Thomas Selfridge: The First Airplane Fatality
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 5, 2026
On the evening of 17 September 1908, a young American officer named Thomas Selfridge climbed into a fragile wooden aircraft at Fort Myer, Vi...
Showing posts with the label USA
Frederic Tudor: The Ice King of Boston
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 26, 2026
In the early 19th century, the idea of exporting ice to the tropics sounded like a joke. Ice was heavy, fragile, and melted. Yet one Boston ...
Joseph A. Walker's Flight Into Space
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 30, 2026
Two weeks before Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin rode Vostok 1 into space to become the first human to complete a full orbit around the Earth,...
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. ...
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 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 ...
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...
Dicran Hadjy Kabakjian’s Radium House
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 28, 2025
In the early decades of the twentieth century, as radium fever gripped scientists and entrepreneurs alike, one Philadelphia businessman join...
