History and context

Stories in “History and context”.

Different towns, different times. One railway timetable.Britain’s Great Western Railway introduced a common railway time in 1840 to reduce confusion from differing l…
The calendar needed a better leap-year rule.Introduced in 1582, the Gregorian calendar adjusted leap years to keep calendar dates closer to the seasons.…
The boundary between one date and the next.The International Date Line crosses the Pacific near 180 degrees longitude, bending around territories and is…
A prize for knowing where your ship was.Britain’s Longitude Act of 1714 offered rewards for a practical way to determine longitude at sea.
The world’s industry became an exhibition.The Great Exhibition opened in London’s Hyde Park in 1851, displaying products and technology from many place…
Under the city, a different kind of river.London developed its modern sewer network in the nineteenth century, confronting the waste problem behind the…
A newspaper for a penny.Cheap mass-produced newspapers spread in the United States from the 1830s. Steam-powered printing helped make…
Before electronic mail, mail moved through air tubes.Pneumatic systems send carriers through pipes using air pressure. They transported papers and money, and stil…
A railway built for the journey to a cemetery.Opened in 1854, the London Necropolis Railway carried bodies and mourners to Brookwood Cemetery outside Londo…
A coffin designed to call for help.Safety coffins incorporated devices intended to signal that a buried person was still alive. They reflected f…
A changing room that rolled into the sea.Bathing machines were wheeled cabins used to change clothes and enter the water with privacy at the seaside.
An automatic chess player. With a person inside.The Mechanical Turk, first exhibited in 1770, appeared to play chess by itself. A hidden human player actuall…
An aircraft carrier made from ice.Project Habakkuk explored an ice-based aircraft carrier during World War II, including the use of wood-pulp-r…
Secret documents intended to be discovered.Operation Mincemeat was a British deception in 1943. Documents planted on a body were used to mislead the ene…
A giant liner found work laying undersea cable.The nineteenth-century Great Eastern was an exceptionally large steamship. It later helped lay transatlantic…
The shipping revolution started with a standard box.Containerization lets the same standardized container transfer between ships, trains and trucks without repea…
Ancient gears from a shipwreck.The Antikythera mechanism used gears to model astronomical cycles. Surviving fragments from a Greek shipwreck…
When tulip contracts became a speculation story.Some tulip-bulb contract prices surged and fell in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. The scale of the wide…
Messages travelled without wires.Optical telegraphs relayed coded positions of arms or other signals from tower to tower over long distances.
A Roman object without an agreed purpose.Small Roman dodecahedra with holes and knobs have been found across former imperial territory. Their intended…
A city's first public cinema. Gone within a month.In 1904, a cinema opened behind an antique shop in Tehran. It showed comedies and newsreels, but a cleric ban…
Didn't like those chapters? Glue the pages shut.An eighteenth-century reader objected to parts of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. They glued pages t…
Swear never to forgive him. Who was he again?Henry Symeonis was implicated in the killing of an Oxford scholar in the thirteenth century. The university k…
A bullet train skipped Nagoya.A Nozomi service launched in 1992 passed through Nagoya and Kyoto without stopping on its way to Osaka. The d…
A million tulips. Replaced after a month.The Netherlands donated a million tulip bulbs for the 1939 New York World's Fair. About a month after opening…
Cranberries vanished from the president's table.In 1959, an herbicide was detected in some U.S. cranberry shipments shortly before Thanksgiving, triggering a…
He disliked sprinklers, so the tower had none.Frank Lloyd Wright's research tower opened without a sprinkler system because he disliked its appearance. Fac…
An ornate theater changed hands for $1.After New York's Valencia Theatre closed in 1977, its owner donated the building to a congregation for a nomi…
A flower thought lost was back in its old cave.A Colorado columbine variety had not been recorded in the wild since 1892 and was presumed extinct. In 2008,…
Five people spotted one comet in 30 minutes.On October 5, 1975, five Japanese observers independently discovered the same comet within half an hour. The…
Some London railings were once stretchers.Metal medical stretchers made for the Second World War became surplus afterward. Some were repurposed as rail…
