the odd bits of the world
One of the rules of thumb for architectural megalomania is that you want to be a success before developing your ideas. Looking at the examples we ve seen already, Henry Ford was one of the world s richest men before launching Fordlândia, while Sir Edward Watkin had made his packet in railways before attempting Watkin s Tower. Neither [ ]
A picture of the now-lost painting Vinland the Year 1127 (or possibly 1117, sources differ) by Albinus Hasselgren, the original being painted c. 1908. It most notably shows the Newport Tower on the right, a supposed Norse building found in Rhode Island. Hasselgren was one of many Scandinavian immigrants who were convinced that there was [ ]
A section of Tokaido narabini Saigoku dochu ezu (1687) by Komaki Mino, showing a near-contemporary illustration of part of the coast along Sagami Bay where the puzzling tsunami of 1700 came ashore. Public domain image via the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. Around midnight on January 27th/28th, 1700 observers on the east coast of Japan [ ]
Photo from a contemporary newspaper account of the cylinder-slash-impromptu-coffin discovered on a Blitz rubble site in 1945. People think of the Blitz as something that happened to London, but cities all over the United Kingdom were subjected to German bombing, the pressure only coming off when the Luftwaffe switched their attention to the newly opened [ ]
The fourth test launch of the Magdeburg Rocket, which was actually the most successful of the early tests despite only traveling 300 meters horizontally. The last ten years or so have seen China tentatively begin exploration of the Moon, culminating as of this writing with the lunar rover Yutu, which trundled around the Mare Imbrium until [ ]
There have been three nuclear power plant meltdowns that have captured worldwide attention and left the general public with the opinion that nuclear power is too dangerous to rely upon. The most dangerous have been the meltdowns at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, both of which have left large areas where no-one can [ ]
It was May of 1946 and Europe had finally reached the end of World War II. Even so, its effects were still reverberating around the continent and disturbing the new peace. Greece had descended into civil war a few months earlier, and the Soviet Union was lowering the Iron Curtain—as was famously pointed out by [ ]
Beneath Land s End and Scilly rocks Sunk lies a town that Ocean mocks. Unattributed rhyme from Legend Land, Volume 2, George Basil Barham, published in 1924 The Isles of Scilly barely enter into history. About the only major event associated with them was the Scilly Naval Disaster of 1707, when the gloriously named Admiral [ ]
In the history of astronomy up to 1992 there were only two people who could cleanly claim to have discovered a planet: William Herschel found Uranus and Urbain Le Verrier can claim Neptune; if you re feeling somewhat charitable, you can give half of Neptune to John Couch Adams. For almost eighty years Clyde Tombaugh was [ ]
One of the many inexplicable statements in historical literature is Gaspar de Carvajal s description of his travels down the Amazon River with Francisco de Orellana. He says in numerous ways that the banks of the Amazon were stuffed with people, literally village after village for most of its length. No-one else reported this. All subsequent [ ]