At 3:45 PM on September 5, 1945, history was made at Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario as the Zero Energy Experimental Pile or ZEEP achieved criticality for the first time. In that moment, Canada entered the nuclear age – only the second country after the United States to do so. While rarely thought of as… Read More »
In September of 1808 Covent Garden Theatre in London burned to the ground. The exact cause of the fire has never been established but due to the extensive amount of flammable items throughout combined with an amazing number of flaming light fixtures, fires of some sort at theaters were relatively common, even inspiring a London… Read More »
The human body is capable of surviving a frankly astonishing amount of trauma to the point that even the loss of entire limbs isn’t necessarily something that will inherently kill us so long as we keep a sufficient amount of blood circulating and avoid a deadly infection. Curiously, despite stories of people surviving things like… Read More »
Throughout history humans have many stories discussing various supposed humans and other beings that we dismiss as legend as a matter of course. Perhaps no source of such legendary figures is more robust than figures related to various religions, with basically no one today, for example, thinking that Hercules ever actually existed, despite the countless… Read More »
The Pyramids of Giza. The Pharos of Alexandria. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Mausoleum at Halicanarnassus. These are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, celebrated for millennia as the greatest architectural achievements of antiquity. Sadly, today only… Read More »
On December 8, 1941, the day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, the United States declared war on the Empire of Japan. Three days later on December 11, Japan’s ally Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. This was to prove a major strategic blunder for the Nazis, for not only was the… Read More »
“On September 15th, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. On October 18th, the NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately, the NBA can’t stop you from wearing them. Air Jordans from Nike.” This is a quote from arguably one of the single most successful ad campaigns of all time- the initial release of… Read More »
In the first episode of the AppleTV series For All Mankind, the people of the world gather around their television sets in the summer of 1969 and watch in awe as the first human being sets foot on the moon. But in this reality, that human being is not NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong but Soviet… Read More »
At 7:35 A.M. on July 1st, 1940, a ship arrived in the port of Halifax, carrying a shipment of fish. Under the watchful eye of 300 armed policemen, the cargo, packed in hundreds of wooden crates, was methodically checked and rechecked before being loaded onto a dozen railcars. From Halifax, the shipment made its way… Read More »
“An army marches on its stomach.” This adage, variously ascribed to Frederick the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte, captured one of the universal truths of warfare: that battles are won not by men and weapons, but by logistics – the ability to efficiently and reliably supply said men and guns with the ammunition, food, medicine, and… Read More »
In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a massive armada of more than 5,000 ships and 1,200 aircraft appeared off the coast of Normandy in northern France. Moments later, some 160,000 American and British Commonwealth troops stormed onto the beaches or landed by parachute behind enemy lines. Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of… Read More »