A Game Boy went online through a mobile phone.Nintendo's Mobile Adapter GB connected the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance to a cellular network. Launche…
A missing park monument lay in the grass.After Seoul's Hanyang Park disappeared, its stone monument was moved around and lost from view. It was found…
Was this jazz bar won in a card game?New York's 55 Bar began in 1919. One account says its founder acquired the property in a card game; that rema…
A public toilet became a national heritage site.Built in 1905, Paris's Lavatory Madeleine is an unusually ornate Art Nouveau underground public toilet. It wa…
Collected in 1909. Named as a species in 2013.Specimens of the Mongolian flower Aquilegia daingolica were collected in 1906 and 1909. Yet the species was n…
A woman sings on screen. A man supplied her voice.In the 1931 Chinese sound film Sing-Song Girl Red Peony, the lead actress Hu Die's singing was overdubbed by…
An old tower was compared to bird droppings.A medieval tower once stood on the Acropolis in Athens. As opposition grew in the 19th century, a Greek archi…
One of Europe's oldest legal disputes was about land.Around 1180 BCE, the Mycenaean priestess Eritha disputed the status of her land with a local community. Clay…
An early animated feature is now a lost film.Argentina's 1917 El Apóstol is widely regarded as the first animated feature film. The only known copy was de…
The first drunk-driving charge involved an electric cab.Just 22 days after London's Bersey electric cab service began, driver George Smith crashed into a building. F…
A political jab with a chamber-pot pan.Laurence Sterne's 1759 satire turned a church dispute into farce. One scene has a character carrying the pan…
The theater burned three times. Each fire started elsewhere.Atlantic City's Academy of Music was destroyed by fire in 1892, 1898, and 1902. Rebuilt each time, it was rep…
They built sailing warships. Steam had arrived by launch.The U.S. Navy's Potomac-class frigates were designed to sail without engines. Construction took so long that…
Their coup failed. Even the family crests had to go.After a failed 1310 coup in Venice, leaders' houses were demolished. All members of the Tiepolo and Querini f…
He built a cathedral, then said he had none.Saint Paul's second cathedral opened in Minnesota in 1851, with worship space on the second floor of a shared…
An early women's-rights speech at a quilting gathering.Nineteenth-century quilting bees in the United States doubled as places to talk and debate. As a teenager, Su…
A fight over signs temporarily shut four stores.Video Update disputed payment to a company hired to replace store signs after an acquisition. The sign maker…
British novel. Japanese text. Chinese silent film.The 1926 Chinese silent film Lonely Orchid adapted a British novel through a Japanese translation and then a…
A royal birth needed a temporary legal space.The Dutch royal family was in exile in Canada during World War II. To avoid a succession problem, Canada arra…
A doctor lost his books in a fire. His account was lost too.After a fire in Rome in AD 192 destroyed his books and medical tools, the physician Galen wrote about facing…
A studio spent its last money on a movie. It worked.Founded in Shanghai in 1922, Mingxing Film Company struggled after its early comedies failed to attract audie…
Chaplin visited Shanghai on film before he did in life.A 1922 Chinese comedy imagined Charlie Chaplin visiting Shanghai, with an impersonator playing him. Chaplin h…
A deserted Greenland settlement. Then a frozen goat was found.In the 14th century, cleric Ívar Bárðarson reported abandoned farms and roaming livestock in Greenland's West…
An early landmark of modern Chinese drama was staged by students in Tokyo.In 1907, Chinese students in Tokyo staged Black Slave's Cry to Heaven, an adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, at…
A landing called Pig's Eye. Then a chapel changed the name.Near today's Saint Paul, Minnesota, a river landing was known as Pig's Eye. After a log chapel dedicated to S…
The manuscript grew too long. A subplot became another book.In 1794, British novelist Elizabeth Gunning's manuscript exceeded her four-volume contract for The Packet. Sh…
Bees crossed into a neighbour's land. A 7th-century text took it seriously.Early medieval Ireland had a legal text on beekeeping called Bechbretha. It discussed hive owners, neighbours…
He opposed slavery and secession. Then was drafted by the Confederacy.German-born Dethloff Willrodt moved to Texas and opposed slavery and secession, yet was conscripted into the…
Uncovered heads could seem rude. So priests wore a hat at Mass.In 17th-century China, missionaries adapted Catholic practice to local ideas of respect by using a ceremonial…
