The age of the giant rigid airship or Zeppelin was tragically brief, lasting barely forty years from the first Zeppelin flights in 1900 to the scrapping of the last surviving such airship, the Graf Zeppelin II, in 1940. When we think of the end of giant airships, we tend to picture the Hindenburg, which met its end in fiery end […]
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On July 20, 1969, the world looked on in awe as 39-year-old astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off a ladder of the Lunar Module Eagle and onto the surface of the moon, becoming the first human to set foot on a natural celestial object. This moment, watched on television by over 650 million people worldwide, has gone down in history as […]
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When Boris Yeltsin resigned as president of the Russian Federation, it was expected, but sudden. He resigned so his Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin could become president on January 1, 2000 – the start of the new millennium. Since then, Putin has been the most powerful man in Russia and one of the most powerful men in the world. Today that […]
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If you’ve ever spent any time arguing on the internet, you’ve likely come across a philosophical principle known as ‘Ockham’s Razor.’ Along with ad hominem attacks and comparing people you don’t like to Hitler, Ockham’s Razor is a favourite argument of keyboard warriors everywhere, most often understood as meaning “the simplest argument is most often the correct one.” But where […]
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When we think of ‘the final frontier’ and the last unexplored places we tend to think of outer space. Yet despite covering 70% of the planet, more than 80% of the world’s oceans remain unexplored. In fact, we know more detail about the surface of the Moon than the bottom of the ocean, as for most of history we lacked […]
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The writings of J.R.R. Tolkien are widely read and revered by both his home country of England and around the globe. A BBC poll found Lord of the Rings to be the “Nation’s best-loved book” and Amazon customers worldwide in a 1999 survey rated it as their favorite book of the entire second millennium. Given this enthusiasm, it’s no surprise […]
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They came in their thousands: young women from across rural Tennessee, fresh out of high school, drawn by the promise of good pay, cheap rent, and a chance to do their part for the war effort – women like 19-year-old Gladys Owens and Ruth Huddleston. One by one they stepped off trains and buses and entered the mysterious town of […]
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Humanity has collectively been responsible for a depressingly large amount of animals going extinct in our relatively short time on this Earth. However, perhaps no creature was wiped from the face of the planet for as silly a reason as the great auk. Once endemic to the North Atlantic, the great auk was a flightless seabird not too dissimilar in […]
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Described variously as everything from “the greatest B-movie ever made” to a masterpiece of horror and suspense, John Carpenter’s The Thing, which debuted on June 25, 1982, is a movie that rightfully stands amongst the likes of Alien and The Terminator as one of the most kick-ass sci-fi movies in history. The thing is, it turns out The Thing was […]
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Throughout World War 2, Winston Churchill gave a number of speeches that galvanized the British public in the face of extreme hardship and convinced them to keep fighting that good fight against Adolf and his cronies. Perhaps the most famous speech Churchill ever gave was the one he spent the longest time agonising over- This was their finest hour, where […]
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On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank received a diary for her 13th birthday. But you all undoubtedly know a lot about that already. What you might not know is that the popular public version of that diary has been greatly censored because, as young teens are wont to do, Anne talked about her nether regions and sex- a lot. In […]
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Today in History: September 18, 1923 On September 18, 1923, Princess Anne Antoinette Francois Charlotte of Bourbon-Parma was born in Paris, France. Like most European royalty she was relatively closely related to many reining or former monarchs, but more directly she was the second child of Prince Rene of Bourbon-Parma and princess Margrethe of Demark. She spent her early years […]
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Today in History: June 21, 1994 On June 21, 1994, a Spanish man by the name of Jose Martin was out for a drive with his wife when he got definitive proof that the Universe doesn’t like him, or, at least, doesn’t like his car. How? Well, it dropped a nearly 2 kilo hunk of space rock that just moments […]
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Today in History: June 11, 1895 As the official name of Paris–Bordeaux–Paris Trail suggests, the idea of this particular event was to see who could drive from Paris to Bordeaux and back again in the quickest possible time. For reference, this was a distance of 1,178 km or 732 miles on the roads of the day. So what was so […]
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Today in History: June 8, 1959 Today for the equivalent price of a decent cup of coffee you can get the United States Postal Service to pick up and deliver a letter to anywhere in the continental United States in just a day or two. But it hasn’t always been that way and there’s a reason they call it “snail […]
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Today in History: June 7, 1971 On April 26, 1968 a 19 year old man called Paul Cohen walked into the Los Angeles County Courthouse to testify in a case for a friend. This, in and of itself, isn’t noteworthy. Why Mr. Cohen would have his name stenciled into the history books is because of something that was in turn […]
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Today in History: June 6, 1822 Being shot directly in the stomach isn’t generally conducive to living- a fact that makes the story of Alexis St. Martin all the more impressive because he not only walked off being shot in said organ at the age of 20 on June 6, 1822 at a range of less than a meter, but […]
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Today in History: June 5, 1995 On June 5, 1995 at approximately 5:55 PM, a male mallard collided with the glass facade of a wing of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, Holland, resulting in its death. Within moments of the dead duck hitting the floor, the unfortunate bird was then mounted by another, much more alive duck who proceeded […]
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