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: 18 December 1912 – Amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson presented members of the Geological Society in London with a reconstructed skull, fragments of which had been discovered, he claimed, in a gravel pit south of Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. Dawson was backed by respected palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward from the British Museum, … Read more
Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and pioneering computer programmer, was born as the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) and Anne Isabella Milbanke. Her parents’ marriage was unhappy, and Byron separated from his wife just a month after Ada’s birth. As a child, Ada was often sickly, but her mother strongly … Read more
Five days of deadly smog began in London, leaving thousands of people dead. The Great Smog of London was caused by a combination of industrial pollution and high-pressure weather conditions. The weather was unusually cold and windless, preventing the dispersion of particles. London was brought to a near standstill. Visibility was so poor that people … Read more
At 5:20 am local time an earthquake lasting 30 seconds, with a magnitude of 7.5 on the Richter scale, devastated parts of Sicily and southern Italy. The epicentre was in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and Calabria on the ‘toe’ of Italy’s mainland. Due to seismic activity in the area, Sicily and Calabria are … Read more