William And Mary Bryant’s Heroic Escape From Australia

Mar 10, 2023

The penal colonies that the British established in Australia during the 18th and the 19th centuries were nearly impossible to escape from. S...

Jack Ketch’s Botched Executions

Mar 8, 2023

The job of an executioner in medieval England was detestable. Nobody invited them to their homes. They were not allowed to go to the church,...

Douglas Crofut: Suicide by Radiation

Mar 6, 2023

On January 22, 1981, a 38-year-old industrial radiographer named Douglas Crofut was admitted to a hospital in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, the United...

Danube Sinkhole: Where a River Vanishes

Mar 2, 2023

The European river system is complex and extensive. Two of its main rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, despite not having their sources relat...

Escape From Colditz Castle

Mar 1, 2023

On a rocky outcrop high above the Mulde River in the small town of Colditz in Saxony, Germany, sits the massive Colditz Castle. Once the for...

St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line: The World’s First Airline

Feb 27, 2023

Barely a decade after the pioneering flight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, the world’s first scheduled passenger airline service bega...

Daniel Sickles's Leg

Feb 22, 2023

One of the most visited exhibits at Washington's National Museum of Health and Medicine is the shattered leg bones of an American Civil ...

The Case of The Exploding Teeth

Feb 21, 2023

In the January 1861 issue of The Dental Cosmos , the first major journal of American dentistry, a Pennsylvania dentist named WH Atkinson doc...

Joseph Samuel: The Man Who Couldn’t be Hanged

Feb 16, 2023

Joseph Samuel was a petty criminal who broke into homes and stole stuff. There is nothing remarkable about his crimes, or about his life. Ho...

Clarence Madison Dally: The First Victim of Radiation

Feb 14, 2023

In December 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen submitted to Würzburg's Physical-Medical Society journal a preliminary report where ...