Born to a peasant family, she passed herself off as a nobleman's daughter.In 17th-century Poland, Agnieszka Machówna used her literacy and knowledge of court manners to claim she was…
A palace to project imperial power. Annexation came months after it was finished.Seokjojeon in Seoul's Deoksugung Palace was a Western-style building intended to display the Korean Empire's…
Her supporters wanted her to leave Guy. She crowned Guy king anyway.In 1186, nobles backing Sibylla's claim to Jerusalem's throne required her to set aside her husband Guy. She…
Its head dates to the 8th century. Its body to the 13th.At Akishinodera temple in Nara, the statue commonly called Gigeiten has an eighth-century dry-lacquer head fi…
The wood reached Japan in the 8th century. Oda Nobunaga cut a piece from it.The agarwood known as Ranjatai is kept at the Shōsōin in Nara and arrived in Japan in the eighth century. Wit…
The first US Congress met there. Later, the building sold for $425.New York's original Federal Hall hosted the first US Congress and George Washington's 1789 inauguration. Afte…
An early Amazon film disappeared. Decades later, it surfaced in Prague.The Brazilian silent film Amazonas, o Maior Rio do Mundo was presumed lost in 1931. In 2023, a digital copy a…
A church built in 1861 still has 54 rifle loopholes.St Bride's Church in Mauku, New Zealand, was enclosed by a stockade and used as a military outpost during the…
A film about Poles and German rule was shown abroad before Warsaw.In 1908, producer Mordka Towbin made Pruska kultura, about conflicts between Poles and German authorities. Ce…
A 1358 peace deal offered England roughly a quarter of France.During the Hundred Years' War, the First Treaty of London provided for about a quarter of French territory to…
New York sent aid with one condition: give it out regardless of race.A fire destroyed nearly 500 buildings in Savannah, Georgia, in 1820. New York City sent relief money on the c…
A car park covered an old church site. Builders found about 190 burials below.After New York's Spring Street Presbyterian Church closed, a car park was built over its burial vaults. Const…
A monument to a defeated 1933 coup was removed one night in 2018.Bangkok's Constitution Defense Monument honored those who resisted a royalist rebellion in 1933. It later bec…
Occupiers considered recruiting a chief. Then they saw the flag on his chest.Japan occupied the Gilbert Islands, now part of Kiribati, during World War II. According to a 1944 magazine a…
In 1586, a wife wrote to her dead husband. The letter surfaced in 1998.A pregnant woman in Joseon-era Korea wrote to her deceased husband, Yi Ŭngt'ae, grieving and worrying about t…
A medieval bishop went to Rome. His complaint: she kept the raid spoils.Alice ruled Latakia and Jabala on the coast of present-day Syria and appears to have pursued her own military…
Two suffrage campaigners entered a school. They liked the room too much to burn it.In April 1913, two windows at an old school in Birmingham, England, were forced open, but no fire was set. A…
It began as a temporary ballroom. Then it was moved and became a museum.London's Rotunda was built in 1814 for royal celebrations as a temporary ballroom. After the festivities, it…
A sample from Pompeii went to a scientist. It turned out to be glass, not stone.Eighteenth-century naturalist Johann Jacob Ferber supplied mosaic samples from Pompeii to researcher Torbern…
A Seoul building opened as apartments. Then it changed jobs repeatedly.Completed in 1937 under Japanese rule, Chungjeong Apartment became a hotel in 1940, then a restaurant selling…
A brewer was kidnapped in 1933. A ransom note changed the investigation.After US brewery executive William Hamm Jr. was kidnapped and released, FBI investigators used silver nitrate…
How do you record a whole way of life? This questionnaire asked 2,087 questions.The first volume of Der Mentsch, prepared after a Jewish ethnographic expedition, was printed in St. Petersbu…
A 1931 Chinese film survived. Its soundtrack did not.Two Stars in the Milky Way used written intertitles for dialogue and separately recorded sound for songs. It…
In an old tale, the Magi shared food. Those who ate it saw visions.The Syriac Revelation of the Magi says a star multiplied the travellers' provisions. Back home, they shared t…
Shakespeare reached a Chinese stage. The script travelled through Japanese.The troupe that followed China's Spring Willow Society adapted Othello as The Traitor from a Japanese transla…
Built in 760, then lost. A Korean bridge reopened in 2018.Gyeongju's Woljeonggyo was first built in the Silla period and disappeared during the Joseon era. After archa…
Two fleets met in a narrow strait. Night and a storm joined them.On 13 February 1352, Genoese ships fought an allied Venetian, Aragonese and Byzantine fleet in the Bosporus.…
