The Ride of Sybil Ludington
It is the American Revolutionary War. A rider on horseback sets out on an all-night ride to warn the militia of nearby towns that the British were coming. I am of course talking about the ride of Pau...
7 Sep 20217min
Air Force One
The era of presidential aviation began on October 11, 1910 when former president Theodore Roosevelt took to the skies in a Wright Brothers Flyer at a county fair in Saint Louis. The flight only lasted...
6 Sep 202113min
The Carrington Event
On September 1 and 2 of 1859, people all over the world were treated to something quite rare. Auroras were seen in the skies as far south as the Caribbean and as far north as Brisbane, Australia. Ho...
5 Sep 202112min
The Fermi Paradox
In a previous episode, I spoke about the Drake equation and the odds of there being intelligent extraterrestrial life. Many people have used the Drake equation to argue that it is almost impossible fo...
4 Sep 202110min
The Oxford English Dictionary (Encore)
In 1844, the Philological Society of London began investigating the creation of a new English dictionary. This initial foray would lead to a dictionary that would be unlike any other dictionary ever c...
3 Sep 202112min
Behold! The Potato
What did the first Chinese Emperor Qin, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Gengis Kahn, the Queen of Sheba, and all their contemporaries who lived when they did have in common? None of them ever at...
2 Sep 202111min
The Elgin Marbles
Beginning in 1801, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, the Earl of Elgin, began a project to document the sculptures located at the Parthenon in Athens. He then took it one step further an...
1 Sep 202110min
Ignaz Semmelweis and His Simple Great Idea
In the mid-19th century, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis advocated for an incredibly simple technique that would go on to save millions of lives. However, when he first proposed it, his...
31 Aug 202111min
