Escaping national service in Eritrea
In 2002, the Eritrean government extended its programme of compulsory national service to make it open-ended. Instead of serving 18 months as the government had originally decreed, most students finis...
3 Apr 202326min
A Brief History of Time
A Brief History of Time, the best-selling book written by the renowned theoretical physicist Prof Stephen Hawking, was published in March 1988.In this programme first broadcast in 2018, Louise Hidalgo...
31 Mar 20239min
The first photo sent from a phone
On 11 June 1997, French software engineer Philippe Kahn shared the first ever photo from a mobile phone. It was of his newborn daughter, Sophie. He created a prototype of a camera phone by connecting ...
30 Mar 20238min
Godfather of manicures
In November 1975, Vietnamese Navy commander Minh Nguyen, left behind his macho military life and retrained as a manicurist. He migrated from Vietnam to the United States during the fall of Saigon. He ...
29 Mar 20238min
How Bengaluru became India’s Silicon Valley
The city of Bengaluru in southern India, previously called Bangalore, is renowned for its huge technology companies and buzzy start-up culture. But, 50 years ago it was a technological backwater. Entr...
28 Mar 20239min
The windmill that revolutionised wind power
In 1978, with energy prices rocketing due to the oil crisis, a group of volunteers in Denmark took matters into their own hands and built a wind turbine to power the town's school. They called it Tvin...
27 Mar 20239min
Keiko: Freeing 'Free Willy'
In 1998, Keiko became the first ever killer whale to be released back into the wild after a life of captivity.Keiko shot to fame as the star of the 1993 Hollywood blockbuster, Free Willy.A multimillio...
24 Mar 20239min
The man who lived in an airport
In 1988, Mehran Karimi Nasseri, from Iran, flew into Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris intending to transfer onto a flight to London. But he wasn’t allowed to board, as he didn’t have a passport. Cau...
23 Mar 20239min
