The Night The Moon Exploded
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 5, 2021
In the early evening of 18 June 1178, five monks from Canterbury in southern England, reported having witnessed an unusual phenomenon in the...
Showing posts with the label Featured
Why Julius Caesar Built a Bridge Over The Rhine And Destroyed it 18 Days Later
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 4, 2021
In the early summer of 55 BC Julius Caesar had already begun his conquest of Gaul three years earlier. At that time the eastern border of th...
Balmis Expedition: How Orphans Took The Smallpox Vaccine Around The World
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 29, 2020
The biggest hurdle to mass vaccination in the 19th century was keeping the virus alive out of the human body as the precious pus was being t...
The Barbegal Mills: The Largest Concentration of Mechanical Energy in Antiquity
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 21, 2020
About 12 kilometers north of the city of Arles, in the Provence region of southern France, is the small town of Fontvieille. It is a commune...
Medieval Russians Built Churches in One Day to Ward Off Epidemics
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 18, 2020
In the middle ages, many Russian communities, especially in the Novgorod and Pskov regions, believed in building churches as response to cal...
Pitch Drop Experiment: The World’s Longest Running Lab Experiment
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 17, 2020
The pitch drop experiment began in 1927 when Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, set out to dem...
SS Baychimo: The Unsinkable Ghost Ship
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 16, 2020
Ships aren’t meant to sink, but sometimes you have to wonder what miraculous forces kept a vessel afloat. The SS Baychimo was such a ship. ...
Franz Reichelt’s Fatal Jump
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 15, 2020
The British Pathé film archive has a chilling video of a man jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower. The man in the short video is shown...
The Fighter Plane That Shot Itself Down
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 14, 2020
Fighter aviation has come a long way from the crude old days when pilots shot down their own planes as often as the enemy’s. In those early ...
The Buried Village of Te Wairoa
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 10, 2020
Until the late 19th century, the shores of Rotomahana, in northern New Zealand, were adorned by one of the most spectacular travertine terra...
The Fake Dome of The Church of St. Ignatius
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 10, 2020
One of Rome’s lesser-known attractions, the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola ( Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio di Loyola in Italian), lies just ...
Saint Guinefort: The Holy Greyhound
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 8, 2020
Around the second half of the 13th century, a Dominican friar known as Stephen of Bourbon, began travelling the width and breadth of souther...
Sunomata Castle: The Castle That Was Built on a Single Night
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 2, 2020
Sunomata Castle stands at the confluence of the Sai and Nagara rivers, in the city of Ōgaki in Gifu Prefecture. It’s a typical Japanese cast...
The Yukon Square Inch Land Rush of 1955
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 1, 2020
Marketers give away freebies all the time to generate buzz and promote their products. Usually these freebies are cheap trinkets like toys, ...
Hostile Façades
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 27, 2020
The old city of Segovia, about 90 km north of Madrid, is best known for its aqueduct , but this historic city is full of architectural curio...
The Great Glass Slab at Beth Shearim
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 26, 2020
In a cave adjacent to an ancient cemetery near Beit She'arim, an old Jewish town in northern Israel, there lies a huge slab of glass app...
The Ancient Chinese Earthquake Detector That’s Puzzling Modern Researchers
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 6, 2019
In the year 132 CE, a brilliant Chinese astronomer, mathematician and engineer named Zhang Heng presented to the Han court an impressive inv...
Punkah: The Hand Operated Ceiling Fans of Colonial India
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 4, 2019
When the British first came to India, they had to adapt themselves to a lot of unfamiliar things, such as the climate, the blood sucking mos...
Monadnock Building: The Last Brick Skyscraper
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 2, 2019
In a city full of high-rises, a sixteen story skyscraper might not seem like much, but the Monadnock Building standing in the south Loop are...
Letters Q, W, And X Were Once Illegal in Turkey
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 28, 2019
An alternative spelling for taxi in Istanbul, Turkey. Photo credit: Jürgen Luger/Flickr In 1928, the Turkish government decided to change ...
