned himself in front of an open window on the third floor of N. 50 Boulevard du Temple in Pa...
The First Airmail Was Delivered During The Siege of Paris
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 22, 2022
When Prussian forces had Paris under siege during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the beleaguered Parisians had only one hope to get messag...
The Pneumatic Clocks of Paris
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 15, 2022
When French-born but London-based civil and electrical engineer, Jules Albert Berly, traveled to Paris for the 1881 International Exposition...
The Giant of Castelnau
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 14, 2022
Legends of giants permeate folklore of cultures around the world. The ancient Greeks had Gigantes who were born of Gaia (Earth) when blood f...
The Longest Sightlines on Earth
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 10, 2022
Last year around April, residents in the state of Punjab in northern India were astonished to see the Himalayas from the rooftop of their h...
Eustace The Monk Who Became a Pirate And Inspired The Figure of Robin Hood
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 5, 2022
Every good comic book fan will have read some of the adventures of Corto Maltés and if so, will remember that one of the characters that the...
The Burning of Tuileries Palace
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 15, 2021
Directly in front of the Louvre, between the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile in Paris, where there is n...
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot And The World’s First Automobile
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 14, 2021
The world’s first self-propelled mechanical vehicle, in other words, the world’s first automobile, was built by the largely unknown French i...
The Last Public Execution by Guillotine
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 1, 2021
On the morning of 17 June 1939, a crowd gathered outside the doors of the Saint-Pierre prison, in the center of Versailles. They had come to...
The First Photograph in History
Kaushik Patowary
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 ...
The Chain Boats of Europe
Kaushik Patowary
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...
The Tiara of Saitapharnes
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 2, 2021
For the better part of a decade, the widely celebrated and esteemed Louvre Museum of Paris proudly displayed a supposedly ancient tiara made...
That Time When The French Divided The Day Into 10 hours
Kaushik Patowary
Jun 28, 2021
For centuries we have used the sexagesimal system of measuring time, where each day is divided into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and ...
HMS Diamond Rock: The Stone Frigate
Kaushik Patowary
Jun 11, 2021
South of Martinique, an island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, lies a small basalt island called Diamond Rock. With an imposing peak of 175 me...
What Happened to Napoleon’s Penis?
Kaushik Patowary
May 18, 2021
The diminutive French military leader Napoléon Bonaparte lies buried in a crypt under the dome at Les Invalides, in Paris, sans many vital b...
Pilâtre de Rozier And The World’s First Aviation Accident
Kaushik Patowary
May 13, 2021
In 1783, French professor Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier created history by becoming the first man to fly in a balloon untethered. Two year...
Gnomonic Blocks, or Multi-faceted Sundials
Kaushik Patowary
May 11, 2021
In the park of the Abbey of Epau, in Yvré-l'Evêque in France, you can admire a curious monument in the shape of an obelisk. Built by the...
