Tag Archives: History
WTF Fun Fact 12887 – No Witches Were Burned At The Stake At Salem
WTF Fun Fact 12887 – The Reagan Astrology Connection
WTF Fun Fact 12886 – Forks Used To Be Seen As Sacrilegious
WTF Fun Fact 12816 – Peas Are the Oldest Cultivated Vegetable
WTF Fun Fact 12815 – Is A Hammer Used When a Pope Dies?
The Impossibly Badass Story of Mills’ Marauders
South Georgia lies 54 degrees south of the equator in the South Atlantic Ocean, some 1,900 kilometres off the coast of Argentina. A cold and inhospitable place covered in jagged snow-capped mountains, fjords, and glaciers, until its discovery by European sailors in 1675 the island had no permanent native population. For the next three hundred… Read More »
The Heart of a Nuclear Bomb and “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail”
At the heart of every nuclear weapon lies the core or pit, a sphere of plutonium the size of a baseball and weighing around 6 kilograms. When a nuclear weapon is triggered, a shell of conventional high-explosive “lenses” wrapped around the core detonates, creating a spherical shock wave that squeezes the core to criticality and… Read More »
The Surprisingly Long and Determined Effort to Create a Flying Submarine
In our previous video, The Surprisingly Long and Determined Effort to Create a Literal Flying Tank, we looked at how designers in the 1930s and 40s devoted a considerable amount of time and effort trying to combine two of the 20th Century’s most revolutionary weapons of war: the tank and the aeroplane. But as ill-conceived… Read More »