The founding of the Warsaw Pact
On 14 May 1955, the leader of the Soviet Union and leaders from seven European countries met to sign the Warsaw Pact. In the years following World War Two, the Soviet Union and the United States start...
14 Maj 202510min
Tesla and Edison: Electricity rivals
By 1915, the two great rivals, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, had brought electricity to the world. It was reported that they were set to share the Nobel Prize for Physics, but it never happened. In ...
13 Maj 202510min
Intervision Song Contest
In 1980, Finnish singer Marion Rung won the Intervision Song Contest. Born in the 1960s, Intervision was the Eastern Bloc’s answer to Eurovision. It ran until 1980, although in 2025 Russia’s President...
12 Maj 202510min
Rescuing Palmyra’s treasures from the Islamic State group
In May 2015, when the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria was about to fall to jihadist fighters, a group of men risked their lives to load centuries-old artefacts from the city’s museum onto trucks and ...
9 Maj 202510min
VE Day celebrations
The end of the Second World War in Europe came on 8 May 1945, after more than five years of conflict.British Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that people could allow themselves "a brief peri...
8 Maj 20259min
Sinking of the Lusitania
On 7 May 1915, the British ocean liner, the Lusitania, was sunk by a German submarine off the Irish coast, as it sailed from New York to Liverpool.Thousands of passengers were onboard and 1,200 people...
7 Maj 20259min
The invention of the automatic electric rice cooker
In 1955, entrepreneur and engineer Yoshitada Minami came up with a way to liberate women from two to three hours of housework a day.When his water-heating business started losing sales, he was tasked ...
6 Maj 20259min
Conclave: How a new pope is chosen
In April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI following the death of Pope John Paul II.The new leader of the Catholic Church was elected after four ballots of the papal conclave. T...
5 Maj 202510min