The river's first bridge opened in 1855. Walking across cost five cents.Minnesota's Hennepin Avenue Bridge opened in January 1855 and is described as the first bridge across the Mis…
A college worked on wartime uranium. The overhead helped build a TV station.Iowa State College received a five-percent overhead allowance for wartime research connected with uranium pro…
The governor asked to see the view. By nightfall he held the fort.In 1620s Macau, Governor Francisco Mascarenhas asked Jesuits to let him into their hilltop fortress for a vie…
New York, 1917. The marchers were silent; drums were not.An estimated 8,000 to 15,000 African Americans marched down Fifth Avenue in 1917 to protest lynching and disc…
The station aired local youth baseball. The field was on its own grounds.In its early years, Ohio television station WLIO broadcast Little League games from a ballfield on its studio…
A pilgrim's memory, pressed from wood onto skin.The Razzouk family has tattooed Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem since the 18th century. Carved olive-wood blo…
His target was not an army. It was Poverty, made into a person.A Mughal miniature from about 1616–1618 shows Emperor Jahangir standing on a globe and shooting arrows at the…
Army transport, circus, early film. All on one camel's résumé.Topsy was among camels brought to the United States for a military transport experiment in the 1850s. After t…
Built in 618. Still standing through centuries of earthquakes.Armenia's Saint Hripsime Church has remained largely intact since 618. It has not suffered major earthquake d…
Kyoto's Golden Pavilion looks ancient. The present building is postwar.An arson attack destroyed Kyoto's Golden Pavilion in 1950. Reconstruction began in 1952 and was completed in…
Herbert Hoover attended the dedication. Decades later came Trump World Tower.The United Engineering Center opened in New York in 1961, with former president Herbert Hoover attending its…
The wreck was found in 2002. By 2016, only its outline remained.The Dutch cruiser De Ruyter sank in World War II and its wreck was found in 2002. A memorial expedition in 20…
Built in the 1100s. Cars crossed it until the 1960s.Armenia's stone Sanahin Bridge dates to the late 12th century. It has been restored over time and carried mot…
He was expected to succeed the king. Then the king outlived him.In 12th-century Jerusalem, William of Montferrat was considered a likely successor to the ill King Baldwin IV…
A coup began before dawn. The president was still in pajamas.On August 15, 1995, soldiers staged a coup in São Tomé and Príncipe. They searched the presidential palace fo…
The main road closed. Locals built a temporary replacement.When a road near Kelston, England, closed over landslip fears in 2014, local entrepreneurs built a private to…
His fellow nationalists criticized him. His song later became their anthem.Journalist Johann Jannsen helped Estonia's 19th-century national awakening but was criticized within the move…
Designed in 1952. Opened in 2022.Mies van der Rohe designed a building for Indiana University in 1952, but funding ended the plan. The drawing…
Coins surfaced in 1846. The same field held more in 1967.Around 2,000 old coins were found in a field at Bolton Percy, England, in 1846. In 1967, schoolboys discovere…
The rubbish was not collected. Residents piled it in the streets.In East Harlem in 1969, residents and the Young Lords protested neglected rubbish collection. After organizin…
Pigeons in the fur coat sleeves. Customers tried them on.John Morris later described hiding pigeons in the sleeves of fur coats during a sale at a Philadelphia depart…
Its score was lost at sea. The reconstruction was lost in war.Kōsaku Yamada composed Japan's first symphony in 1912. He said the score was lost in a maritime accident afte…
A hill appears in an old epic. A teacher suspected a fort beneath it.Estonian epic Kalevipoeg mentioned the hill at Iru. Teacher Artur Spreckelsen proposed that it might hold an…
He asked for his grandfather's remains. A treaty had already promised their return.Tanganyikan chief Adam Sapi Mkwawa began seeking the return of his grandfather's skull from Germany in 1948.…
A football game brought missiles onto the field.Chicago's Armed Forces Benefit Game ran from 1946 to 1970 with military ceremonies. Two Nike Ajax anti-aircra…
Olympic gold in boxing. Twelve years later, gold on ice.American Eddie Eagan won light-heavyweight boxing gold at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp. At the 1932 Wi…
They planned a new federal building. Then found 419 people's remains.During excavation for a New York federal building in 1991, workers uncovered a historic African burial ground…
His 70,000-book library was sealed. He wrote in school copybooks.During China's Cultural Revolution, historian Gu Jiegang lost access to a library of more than 70,000 volumes…
