First free-falling skydiver
Tiny Broadwick was the first person to intentionally jump out of a flying airplane without being tethered to something.
Category: 20th century history
Admirals of Nebraska
The US state of Nebraska is landlocked; all the states around it are also landlocked; and all the states around them are also landlocked. And yet, the Governor of Nebraska can grant residents the honorary title of Nebraska Admiral.
The Man of the Hole
The Man of the Hole is an indigenous man living alone in the Amazon rainforest. Authorities believe that he is the last survivor of a tribe otherwise wiped out by illegal loggers.
Oldest government in exile
The Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic has operated as a government in exile for more than a hundred years.
Continent of stability (Part 2)
Beyond the boundaries of the natural elements may lie a whole new form of matter without protons or neutrons: quark matter. [2 of 2]
Continent of stability (Part 1)
Nuclear physicists predict an “island of stability” beyond the current end of the periodic table. But there’s another possibility even further out: an exotic “continent of stability.” [1 of 2]
School bus kidnapping
In 1976, twenty-six children riding in a California school bus were kidnapped at gunpoint and hidden inside a truck that was buried in a quarry. Twenty-seven hours later, after sixteen hours underground, they escaped.
The scientists of Mars
When asked why we have no proof of extraterrestrial life, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard joked that Martians were already among us… they just called themselves Hungarians.
The Phony King of England
Disney’s Robin Hood features a song about the “Phony King of England.” That song is based on an old (and very bawdy) English folk ballad about “The Bastard King of England.”
Buried film history
In 1978 a cache of five hundred film reels was discovered under an ice rink in Dawson City, Yukon. These buried reels included the only copy of films that had been lost for decades.
Ski ballet
The 1988 Winter Olympics included three freestyle skiing events as a demonstration sport: moguls, aerials, and ski ballet. Two of these have become official Olympic sports. One has not.
Constipation Blues
The blues music genre at its core is about hardship, oppression, and suffering. But it took Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to sing about that real pain down inside.
The end of the world will be televised
When it launched in 1980, CNN was the first 24-hour news channel in television history. It has been running non-stop since that launch. But what happens if the world ends? Well, CNN plans to go out in style.
The generalist
For more than fifty years, Norbert Pearlroth sat in the reading room of the New York Public Library main branch every weekday from noon until 10pm. Unknown to almost everyone, he was researching one of the 20th century’s great sources of facts and trivia.
Horses of Chernobyl
Przewalksi’s horse is genetically distinct from modern horses (it has an extra chromosome pair). It went extinct in the wild in 1969, but a small population was introduced to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 1998; they have thrived.
Original cliffhanger
Cliffhangers have been a staple of serialised fiction for centuries, but the first literal cliffhanger appears in an 1873 novel by Thomas Hardy.