London to Calcutta by Bus
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 30, 2022
For fifteen years from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, it was possible to hop on to a bus in London and travel all the way to Calcutta, I...
Hannah Beswick: The Manchester Mummy
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 26, 2022
Hannah Beswick had a morbid fear of being buried alive, and this dread was not entirely irrational. Her young brother John almost had his co...
The Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 23, 2022
On June 18, 1875, a fire broke out on Chamber Street in the Liberties neighborhood of Dublin, Ireland. The exact cause of the fire remains u...
Wilhelm Gustloff: The Deadliest Ship Disaster You Never Heard Of
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 22, 2022
The sinking of the British ocean liner Titanic in 1912, with over 1,500 fatalities, is probably the most famous shipwreck of all time, but n...
The Calutron Girls Who Helped Built The Atomic Bomb
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 17, 2022
The Manhattan project that developed and built the world’s first atomic weapon employed some 130,000 people, of which only a small number of...
How Australia Fought The Prickly Pear Infestation
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 16, 2022
Prickly pear is a common name that refers to a number of large cactus species of the Cactaceae family that is endemic to the Americas. The s...
Albino Redwood
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 11, 2022
Albinism is rare in humans and animals, and it is rarer still in plants, where it manifests as the complete lack of chlorophyll. Because thi...
Drowning in Sewage: The Sinking of Princess Alice
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 10, 2022
The sinking of SS Princes Alice , a British paddle steamer, on the River Thames on 3 September 1878, that resulted in the loss of more than ...
Spot The Woman
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 9, 2022
For much of history, women have been forced to occupy a position one notch lower than that of men. This is very apparent when you look at ol...
The Thousand-Year Rose of Hildesheim Cathedral
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 9, 2022
Climbing the outer wall of Hildesheim Cathedral’s apse is a rose bush, said to be one thousand years old. According to legend, as long as it...
Clark Stanley: The First Snake Oil Salesman
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 9, 2022
The term “snake oil” is frequently used to describe any substance that has no real value but sold as a remedy for a particular set of proble...
Murtoa Stick Shed
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 5, 2022
In the town of Murtoa, in the Wimmera region of Victoria, Australia, there is a large grain storage facility that looks rather like an enorm...
Franja Partisan Hospital
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 4, 2022
During World War 2, when Slovenia was under Nazi occupation, the country’s resistance movement built a large number of hospitals hidden in t...
Photophone: How Alexander Graham Bell Transmitted Sound by Sunlight
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 3, 2022
Alexander Graham Bell’s greatest invention was the telephone. But if you told that to Mr. Bell, he would have disagreed. On June 3, 1880, ...
The Man Who Bought Stonehenge And Gave it Away
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 2, 2022
On 21 September 1915, a barrister named Cecil Chubb was sent to an auction by his wife to buy some curtains. According to some accounts, she...
The Angel Makers of Nagyrév
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 1, 2022
About sixty miles southeast of Budapest, on the River Tisza, lies a quiet little village with a horrible past. It was here in Nagyrev, a cen...
Australia’s First Tour of England in 1868 Was Made by an Aboriginal Cricket Team
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 29, 2022
Sports has been an important way to bridge different cultures. For the aboriginal Australians and their colonial settlers, it was cricket. ...
Painless Parker: The Showman Dentist
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 27, 2022
At the Temple University's dental museum in Philadelphia, there is a small section dedicated to one of the most notorious dentist of Ame...
The Band of Holes
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 25, 2022
In Peru’s Pisco Valley, there is a strange alignment of thousands of shallow pits. The pits are arranged in a narrow band about 14 to 20 met...
The Diary of Merer: A 4,500-Year-Old Papyrus That Details The Construction of The Great Pyramid
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 22, 2022
The Great Pyramids of Giza has been one of the world’s greatest enigmas—how did an ancient society build such massive monuments without the ...