Was the king's brother drowned in wine? The execution is real; the method is lore.George, Duke of Clarence, was convicted of treason and privately executed in London's Tower in 1478. The famo…
To return to Chile in secret, he changed his appearance.Chilean politician Luis Corvalán was detained after the 1973 coup and freed in a 1976 prisoner exchange. In t…
A Japanese comic about Polish history became a publishing first in Poland.Riyoko Ikeda's Ten no Hate Made tells the story of Polish prince Józef Poniatowski. Published in Japan from 1…
A building for sorting letters. A guard's shooting range on the roof.New York's Bronx General Post Office opened in 1937 with extensive mail-sorting facilities. Its original buil…
A thin silver sheet was too fragile to open. CT scans revealed its words.A third-century silver amulet found in Frankfurt in 2018 contained a rolled-up sheet. Researchers used high-r…
Ordinary soldiers stayed outside. Women with swords guarded the king.Ryukyuan envoys to Korea reported that fifteenth-century king Shō Taikyū had an all-female royal bodyguard ar…
Its planks were joined with pegs. And sewn along the seams.The Iron Age wreck known as Mazarrón I, found off Spain and identified in 1991, combines pegged mortise-and-t…
After a space-center tour, he made an unscheduled supermarket stop.During a September 1989 US visit, Soviet politician Boris Yeltsin stopped at an ordinary Houston grocery stor…
Making liquor was illegal. A monk helped farmers build stills.During US Prohibition, Benedictine brother Justus Trettel reportedly helped Minnesota farmers build stills to…
A Trojan War tapestry set— made by Chinese artisans in Macau.In the 1620s, Ming Chinese embroiderers in Macau made seven hangings depicting the Trojan War. Despite the We…
In 1919, work for women was scarce. She found a job using her husband's name.After World War I, Maria Einsmann used her husband Josef's clothes and insurance card to find work in Germany…
The king wanted a prince at his council. The prince was not his vassal.In 1109, King Baldwin I of Jerusalem called Frankish leaders to a council at Tripoli to settle their disputes…
Two stone columns stand at a mountain pass. They once belonged to a Roman sanctuary.Switzerland's Julier Pass saw traffic long before modern roads, including in Roman times. Two soapstone colum…
Tensions ran deep in colonial Java. A road project helped ignite war.The Java War of 1825–1830 pitted rebels led by Diponegoro against Dutch colonial forces. Succession disputes…
Beneath a giant tomb lay at least 30,000 stone vessels.Unrobbed galleries under Djoser's Step Pyramid held at least 30,000 stone vessels, weighing about 90 tonnes i…
A captive king agreed to cede nearly half his country. France refused.In 1359, during the Hundred Years' War, the captive French king John II signed the Second Treaty of London. I…
Enemy ships approached, so Rome lashed its transports together.During the siege of Utica in today's Tunisia, Roman forces learned that a Carthaginian fleet was coming. They…
A 1323 regional agreement explicitly outlawed abducting brides.The Statutes of Upstalsboom, ratified among Frisian regions in 1323, covered public order, courts and currenc…
Paris seized a novel for immorality. The ban helped make it popular.Prévost's Manon Lescaut appeared in 1731 with unmarried lovers and a descent into crime. In 1733, copies for…
A government commissioned stained glass, then judged it too provocative to install.The Irish Free State commissioned Harry Clarke to create a window for a League of Nations building in Geneva.…
When the field was suppressed, a psychologist secretly wrote a vast manuscript.Chinese psychologist Pan Shu continued writing during the Cultural Revolution, when psychology research was r…
After rebellion damaged a Javanese town, it reappeared on the map as Bojonegoro.Rajekwesi was a base during Sasradilaga's 1827–1828 rebellion in Java. The rebel commander lost it in Februar…
During the American Civil War, the Union built ships for a second, feared war.In 1863 the Union Navy feared Britain might enter the Civil War on the Confederate side. It planned fast Wamp…
The name Philadelphia belonged to a Middle Eastern city too.Around 255 BC, Ptolemy II rebuilt the settlement that is now Amman, Jordan, and named it Philadelphia after h…
England and France signed a truce in 1343. Brittany kept fighting.The Truce of Malestroit froze each side's holdings and promised talks toward lasting peace. Neither monarch n…
After a defeat, a Javanese leader wrote about more than battlefield tactics.Prince Diponegoro's rebels lost heavily at Gawok in 1826 during the Java War. In his later account, he partly…
