Shizo Kanakuri: The Man Who Took 54 Years To Finish a Marathon
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 5, 2022
Shizo Kanakuri was not a slow runner. In fact, he reportedly set the world record by completing a 40-km marathon run in 2 hours, 32 minutes,...
Pierre Picaud: The Real Count of Monte Cristo
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 30, 2022
Alexandre Dumas’s literary classic The Count of Monte Cristo is one of Dumas’s most famous and beloved novels, but this satisfying tale of ...
Chung Ling Soo: The Magician Who Led a Double Life And Got Shot on Stage
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 29, 2022
One of the most dangerous and daring illusions that a magician can attempt is the famed bullet catch trick. There are several variation to t...
Why Two Prestigious American Universities Fight Over a Cannon
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 27, 2022
Most college rivalries revolve around academics or sports, but the rivalry between Princeton and Rutgers Universities is as much about sport...
Insectothopter: CIA’s Dragonfly-Shaped Bug
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 23, 2022
Is that buzz above your head an insect, or is it a miniature flying machine? With current technology and progress in mechanical miniaturiz...
Cross Writing: A Peculiar Way to Save Paper And Postage
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 22, 2022
Back in the 1800s, when both paper and postage were expensive (the cost of posting a letter depended on how many sheets of paper you used), ...
The Family That Sold Time
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 22, 2022
Mechanical clocks of the 19th century and earlier were not very accurate timekeepers and tended to drift over the course of a single day. Af...
The 1904 Olympic Marathon Was The Worst Race Ever
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 20, 2022
On a hot August afternoon in 1904, with temperatures hovering above the nineties (32 degree centigrade), thirty-two men dressed largely in w...
Vesna Vulovic’s 33,000 Feet Fall
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 15, 2022
On January 26, 1972, the JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 flying from Stockholm to Belgrade became the target of a terrorist attack. A suitc...
Amphitheater of Capua: The First Roman Amphitheater
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 13, 2022
Of all the amphitheaters built by the Romans, the Colosseum or Flavian Amphitheater in Rome is the largest of all in dimensions, followed by...
The Slaves of Tromelin Island
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 12, 2022
On the night of July 31, 1761, a frigate of the French East India Company named Utile , captained by Jean de La Fargue, and carrying a contr...
Félicette: The Cat Who Went to Space
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 8, 2022
During the early years of space flight, animals were frequently flown into space and their bodies examined to investigate the various physio...
The Bradford Sweets Poisoning of 1858
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 7, 2022
William Hardaker ran a sweet shop in Green Market in Bradford, England. His most popular confectionary was the humbug, a hard boiled sweet m...
The Texas Horned Lizard That Was Entombed for 31 Years
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 6, 2022
The Texas horned lizard is a hardy creature, but its hardiness might have been overestimated. The Native American legend holds that the rugg...
Frog Battery
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 1, 2022
The term ‘battery’ was first used by Benjamin Franklin in 1749 to describe an apparatus he had designed to produce electricity. Franklin lin...
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...
