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From 1878 through to his death in 1934, Willy Clarkson was king of the wigmakers of London. He provided disguises to Scotland Yard (and was rumoured to have supplied Jack the Ripper also), theatre actors, and Virginia Woolf.
In 1939, a geologist dug up mammoth-ivory fragments inside a cave in Germany. Two weeks later, World War II began and they were forgotten. The fragments were reconstructed later, and turned out to be the earliest art in the world.
Samoa won independence from New Zealand through a concerted campaign of non-violent resistance. The Mau movement used a wide range of clever tactics, including boycotts, beetle-breeding, and surrendering en masse – and it worked.
It’s a bad idea to make a bridge out of cast iron – it’s brittle and doesn’t handle tension well – but the very first major bridge of this type opened to traffic in 1781 and still stands today.
Vampire folklore goes back a long way, but who was the first real person to be described as a vampire? That honour goes to Jure Grando, who died in 1656, and who was decapitated sixteen years later.
1866: the Irish invade Canada. The Irish independence cause spilled over to the rest of the world in interesting ways. In the Battle of Ridgeway, Irish republicans attempted to seize Canada to pressure the UK to leave Ireland.
Poggio Bracciolini was a key instigator of the Italian Renaissance: he recovered or rediscovered many of the Latin texts that would inspire that storied revival. Also, he loved a good fart joke.
Take water, mix with wood pulp, and freeze. Now it’s as strong and tough as concrete, as long as it stays frozen. So, in World War II, serious plans were afoot to use it to build battleships out of ice.
Why would someone want a hole in the head? And how do we know that it was prehistoric surgery and not, you know, murder?
Venice, 15th century. It’s a gorgeous city, but has a tendency to get a bit waterlogged, so you wear clogs to keep your clothes out of the mud. Next thing you know, you’re half a metre off the ground.
On August 5th, 1944, more than a thousand Japanese prisoners of war broke out of the Cowra POW camp in eastern Australia. It was the biggest prison break of World War II.
Geoffrey Chaucer is best known as the author of The Canterbury Tales, one of the most important works of early English literature. I guess that didn’t pay the bills, because he also wrote one of the first English technical manuals.
In most editions of the Christian Bible, Genesis comes first. But it was almost certainly not the first book of the Bible to be completed.
The HMS Trident was a British submarine. Over the course of World War II it sunk several German ships while patrolling the North Sea. And one of its crew members was a reindeer.
In 1971, Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau apparently swore under his breath during a parliamentary session. He later referred to it as “fuddle duddle” – and so a minor scandal and a major pop culture phrase were born.
Around 1311 CE, the mansa (sultan) of the Mali Empire sent hundreds of ships to find the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. They were lost at sea, so on the next expedition he sailed into the Atlantic himself. He was never seen again.
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