The familiar Seven Wonders list grew from a series with an eighth monument.A 1572 engraving series, Octo Mundi Miracula, presented a complete visual set of ancient wonders. Earlier cla…
Donus II had a portrait and praise, but apparently never existed.A medieval papal list seems to have mistaken the title domnus for a person's name. Later writers gave the sup…
His bat-like flying machine worked once. Ten days later, it crashed.On 29 June 1874, Vincent de Groof descended from a balloon in his winged apparatus and landed safely near Lon…
A sultan named his grandson heir while the boy's father was still heir too.In 1790, Hamengkubuwono I of Yogyakarta designated his grandson Surojo as crown prince even though Surojo's f…
An election tally assigned 130 votes to a candidate's brother.In Vermont's 1860 congressional election, 130 votes from Fairfield were mistakenly credited to Carlos Baxter…
An empress gave up the throne, then came back under another name.Japan's Empress Kōken abdicated in 758 in favour of Emperor Junnin. She later became a Buddhist nun and shave…
A tanker lost to a torpedo later served as demolition practice.In April 1942, the tanker Axtell J. Byles was torpedoed while US Coast Guard cutter Dione escorted its convoy…
A party nominated a man who said he had tried to avoid the nomination.In Michigan in 1912, L. Whitney Watkins preferred another candidate for governor and said he had sought to av…
One official took several opposing roles in the same case.Working in colonial Papua New Guinea, Horace Niall helped arrest five murder suspects and served as magistrat…
During the 1812 sack of Yogyakarta, records and instruments were taken too.British forces looted court archives, manuscripts and gamelan instruments along with valuables. Accounts say…
A Ming emperor abolished a practice that cost concubines their lives.During his second reign in the 15th century, Emperor Yingzong of Ming abolished the practice of concubines co…
An object that looks like cookware turned up in a Bronze Age tomb.At Chalandriani on the Greek island of Syros, graves dating roughly to 2700–2200 BCE contained ceramic object…
We can read Cicero's courtroom defence, but not its certain outcome.In 54 BCE, Cicero defended Gnaeus Plancius in Rome. His speech Pro Plancio survives, yet historians cannot sa…
A federation called itself indissoluble, then dissolved within ten months.El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras formed the Federation of Central America in April 1921. Its constitution…
A pope offered Sicily's throne to an English child who never went there.In 1254, the papacy offered the Kingdom of Sicily to ten-year-old Prince Edmund. His father Henry III accepte…
A kingdom's origin story begins with a man emerging from bamboo.An origin myth of the Mori polity in present-day Sulawesi, Indonesia, tells of a supernatural man emerging fr…
One building produced flour, textiles, and nights out.Town Mill in Mansfield, England, was built around 1775 as a water-powered flour mill. It later made textiles…
Rice was leaving the port while locals struggled to buy it.In 1918, protests over rice prices began around Uozu, a fishing town in Japan's Toyama Prefecture, then sprea…
After earthquake damage, a century-old store lost its building but kept its front.The Christchurch furniture-store building dated to 1910. It was demolished in 2015 after the 2010–11 earthqua…
Funeral biscuits came with a black sealA British magazine in 1790 described sweet biscuits given to funeral guests. The biscuits were wrapped in pap…
That bracelet may be made from hairMourning jewellery became especially popular in the nineteenth century. Some pieces incorporated a deceased p…
The iron cage was keeping thieves outMortsafes were heavy iron protections used over graves in nineteenth-century Britain. They guarded against pe…
A meal believed to take on someone else’s sinsSin-eating is a reported funeral ritual associated especially with Wales and nearby areas. A person was belie…
The ancient tear bottle probably held perfumeSmall vessels from ancient tombs were once interpreted as containers for mourners’ tears. The name lacrymator…
The old intercom began with a whistleSpeaking tubes carried voices through pipes. In versions with a removable whistle, blowing into one end summo…
Butter began with a lot of movementA butter churn turns cream into butter through mechanical agitation. Historical designs used plunging poles o…
Butter could wear a cow or a flowerButter stamps pressed designs into warm blocks of butter. Often made of wood, they featured cows, flowers or…
A silver grater for your next drinkIn the eighteenth century, men carried pocket-sized silver containers fitted with nutmeg graters. They could…
A letter could finish with a dusting of powderPounce was a fine powder used to dry ink and prepare writing surfaces. Some nineteenth-century pots had a sha…
