Sweden raised the Vasa warship after 333 years underwater
Engineer Anders Franzén found the wreck in 1956. Cold Baltic water had left an estimated 95% of the wood, so divers could lift the hull in 1961.
category archive
History.
Past lives, surviving traces and the stories we choose to remember.
The 1871 act that ended religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge
The Universities Tests Act of 1871 ended Oxford's religious tests, in place since 1581, and opened Oxford, Cambridge and Durham to all faiths.
A chaplain's student hostel gave the Sorbonne its name
Robert de Sorbonne, a royal chaplain, opened a hostel for Paris students in 1257. Officially, the Sorbonne stopped being a university in 1970.
Ford's moving line cut a Model T from 14 hours to 93 minutes
In 1913 Ford's Highland Park plant started a moving assembly line. Build time fell from 14 hours to 93 minutes, and the car's price fell with it.
A 1927 IBM gadget solved Nuremberg's language problem
A system used at a 1927 labour conference ended up carrying Nuremberg's war-crimes trial live, in four languages at once.
Al-Azhar: how a Fatimid mosque became a university
Al-Azhar began as a Fatimid mosque in 970. By 988 the state paid 35 scholars to teach there, and it later became a modern university in Cairo.
Bletchley's Bombe cut Enigma's settings to about a million
Enigma had 158 million million million settings. The Turing-Welchman Bombe cut that to about a million, and helped Bletchley Park find each day's key.
A 1606 English law turned a foiled plot into Bonfire Night
A 1605 plot to blow up parliament led to a 1606 law making 5 November an annual celebration, which stayed on the books until 1859.
Bessemer's process made steel ten times faster
Henry Bessemer patented a way to turn molten iron into steel with a blast of air in 1855. It cut batch times tenfold and made cheap steel possible.
The panopticon was designed so no one had to watch all the time
Bentham's panopticon put a tower inside a ring of cells. Prisoners could not see the watchman, so they had to assume someone was looking, at minimal cost.
Henry Cole sold the first printed Christmas card in 1843
In 1843, a busy London civil servant had no time to write to family and friends, so he commissioned an artist to design a card instead.
Parish birth books gave way to civil records from 1837 to 1878
Civil registration replaced parish records at different times: 1837 in England and Wales, 1855 in Scotland, 1864 in Ireland, 1878 in Jamaica.
Delays sent the first nuclear reactor to a Chicago squash court
Arthur Compton moved the reactor under Stagg Field in 1942 after the planned site stalled. Enrico Fermi's team then ran the first chain reaction.
The 1982 Falklands war left who owns the islands unsettled
The 1982 war restored British rule over the Falklands, but it left Argentina's claim to the islands exactly where the fighting found it.
The obituary said to inspire the Nobel Peace Prize is unproven
Alfred Nobel's will funded a prize for peace. The obituary usually credited for it traces to a French newspaper nobody has verified.
The 1903 Chicago theatre fire that killed over 500 people
The Iroquois Theatre fire of December 30, 1903 killed hundreds behind locked gates and inward doors. The outrage pushed US cities to rewrite fire codes.