At exactly 5:30 AM on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb, codenamed Trinity, detonated over the desert in New Mexico, unleashing in an instant the power of 18,000 tons of TNT. The atomic age had begun. As night turned to day and a fireball 200 metres across rose into the sky, the scientists of the Manhattan Project who […]
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1,500 kilometres southeast of Moscow, sprawling over the rugged steppes of Kazakhstan, lies Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s first gateway to space. It is from this hallowed ground that Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, blasted off on their historic missions – and a long time primary gateway to the International Space Station. […]
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Grosse Île lies 50km east of Quebec City, one of 21 islands in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. Though its name means “Big Island” in French, Grosse Île is barely two kilometres square, home to a small collection of buildings from its days as a quarantine station for Irish immigrants arriving in Canada. Designated a National Historic […]
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If you were to ask the average American “who invented the aeroplane?” the answer you would most likely get is the Wright Brothers. Indeed, the two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, are generally acknowledged to have carried out the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight in history, piloting their aircraft the Flyer a distance of 36.5 metres at Kitty Hawk, North […]
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In the early morning hours of March 26, 1941, Royal Navy sailors on watch at Souda Bay, on the northern coast of Crete, were alarmed by an unusual sound: the high-pitched whine of high-powered engines, growing ever louder. As the sailors strained their eyes into the pre-dawn gloom, a swarm of tiny, fast-moving craft suddenly burst from the darkness, heading […]
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At 3:45 PM on September 5, 1945, history was made at Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario as the Zero Energy Experimental Pile or ZEEP achieved criticality for the first time. In that moment, Canada entered the nuclear age – only the second country after the United States to do so. While rarely thought of as a leader in nuclear technology, […]
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The Pyramids of Giza. The Pharos of Alexandria. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Mausoleum at Halicanarnassus. These are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, celebrated for millennia as the greatest architectural achievements of antiquity. Sadly, today only one of the original wonders […]
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On December 8, 1941, the day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, the United States declared war on the Empire of Japan. Three days later on December 11, Japan’s ally Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. This was to prove a major strategic blunder for the Nazis, for not only was the United States the greatest industrial […]
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In the first episode of the AppleTV series For All Mankind, the people of the world gather around their television sets in the summer of 1969 and watch in awe as the first human being sets foot on the moon. But in this reality, that human being is not NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong but Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, and his […]
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At 7:35 A.M. on July 1st, 1940, a ship arrived in the port of Halifax, carrying a shipment of fish. Under the watchful eye of 300 armed policemen, the cargo, packed in hundreds of wooden crates, was methodically checked and rechecked before being loaded onto a dozen railcars. From Halifax, the shipment made its way to Montreal, where the train […]
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“An army marches on its stomach.” This adage, variously ascribed to Frederick the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte, captured one of the universal truths of warfare: that battles are won not by men and weapons, but by logistics – the ability to efficiently and reliably supply said men and guns with the ammunition, food, medicine, and any other resources required to […]
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In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a massive armada of more than 5,000 ships and 1,200 aircraft appeared off the coast of Normandy in northern France. Moments later, some 160,000 American and British Commonwealth troops stormed onto the beaches or landed by parachute behind enemy lines. Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, had begun. The […]
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On September 15, 1935, the Reichstag or parliament of the German Third Reich passed the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Comprising the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law, these edicts forbade intermarriage or premarital sex between Aryans and non-Aryans – namely Jews and Roma – categorized people according to ancestry, and denied full […]
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“All the old paintings on the tombs They do the sand dance, don’t you know? If they walk too quick (oh way oh) They’re falling down like a domino Slide your feet up the street, bend your back Shift your arm then you pull it back Life is hard you know (oh way oh) So strike a pose on a […]
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In the early morning hours of June 13, 1944, the residents of East London were awoken by an unusual sound: a loud, high-pitched chugging like a motorcycle with a broken muffler. Looking up, they saw a small aircraft skimming over the rooftops at tremendous speed, a tongue of flame trailing from its tail. Moments later, the aircraft plunged to the […]
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Lasting from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War was among the most dangerous periods in all of human history. For over four and half decades, the communist east and the capitalist west eyed each other suspiciously across the Iron Curtain, locked in a deadly game […]
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On September 1, 1939, 66 infantry divisions, 2,750 tanks, and 1,315 aircraft of the German Wehrmacht thundered across Germany’s eastern border into neighbouring Poland, plunging Europe into the Second World War. Two weeks later on September 17, the Soviet Red Army followed suit, invading Poland from the east with 33 divisions. The Polish armed forces, brave but outnumbered and outgunned, […]
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“I never shall forget the way, That Blood upon this awful day, Preserved us all from death. He stood upon a little mound, Cast his lethargic eyes around, And said beneath his breath : “Whatever happens we have got, The Maxim Gun, and they have not.” This passage, from Hillaire Belloc’s 1898 poem The Modern Traveller, infamously captures the awesome […]
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