Why Batman’s Gotham City is Named After a Nottinghamshire Village
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 15, 2019
Gotham is a fictional city in the DC Universe but its namesake is not. Located across the Atlantic in South Nottinghamshire, this quiet, lit...
Somalia’s Hand Painted Storefronts
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 12, 2019
Many businesses and shopkeepers in Somalia—which is one of the world’s poorest nations—cannot afford luxuries such as backlit signs and viny...
The Temples of Mount Fanjing
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 11, 2019
Fanjingshan or Mount Fanjing, in Guizhou Province in southwest China, is a sacred Buddhist site and a place of great natural beauty with un...
Dagen H: The Day Sweden Switched Traffic Sides
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 11, 2019
Few traffic jams are as organized and coordinated as the ones that took place nationwide in the morning of September 3, 1967, on the streets...
Nasoni: Rome’s Ubiquitous Water Fountains
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 9, 2019
Drinking fountains in Rome are as quintessential as the city’s many Roman monuments. Standing about three feet high, these 200-pound cylind...
How War Drove to Extinction The Wake Island Rail
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 9, 2019
The day Japan bombed Pear Harbor, many American outposts in the Pacific, such as Philippines, Guam, Midway, Wake Island, Malaya, Thailand,...
People Once Downloaded Games From The Radio
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 6, 2019
The year 1977 was an important year in the history of home computing. That year, the world’s first microprocessor-driven personal computer ...
Wrigley Field’s Rooftop Seats
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 5, 2019
One of the best spots to watch the Chicago Cubs play at their home ground, Wrigley Field, is not inside but outside the stadium, from the r...
Voder: The World’s First Talking Machine
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 3, 2019
That voice in your GPS navigator, the virtual assistant in your smartphone, and the automated responses you get when you dial a company hel...
Cragside: The World’s First House To Have Electric Lights
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 2, 2019
Nearly a decade before Thomas Edison began working on incandescent lamps and a more affordable way to bring the bright world of electricity...
Carrières de Lumières: An Immersive Art Gallery in a Disused Quarry
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 30, 2019
In the Les Baux-de-Provence of southern France, is located Carrières de Lumières , or the Quarries of Light—an unusual multimedia exhibit sp...
Vardo: The Opulent Caravans of The Gypsies
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 29, 2019
Living in trailer homes is largely an American culture , but the history of mobile homes originated in Europe. The first trailer home owne...
The Castle of Zafra
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 29, 2019
In the beloved TV series Game of Thrones, young Ned Stark is seen clashing swords with the henchmen of Targaryen in front of a spectacular c...
Mimizuka: The Burial Site of Thousands of Noses
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 28, 2019
In the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood in the suburb of Kyoto, Japan, is a 30-foot-high, grass-covered hillock within which are b...
WLW: The 500 Kilowatt Super Station
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 27, 2019
On most nights, during the 1930s, the airwaves over North America were dominated by a single radio station called WLW. Transmitting at a pow...
Quaker Guns of The American Civil War
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 25, 2019
“All warfare is based on deception,” Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War , an ancient Chinese military treatise, often regarded as one of the m...
The World’s First Cyber Attack Happened Nearly Two Hundred Years Ago
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 25, 2019
Many say that the world’s first cyber attack happened in 1988, when Robert Morris, a 20-something graduate student at Cornell, inadvertentl...
The Red Taj Mahal: John Hessing’s Tomb
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 22, 2019
The Roman Catholic Cemetery in Nehru Nagar, Agra, harks back to a time when the many princely states that eventually united to become India ...
Syndrome K: The Fake Disease That Saved Lives
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 20, 2019
In the fall of 1943, as German soldiers began rounding up Jews in Italy and deporting them by the thousands to concentration camps, a myster...
Why Did Ancient People Bury Butter in Bogs?
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 19, 2019
Peat bogs are favorite hunting grounds of archeologists because of the many odd surprises these marshy wetlands have revealed from time to t...
