The lost bell of Shwedagon Pagoda
A Portuguese mercenary stole the largest working bell in history from Shwedagon Pagoda, and then lost it in the waters of the Yangon River.
Portugal vs. Egypt in India
How about that time that the Egyptian Mamluks, with secret support from Venice, battled the Portuguese in the sea off the coast of India?
Eight years on the Suez Canal
In 1967, fifteen ships and their crews were trapped on the Suez Canal because of the Six-Day War. The ships would remain there for the next eight years.
Log guns
Take a log, paint it black, and make sure your enemy can see it. The “quaker guns” were a key piece of strategic deception in the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
First picture from outer space
In 1946 a modified V-2 rocket took the first picture of our planet from outer space.
Doomsday device
In 1950 Leo Szilard warned the world that a single device capable of annihilating all life on Earth was theoretically possible.
The strange death of Rudolf Diesel
The inventor of the diesel engine died at sea under mysterious and still unexplained circumstances.
Vidal Sassoon, antifa
Vidal Sassoon was an icon of 20th century fashion – and also beat up fascists in post-WWII London.
First fatal plane crash
Thomas Selfridge was a passenger in one of the Wright brothers’ early planes when it crashed in 1908; he was the first person to die in a plane crash.
Parthenon mosque
In 1687 Ottoman-controlled Athens, the Venetians blew up the Parthenon. The Ottomans built a mosque from its ruins.
The Phenol conspiracy
In World War I, phenol was a key ingredient in aspirin, explosives, and phonograph records. German agents secretly redirected Thomas Edison’s excess phenol supply to prevent it being used for British bombs.
Korean black ops
In 1968 a North Korean black ops assassination team got within 100 metres of the South Korean president’s house. South Korea formed a team of petty criminals and teenagers to return the favour, but after three years of training they mutinied.
Under Beijing
Underneath Beijing is a vast network of tunnels built during the Cold War to shelter three million people during a nuclear attack.
Tank vs. Toyota
In 1987 the army of Chad won a war against a more powerful Libyan force. The Libyans had tanks and aircraft; Chad had a fleet of Toyota pickup trucks.
Pacific aurora
In 1962 the United States detonated a nuclear bomb in outer space over Hawai’i. It caused an artificial aurora in the sky over Honolulu – and another one over Samoa, more than four thousand kilometres away.
Pig War
In 1859 a dispute over a single pig led to a military standoff between the United States and the United Kingdom. The conflict would eventually draw in George Pickett (of Pickett’s Charge), Henry Robert (of Robert’s Rules of Order) and Kaiser Wilhelm I.