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… Read More »
Scapa Flow lies barely seven degrees below the Arctic Circle, in the cold, windswept Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland. Measuring 10 kilometres wide by 8 kilometres long with an average depth of 30 metres, this natural anchorage is bounded to the north by the mainland, to the east by the islands of… Read More »
The idea of the robot – an autonomous, even sentient machine – has been around for millennia. In Ancient Greek mythology, the blacksmith god Hephaestus, whose legs were injured as a child, crafted a pair of mechanical women to help him walk. From the Middle Ages onwards, various master craftsmen constructed increasingly sophisticated clockwork automatons… Read More »
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… Read More »
Sticking your thumb out to convey some meaning has seemingly been around for about as long as humans have been humaning, or, at least, as far back as written history goes. But how did the gesture come to be a signal that you’d like to hitch a ride from someone? And is hitching a ride… Read More »
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… Read More »
For the residents of San Francisco, October 11, 1950 started out like any other day, with thick banks of autumn fog rolling in from the bay and across the city. By the afternoon, however, it became clear that something was seriously wrong. On that day alone, eleven patients were admitted to Stanford Hospital with pneumonia,… Read More »
Shortwave radio signals, which occupy the radio frequency band between 3 and 30 megahertz, have the unique ability to bounce or “skip” off the earth’s ionosphere, allowing them to propagate over vast distances. This has attracted a devoted international community of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who exploit the unique properties of the medium to listen to… Read More »
American gangster films of the 1920s, 30s and 40s have contributed a wealth of colourful slang to the English language, much of which is still floating around popular culture to this day: “sleeping with the fishes”, “concrete overshoes”, “G-man”, “Chicago typewriter”, “goon”, “big house”, “private dick”, “speakeasy”, “Chicago overcoat”, “ride the lightning”, “fuzz”, and many… Read More »
At precisely 3 in the morning on January 17, 1991, a series of explosions rocked the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The explosions were exact and devastating, destroying Iraqi military radars, command bunkers, and communications hubs with surgical precision. Immediately, Iraq’s aerial defence system sprang into action, its 3,000 anti-aircraft guns saturating the air with explosive… Read More »
Picture in your mind a classic Old West showdown. Two gunslingers slowly advance towards each other down a deserted street, their spurs gently clinking with every step. They stop and stare each other down, hands hovering over the six-shooters slung from their hips. All goes still as the tension rises, the silence broken only by… Read More »