Showing posts with the label History

Arthur John Priest: The Unsinkable Stoker

Oct 18, 2023

If there was anyone on board the Titanic that truly deserved the title “unsinkable” it was a coal stoker named Arthur John Priest, who surv...

Adrian Carton de Wiart: The Most Battle-Scarred Soldier

Oct 13, 2023

No one who has been touched by war has emerged from the experience unchanged. In the case of Adrian Carton de Wiart, who had participated in...

Boynton’s Bicycle Railroad

Oct 6, 2023

For a brief two years during the 1890s, there was a rail service between Gravesend and Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. The railway was u...

Pakistan’s Century-Old Horse-Drawn Train

Oct 4, 2023

In 1903, a famous social activist named Ganga Ram established a unique mode of transport in his village in Faisalabad, Pakistan. It was a tr...

MS Hans Hedtoft: Denmark’s Titanic

Oct 3, 2023

Nearly five decades after the sinking of the Titanic , another tragedy struck in the oceans. A Danish liner was on her maiden voyage off the...

William Rankin: The Man Who Fell Through a Thundercloud

Oct 2, 2023

Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Rankin gently pulled back the stick of his F-8 Crusader to put the single-engine supersonic fighter jet on ...

Porphyrios, The Whale That Spread Terror Among Byzantine Sailors Of The 6th Century

Sep 27, 2023

In his novel Moby Dick , Herman Melville recounts numerous cases of cetaceans turning against whalers who were hunting them, attacking their...

Who Was The Earliest Born Person To Be Photographed?

Sep 26, 2023

If you've had the chance to explore your old family photo albums, you may have stumbled upon pictures of your ancestors who were born du...

The Sibling Rivalry That Gave Birth to Adidas and Puma

Sep 25, 2023

Straddling the river of Aurach in the German state of Bavaria lies the small town of Herzogenaurach. It was here in the late 1940s, the Dass...

The Red Ball Express

Sep 21, 2023

During World War II, one of the most significant logistical challenges faced by the Allied forces during their invasion of Europe was ensuri...

Nedelin Catastrophe: The Worst Space-Related Disaster

Sep 19, 2023

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan is one of the busiest and the most important spaceport on earth with over a thousand satellit...

Optography: Preserving a Dead Person’s Last Sight

Sep 15, 2023

In 1924, Germany was rocked by a sensational case of multiple homicide. Fritz Heinrich Angerstein, a resident of Limberg, Germany, had bruta...

Glacier Girl: The P-38F Lightning That Was Rescued From Beneath The Ice

Sep 13, 2023

During the Second World War, the United States initiated a massive movement of aircrafts and ground troops across the Atlantic and into the ...

Ennigaldi-Nanna: The World’s First Museum Curator Was a Woman

Sep 7, 2023

In 1925, when British archeologist Leonard Woolley and his team were excavating at Ur, in the modern-day Dhi Qar Governorate of Iraq, they d...

Peter Stumpp: The Werewolf of Bedburg

Sep 6, 2023

In The Knave of Harts , a collection of satirical poems penned by Samuel Rowlands, the English poet makes an allusion to a certain German ca...

Karolina Olsson: The Woman Who Allegedly Slept for 32 Years

Sep 4, 2023

In the small island of Oknö near MönsterÃ¥s, Sweden, a young girl named Karolina Olsson went to bed complaining of a toothache. She wouldn’t ...

The Portuguese Bank Note Scandal of 1925

Aug 23, 2023

Throughout the annals of history there have been individuals who have sought to deceive others by producing counterfeit versions of precious...

That Time When Hartlepool Hanged a Monkey

Aug 17, 2023

On the coast of northeast England, lies the town of Hartlepool, and from this large town in County Durham comes a humorous legend about a mo...

The Perfect Crime: The Murchison Murders

Aug 16, 2023

Arthur Upfield is one Australia's most underrated writers. His literary contributions often remain overshadowed by the brilliance of his...

The 1,000-Ton Nazi Tank That Was Never Built

Aug 11, 2023

In the midst of the Second World War, the Nazis unveiled prototypes for an array of extraordinary weaponry, spanning colossal aircraft, adva...