The longest musical composition
On 31 December 1999, a piece of music started playing in a lighthouse on the River Thames in east London. It’s called Longplayer, and it’s set to keep going, without repeating, until the year 2999. It...
31 Dec 202510min
Radio Free Europe
Seventy-five years ago, Radio Free Europe started broadcasting news to audiences behind the Iron Curtain.It initially broadcast to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania and programmes ...
30 Dec 20259min
SMS: The invention of text messaging
In October 1984, as the market for mobile phones was just opening up, one man decided it would be useful if the new technology could be used to send and receive short, electronic messages.But colleagu...
29 Dec 202510min
Creating the board game Catan
In 1995, Klaus Teuber’s board game Catan launched in Germany. The board is made up of hexagonal tiles, and it's a game about strategy and collecting resources.It's since sold over 40 million copies an...
26 Dec 202510min
Tamagotchi is born
The Tamagotchi was first released in Japan in 1996 after it was developed by Akihiro Yokoi and his colleagues at his toy development company.Measuring just a few centimetres long, the egg-shaped digit...
25 Dec 20259min
How the hoverboard was created
It was Back to the Future II that made a generation of children dream of travelling by hoverboard.In the 1989 film, the hero Marty McFly escapes from his arch nemesis Biff by jumping on a flying skate...
24 Dec 202510min
Inventing Play-Doh
In 1956, one of the world’s most beloved children’s toys went on sale for the first time, but its origins were surprising.The modelling clay had started out as a household cleaning product. In the day...
23 Dec 202510min
The invention of Jenga
It's just over 30 years since the brick game was introduced to the world at a department store in London. Made of 54 wooden blocks stacked into a tower in rows of three by three, each player takes a t...
22 Dec 202510min
