More than a century after it struck an iceberg and sank beneath the waves, the Royal Mail Ship Titanic continues to capture the popular imagination. It is a classic fable of ambition, hubris, and the tragic social divisions of the Gilded Age, and has inspired countless books, documentaries, TV programs, and one of the highest-grossing feature films of all time. […]
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South Georgia lies 54 degrees south of the equator in the South Atlantic Ocean, some 1,900 kilometres off the coast of Argentina. A cold and inhospitable place covered in jagged snow-capped mountains, fjords, and glaciers, until its discovery by European sailors in 1675 the island had no permanent native population. For the next three hundred years the island would remain […]
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At the heart of every nuclear weapon lies the core or pit, a sphere of plutonium the size of a baseball and weighing around 6 kilograms. When a nuclear weapon is triggered, a shell of conventional high-explosive “lenses” wrapped around the core detonates, creating a spherical shock wave that squeezes the core to criticality and sets off the nuclear chain […]
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In our previous video, The Surprisingly Long and Determined Effort to Create a Literal Flying Tank, we looked at how designers in the 1930s and 40s devoted a considerable amount of time and effort trying to combine two of the 20th Century’s most revolutionary weapons of war: the tank and the aeroplane. But as ill-conceived and ultimately futile as these […]
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Ever wonder why the Nazi dominion over Germany was called the “Third Reich” and who the first and second were? Well, wonder no more. To begin with, the phrase “Third Reich” was first mentioned as the title of a book published by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in 1923. As you might expect given the moniker for the regime caught […]
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Depending on the country you live in, political opinion may be varied, or biased in one direction. In democratic countries, you obviously have the option to actually decide what direction your state should move towards via voting. And while a lot of political parties may opt for a safer middle ground usually more relatable for a wider demographic, there will […]
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In 1814, some 20,000 troops of the British East India Company launched an assault on the Kingdom of Ghorka in what is today Nepal, seeking to expand their influence into the Indian subcontinent’s mountainous northern territories. To their surprise, the British encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance from local mountain warriors known as Ghorkalis, and the conflict quickly degenerated into a bloody […]
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The Boeing 747 is among the most iconic and celebrated aircraft in history. Since first taking to the skies in 1969, the world’s first “Jumbo Jet” has become synonymous with luxury and reliability in air travel, the more than 1,500 aircraft produced having carried over 4 billion passengers over the last 50 years. But sadly the reign of the venerable […]
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After the Second World War, a common joke was that Adolf Hitler was the best general the Allies ever had. His string of disastrous decisions, from halting his forces around Dunkirk, delaying his invasion of Russia, and refusing to pull the 6th Army out of Stalingrad, handed the advantage to his enemies time and time again – to the point […]
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We’ve all heard of him. Alexander the Great has been for many centuries a household name in much of the world- an impressive feat for a king who’s been dead for two millenia and reigned only for a little over a decade. In western countries, his defeat of the Persian Empire in the 320s BC has often been depicted as […]
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When we think of Germany and genocide, we typically think of the Holocaust, wherein some 15 million Jews, Roma, homosexuals and others deemed “undesirable” by the Third Reich were systematically exterminated between 1941 and 1945. But policies of mass murder go back much further in German history than many dare admit. For some 30 years before the Nazis came to […]
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There’s an old joke told in natural history museums about a new tour guide showing around a group of visitors. Stopping before a dinosaur skeleton, he informs the group that the fossil remains are 80 million years and three weeks old. “How do you know that?” asks one of the visitors. “Because it was 80 million when I started,” says […]
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The “Roaring 20s” were a time of liberation and experimentation in America. In the wake of the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic, which collectively killed more than 100 million people worldwide, Americans were eager to break free of the moral and social constraints of the past and experience every pleasure and thrill life had to offer. Women […]
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On November 11, 1918, representatives from Imperial Germany and the Entente Powers gathered in a railway carriage near the French forest of Compiègne [“Kom-pee-enne”] to sign a historic document. This document, signed at 5AM, declared an armistice or cease-fire between the two powers, to take effect at 11AM that morning. And so at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day […]
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Generals, it is said, are always ready to fight the last war. Never has this adage been more true than in the years 1939-1941, when the Nazi blitzkrieg swept its way across Europe. German divisions, spearheaded by tanks and supported by ground-attack aircraft, either steamrollered over or bypassed entirely the French Maginot Line and other fortifications built to keep them […]
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By nearly every measure, the Office of President of the United States is the most powerful position in the world, its holder presiding over not only the world’s largest economy but also its third-largest military and largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. The United States Nuclear Stockpile currently stands at 3,800 warheads, distributed among the three branches of the “nuclear triad”: […]
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At 10:25 A.M. on September 9, 1949, Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108 took off from L’Ancienne Lorette airport outside Quebec City and headed northeast along the St. Lawrence River. The Douglas DC-3, with 23 passengers and crew aboard, was on a scheduled run between Montreal and the pulp-and-paper hub of Baie-Comeau in the northeastern township of Sept-Iles, with a […]
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In the summer of 1940, Britain stood balanced on a knife edge. The British Expeditionary Force had narrowly escaped the beaches of Dunkirk, and on July 10 the German Luftwaffe launched a massive air assault, starting what became known as the Battle of Britain. As the bombs fell, the nation braced for the inevitable German invasion. With much of the […]
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