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...
