The 100 Ton TNT Test
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 28, 2021
By the spring of 1945, the United States had completed building the world’s first nuclear device, nicknamed The Gadget . It was an implosion...
One-Armed Versus One-Legged Cricket
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 27, 2021
In 1861, Charles Dickens reported, in his magazine All the Year Round , a rather eccentric cricket match being played at Peckham Rye in the ...
The Woman Who Was Hit by a Meteorite
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 26, 2021
At the Alabama Museum of Natural History located in the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, there is a small chunk of black space ro...
How Two Families Escaped East Germany in a Homemade Hot Air Balloon
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 22, 2021
At 2:40 a.m. on the morning of 15 September 1979, constables Walter Hamann and Rudolf Golkel of the Bavarian State Police were patrolling ...
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 ...
Agent 355: The Mysterious Female Spy of The American Revolution
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 18, 2021
Agent 355 sounds like a comic book character or the protagonist of a television series, but in reality it is the nickname of a real figure: ...
Post Mortem Photography
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 8, 2021
In the olden days before photography, people used to hire painters to create portraits of those who had recently died as a way to keep the...
Itacolumite: The Flexible Rock
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 6, 2021
Ever seen a piece of rock bend? Itacolumite is unique kind of sandstone that does when cut into thin strips. If a foot-long piece, a few cen...
Tripitaka Koreana
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 6, 2021
The Tripiṭaka Koreana is the oldest surviving version of the Buddhist canon and the most complete collection of Buddhist texts, laws and tre...
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...
Otto von Guericke's Magdeburg Hemisphere Experiment
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 2, 2021
The Magdeburg Hemispheres is a classic physics experiment that demonstrates the incredible pressure the atmosphere around us exerts on our b...
Horatio Phillips’s Extreme Multiplanes
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 30, 2021
British engineer and aviator Sir George Cayley suggested, as early as 1843, that an airplane with multiple wings will generate more uplift a...
Hackney Borough Disinfection Station
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 28, 2021
When you came down with an infectious disease in the early 1900s in London, not only were you whisked away in a horse-drawn cart to the hosp...
The Madaba Mosaic Map
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 27, 2021
In 1884, an Orthodox Christian community that had recently moved to Madaba, a city in western Jordan, began the construction of a new Church...
The Soviet Moon Prank
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 24, 2021
In December 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, became the first men to fly around the moon and return to earth. But they ...
Viktor Belenko: The Pilot Who Stole a Secret Soviet Aircraft
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 22, 2021
Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko woke up early in the morning as he had done everyday for the past four weeks, to watch the approaching d...
The World's Largest Log Cabin
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 20, 2021
At the turn of the 20th century, the city of Portland, in Oregon, United States, was a major economic center, with a flourishing wheat and f...
Typhoid Mary: The Most Infamous Typhoid Carrier Who Ever Lived
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 16, 2021
We have been hearing about “asymptomatic carrier” quite a lot in the past few months. It scares us to death that there are people carrying c...
The Lighthouse at The End of The World
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 14, 2021
The San Juan de Salvamento lighthouse is located at the very end of the island of states, in Patagonia of Argentina, in the province of Tier...
The Pantai Remis Landslide
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 9, 2021
Tin mining is one of the oldest industries in Malaysia, having been mined for centuries along the river banks. These mines were small and th...
