How the First Olympics Worked

Tracy and Holly talk about school science fairs and their performance in them. They then discuss the interesting aspect of Field of Cloth of Gold preparations that put people from England and France s...

9 Sep 202222min

The Field of Cloth of Gold was a summit and celebration that was held to start what was hoped to be a long-term alliance between France and England. And it required a lot of fancy footwork to keep two...

7 Sep 202242min

The development of penicillin started – but definitely did not end – with the chance discovery of some mold in a petri dish. There is so much more to the story. Research: Bernard, Diane. “How a mirac...

5 Sep 202244min

The subject of this 2018 episode is sometimes called a 19th-century Rosa Parks. When Elizabeth boarded a Manhattan streetcar in 1854, a chain of events began which became an important to the civil rig...

3 Sep 202226min

Holly speculates about how one article about Josephine Cochrane got so many details wrong. Tracy then talks about the details of Canada's currency featuring Viola Desmond. See omnystudio.com/listener ...

2 Sep 202219min

Desmond was convicted after refusing to leave her seat in a segregated movie theater in Nova Scotia in 1946. But she also established the first beauty salon for Black women her area, and founded a bea...

31 Aug 202239min

There is one woman in particular who normally gets the credit for inventing the dish washer. But there were other inventors trying to come up with ways to automatically take care of kitchen clean up b...

29 Aug 202234min

This 2014 episode covers why when the Great London Smog descended in December of 1952, nobody initially realized anything unusual was going on. At its largest, it extended 30 kilometers around London,...

27 Aug 202218min