Jacques Charles And The First Hydrogen Balloon

Jan 19, 2023

On June 4, 1783, the Montgolfier brothers gave the first public demonstration of a hot-air balloon in southern France. The balloon, made of ...

The White Woman of Gippsland

Jan 18, 2023

For the past 180 years a legend have persisted in Gippsland, in southeastern Victoria, Australia, about a shipwrecked white woman who was al...

James Bartley: The Sailor Who Got Swallowed by a Whale And Survived

Jan 13, 2023

In 1891, a sensational story appeared in the St. Louis Globe Democrat of Saint Louis, Missouri. According to the news report, a young sail...

Charles Boycott: The Man Who Became a Verb

Jan 12, 2023

The act of boycotting an organization or a person dates back to centuries, but the word “boycott” itself is relatively new. It entered Engli...

How Kate Shelley Saved a Train

Jan 9, 2023

In 1901, the Chicago & North Western Railway erected a new bridge over Des Moines River in Boone, Iowa, the United States. The bridge wa...

Serge Voronoff: The Doctor Who Transplanted Monkey Testicles Into Men to Rejuvenate Them

Jan 7, 2023

One of the most sensational presentations at the 1923 International Congress of Surgeons in London was made by the Russia-born French surgeo...

Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings: The Building That Changed The World’s Skyline

Jan 3, 2023

In 1797, an extraordinary building went up in Shropshire that would change the skylines of our cities forever. Described as “the grandfather...

Our Favorite Stories of 2022

Dec 22, 2022

With the year drawing towards the end, let us look at some of the best stories we published in the past 12 months. Thomas Midgley Jr.: The...

Helen Duncan: The Last Witch of Britain

Dec 20, 2022

The Witchcraft Act of 1735 was a landmark act for Britain. Unlike the earlier Witchcraft Acts which legalized witch-hunting and the executio...

Project HARP: The Space Cannon

Dec 16, 2022

When Jules Verne sent three men to the moon in his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon , he did so in a projectile fired from a massive gu...