Melanie King 
ON THIS DAY: 22 February 1797 – This date is remembered as the day a small Welsh town, Fishguard, became the site of the last invasion of Britain – and when a group of local women, later known as the Brave Ladies of Fishguard, helped secure a remarkable and bloodless victory. France, fired by revolutionary … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 12 February 1994 – On the same day as the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics in nearby Lillehammer, one of the most audacious art heists in history took place when four art thieves stole The Scream by Edvard Munch from the National Gallery in Oslo. Led by the notorious Norwegian art … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 6 February 1958 – British European Airways Flight 609, chartered to carry the Manchester United team home from a European Cup tie, crashed during take-off at Munich-Riem Airport in West Germany. The tragedy would become forever known as the Munich Air Disaster. Manchester United had just played a European Cup quarter-final in … Read more
ON THIS DAY – 24 January 1972 – An extraordinary discovery made headlines around the world. Shoichi Yokoi, a sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army, was found alive on the island of Guam after spending 28 years hiding in the jungle – completely unaware that World War II had ended in 1945. Yokoi was a 26-year-old … Read more
ON THIS DAY – 10 January 1897 – Ukrainian bacteriologist Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine performed the first human trial of a plague vaccine – on himself – during the devastating Bombay (Mumbai) epidemic of 1896-97. Born in 1860 to a Jewish family in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire, Haffkine studied physics, mathematics, and zoology … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 2 January 1877, Charles M. Tinker received U.S. Patent No. 187,881 for a delightfully inventive device: a dog-powered treadmill designed to churn butter. Tinker’s creation worked by having one or more dogs walk on a slanted tread-wheel or treadmill-style platform. As the dogs walked – or trotted – to keep their balance, … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 31 December 1966 – The last whaling season at South Georgia island came to an end – marking the close of industrial whaling in the Southern Hemisphere. For over sixty years, the remote island of South Georgia, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, was one of the world’s busiest whaling … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 15 December 1859 – In Białystok, a Polish town then part of the Russian Empire, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof was born. He would become the inventor of the international language Esperanto. Zamenhof was a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist, linguist, and idealist who grew up speaking several languages – Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and German. Białystok was … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 6 December 1917 – tragedy struck the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Two ships collided in the narrow stretch of water known as The Narrows, triggering one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. The blast killed 1,800 people, injured more than 9,000 – many blinded by shattered glass – and left … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 24 November 1715 – A deep freeze began that would grip London for months. The day marked the beginning of a three-month frost fair on the River Thames – one of the most remarkable spectacles of England’s so-called Little Ice Age, a period of bitter winters and unpredictable weather that stretched from … Read more