On June 28, 1839, a ship departed Havana, Cuba en route to Puerto Principe. Along with a crew of 7, including two slaves serving as a cabin boy and ship’s cook, the vessel was also packed with cargo worth approximately $60,000, or about $1.7 million today. This included items ranging from wine, saddles, iron castings, mill rollers, fabrics, soap, leather […]
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“Helicopter’s don’t fly – they just beat the air into submission.” and “Helicopters aren’t aircraft – they’re just ten thousand parts flying in close formation.” are just two of the many tongue-in-cheek sayings which have been levelled at rotorcraft. Yet despite their often ungainly and precarious appearance, it cannot be denied that helicopters are remarkable pieces of engineering, capable of […]
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31 countries currently use some form of nuclear power, with the 455 currently operational reactors generating some 393,000 Megawatts of electricity – nearly 20% of the world’s total energy production. Despite high-profile disasters such as Chernobyl, Three-Mile-Island, and Fukushima, nuclear power is actually among the safest and cleaner forms of electricity generation, placing dead-last in terms of deaths per kilowatt-hour […]
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It was a dark, stormy night in October 1934 when the residents of Albury, a small town in New South Wales, Australia, were awakened by the drone of an aeroplane droning overhead. Endlessly it circled above the iron grey clouds, searching for a place to land. Any aeroplane lost in a storm was cause for concern, but the residents of […]
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The Great War of 1914-1918 has been described as the first “industrial war”, and saw the battlefield debut of a number of advanced weapons, including the aeroplane, poison gas, the tank, the flamethrower, and the submarine. Of these, the tank and the aeroplane would go on to completely revolutionize modern warfare. The post-war years saw great leaps in the development […]
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Erik Weiss, better known by his stage name Harry Houdini, was one of the greatest entertainers in history, and among the first modern mega-celebrities. Over a 35-year career spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Houdini thrilled audiences the world over with his headline-grabbing feats of stage magic and death-defying escapology, making entire elephants disappear and wriggling his way […]
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, is one of the most important and celebrated American writers and wits in history. His keen observations and biting satires of 19th Century America remain beloved classics to this day, while his pithy quips will likely continue to infest our social media feeds for decades more to come. Yet despite Twain’s legendary intelligence and […]
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On February 21, 1967, tragedy struck the Apollo moon landing program. During a dress rehearsal or “plugs out” test for Apollo 1 – the first planned shakedown mission of the new spacecraft – an electrical wire sparked and started a fire in the capsule. In the pressurized, pure oxygen environment of the cabin, the flames quickly raged out of control, […]
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When we think of Sparta, the first thing that comes to mind is the Spartan warrior. Unlike other historical warrior peoples like the Samurai, the Spartan warriors were pretty close to our imagined conception of them. They were manly warriors who were very muscular, fought wearing red capes, and holding big shields. They were the face of Sparta, to the […]
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On the morning of August 13, 1961, the residents of the German capital of Berlin awoke to find their city divided. At midnight, thousands of East German troops had fanned out across the city tearing up roads, erecting guard posts, and stringing barbed-wire barriers. The 43-kilometre border dividing communist East Berlin from the capitalist West had been sealed shut. Over […]
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In today’s age of relatively stable international relations, it is hard to imagine the impact of something like the Mongol invasions. Starting in 1206, It was a trying time for those who initially witnessed them: mountains of skulls, burning cities, murder and pillaging on a wide scale. Even if Genghis Khan’ descendants became more urbane and grew closer to their […]
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In June 2021, Southern District of California Judge Roger Benitez made headlines when he struck down the state’s 30-year ban on assault weapons, concluding that: “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.” Benitez’s landmark decision was but one episode in the long-running political debate over gun […]
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On November 28, 1787, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty set sail from England with 46 men aboard, bound for the island of Tahiti in the South Pacific. Commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh, her mission was to collect and deliver breadfruit plants to the West Indies, where they would serve as cheap food for slaves on British plantations. After a long […]
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There’s an old engineer’s adage that goes: “If it moves but shouldn’t, use duct tape. If it doesn’t move but should, use WD-40.” For nearly 60 years, WD-40, the iconic “toolkit in a can,” has been helping amateurs and professionals alike out of all sorts of sticky mechanical jams. In addition to its intended purpose as a penetrating lubricant and […]
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Football is undoubtedly the most beloved sport around the world. And for American viewers – who associate football with big shoulder pads and helmets – we mean soccer, where the ball is… a ball and the main medium with which is used to play with it are feet. For more on how soccer got that name, stick around for the […]
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On the first of September, 1939, nearly 1.5 million troops, 2,750 tanks, and 2,300 aircraft of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich stormed over the border into Poland. That same day, Britain and France, bound by treaty to defend Polish sovereignty, issued an ultimatum calling for the immediate withdrawal of German forces. The ultimatum was ignored, and on September 3 the Allied […]
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On February 14, 1960, Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb arrived at the sprawling Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and prepared to make history. At age 30, Cobb was already one of the world’s most accomplished female pilots, having been the first woman to fly the Paris Air Show and holding three world records for speed, distance, and absolute altitude for light […]
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Every morning around 7 o’clock, a small army descends upon the Indian port city of Mumbai. Dressed in distinctive white uniforms and topi or Gandhi caps, they fan out across the city’s sprawling suburbs to collect their wares before regrouping at local train stations and streaming down a network of rail lines into Mumbai’s commercial heart. There, on bicycles or […]
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