Episodes

Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published on October 2nd, 1902. The book was an instant sensation, needing reprints almost immediately, and ultimately went on to sell an extraordinary 40 million copies worldwide. Potter had initially written it in 1893 as a letter to cheer up Noel Moore, the five-year-old son of her […]

Henry Robinson opened the Office of Addresses and Encounters on Threadneedle Street, London on 29th September, 1650. The centre provided a forward-looking, unusual mix of services ranging from job placements, money lending, and property dealings… to (shhh) match-making. Robinson’s inspiration came from a broader philosophical concept of creating a place where people of all classes

Rerun. Feet, inches, palms, cubits, rods… all were SWEPT ASIDE on 28th September, 1889, when the first General Conference of the Weights and Measures Commission met in Sèvres, France to refine a definition for the NEW universal measurement of distance: the metre. The calculation was painstakingly made by measuring a quarter of the meridian of

George Stephenson drove Britain’s first-ever steam-powered passenger train, the Locomotion Number One, on 27th September, 1825, from Darlington to Stockton on Tees. The Cambridge Chronicle and Journal reported, with breathless excitement: “in the presence of great crowds of spectators, including many scientific gentlemen… 60 waggons were attached, containing one thousand persons, who were visibly delighted,

Pushing the boundaries of human flight to hitherto unknown extremes, Swiss aviator Yves Rossy entered the record books on 26th September, 2008, becoming the first person ever to cross the English channel using a jet-propelled wing strapped to his back, equipped with four kerosene-fueled turbine engines.  To embark on his flight, Rossy first ascended to

The world did NOT wake up to the dangers of smoking on September 25th, 1878, despite the efforts of Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, who had a letter published in The Times warning that smoking is a practice “deleterious to health and vitality,” noting that a contemporaneous experiment on dogs had led to “palsy of the

Robert Walpole, first Lord of the Treasury, moved into 10 Downing Street on 22nd September, 1735, after three years of renovations. Although initially given to him as a personal gift from the King, the house became the official residence for all future Prime Ministers. Despite its central location in London, Downing Street wasn’t fashionable at

Rerun. ‘The Fish Feud!’ – as the tabloids originally termed the standoff between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights – had escalated into a fully-fledged ‘Cod War’ by 21st September, 1958, when the destroyer H.M.S. Diana requested medical assistance for a Marine suffering appendicitis. The dispute arose when Iceland had unilaterally extended its fishing zone

Robert of Geneva was elected Pope Clement VII on 20th September, 1378. Inconveniently, there was already a pope: Urban VI. Cue three decades of confusion and division, as citizens and nations had to choose which pope to support – the one in Rome, or the one Avignon – the situation becoming more inflamed as both

When German hikers Erika and Helmut Simon stumbled upon a dead body in the Oertzel Alps on 19th September, 1991, they believed it to be a recently fallen mountaineer, whose cadaver had been preserved in the ice. In fact, the specimen turned out to be 5,300 years old – older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.