Michigan gave up Toledo and gained more peninsulaIn the 1830s Ohio and Michigan disputed land around Toledo. A compromise tied Michigan’s statehood to surrend…
A 335-year war may not have been a war at allA story holds that the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly remained at war for 335 years without a peace trea…
The territorial rivals left each other drinksCanada and Denmark disputed Arctic Hans Island, sometimes planting flags and leaving bottles of alcohol. The…
The Football War was not simply about footballThe 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador became known as the Football War. Tension around matches matter…
A lobster’s movement entered a diplomatic disputeIn the early 1960s Brazil and France disputed lobster fishing off Brazil’s coast. Brazil argued that lobsters…
Ten-cent beer ended with a forfeited baseball gameOn June 4, 1974, Cleveland’s stadium offered ten-cent beer during a game against Texas. Late in the game, spe…
One side of the tennis court was grass, the other clayIn a 2007 exhibition on Mallorca, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal played on a court split between grass and cl…
King beat the former champion in three straight setsIn Houston in 1973, 55-year-old Bobby Riggs faced 29-year-old Billie Jean King in a heavily publicized tennis…
Melbourne’s equestrian events took place in StockholmThe 1956 Summer Olympics were hosted by Melbourne, but the equestrian competitions took place months earlier…
One country could send several Olympic tug-of-war teamsTug of war appeared at the Summer Olympics held between 1900 and 1920. Club teams competed, and a country cou…
Some people feared that their bodies were made of glassEuropean records from the late medieval and early modern periods describe people convinced that their bodies…
Ships set their clocks when a raised ball began to fallNineteenth-century ports used time balls: raised balls dropped at a predetermined time so navigators could sy…
Some old books contained rotating paper calculatorsA volvelle uses rotating paper components to align information. Early examples appeared in astronomy books, h…
An early use of the name did not mean automatic fireThe Puckle gun was a manually operated revolving firearm patented in 1718. A later shipping record called it…
Few major battles did not mean little sufferingThe War of the Bavarian Succession in 1778–79 became known as the Potato War. Large armies maneuvered, with r…
A boot jack is for removing boots, not putting them onA boot jack grips a boot’s heel while the other foot holds the device down. It lets the wearer withdraw a foo…
Sugar once needed a sturdy cutting toolBefore granulated and cube sugar became widespread, households bought sugarloaves or parts of them. Sugar nip…
A small bouquet’s name points to its scentA nosegay is a small bouquet carried or worn. Its Middle English name combines nose with gay in the older sen…
Growth in a sealed bottle suggested a shipping caseNathaniel Ward noticed ferns and grass growing in soil inside a sealed bottle used for insects. He developed…
The little ledge inside this cup protected a moustacheA moustache cup has an interior ledge with an opening for liquid. The guard keeps the moustache dry while the…
An old wheel design added a ring of stepping padsBramah Joseph Diplock’s pedrail wheel carried a series of pivoting feet around its rim. The pads could adapt…
The experimental vehicle walked on four legsGeneral Electric created an experimental four-legged Walking Truck in 1965. An operator inside used hand and…
This experimental railcar used an aircraft-like pushGermany’s Schienenzeppelin used a rear propeller for propulsion. In 1931 it reached roughly 230 kilometres pe…
Spinning machinery kept the vehicle uprightA gyro monorail used gyroscopic action from spinning wheels to balance a vehicle on a single rail. Full-scale…
The giant-wheel vehicle had an awkward motion problemThe 1930s Dynasphere put its driver inside a giant rolling wheel. Steering and braking proved difficult, and…
Some surviving platform shoes exceed fifty centimetresChopines were elevated shoes worn during the Renaissance, with surviving examples more than fifty centimetres…
Those broad folded collars needed help to stand outHistorical ruffs were stiffened with starch, which allowed wider collars to retain their shape. Later example…
A fashionable skirt made long steps difficultThe hobble skirt, whose popularity peaked around 1908–1914, had a hem narrow enough to impede the wearer’s st…
A hidden frame shaped the back of a skirtA bustle was a padded support or wire frame worn behind the waist under a nineteenth-century dress. It suppor…
Pointed shoes borrowed a seaside snack’s nameWinklepickers became associated with British rock-and-roll fans from the 1950s onward. Their sharply extended…