The April 5th Anomaly
The Soviet Union was not good at acknowledging failures. If a space mission did not make it to orbit then it did not get given an official designation of name and number. An R-7...
Category: Odd History
9th December 1868 – The First Traffic Lights
In the 1860s London was the largest city in the world, with 3 million people squeezed into an area much, much smaller than the present-day city. This high population density caused many problems. These...
The Strange Gadgets Supplied to Resistance groups in World War Two (Part 2)
The SOE had a big section devoted to forgery. Its staff, some of them recruited directly from prison cells, produced over a quarter of a million fake documents. Most of these were individually produced...
Steaming Along – The erratic history of steam powered road vehicles. (Part 3)
Based in Le Mans, France, a town forever associated with motorsport, Amedee Bollee made bells for a living. However, for ten years from 1873 to 1883 he turned his attention to steam vehicles. One...
The Strange Gadgets Supplied to Resistance groups in World War Two (Part 1)
In July 1940 many countries in mainland Europe were occupied by Nazi forces. Britain was expecting to be invaded within months. Against this background, Winston Churchill authorised the formation of a new secret service....
Steaming Along – The erratic history of steam powered road vehicles. (Part 2)
By the 1860s many different inventors were working on steam cars. Railways powered by steam locomotives were well established, so making something smaller and lighter that could run on roads seemed to be the...
Steaming Along – The erratic history of steam powered road vehicles. (Part 1)
Steaming Along – The erratic history of steam powered road vehicles. (Part 1) Today, when it comes to road transport, there is a slow but steady move away from the internal combustion engine and...
Why are there so many Georgetowns?
Whilst working on a different project, I kept coming across places called Georgetown. This led me to wonder how many different Georgetowns (or George Towns) there are. Despite the best efforts of Google and...
9th May 1671 – Colonel Thomas Blood Steals the English Crown Jewels
Born in Ireland in 1618, by 1671 Thomas Blood had already had a colourful life. He initially fought for King Charles I in the English Civil War, but then switched sides and joined the...
Warning to ET – Contains Scenes of Nudity
In November 1971, journalist Eric Burgess was visiting the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to see the initial pictures from Mariner 9, the first spacecraft to orbit Mars. The pictures were disappointing as a...
