Episodes

Phineas Gage, a foreman on the New England railroads, was pierced through the head with a 13-pound tamping iron on 13th September, 1848. The rod went straight through his skull and landed several yards away. Despite this, Gage was able to present himself at a physician, and anticipated being back at work in a couple […]

NBC premiered ‘Royal Flush’ – the pilot episode of iconic Sixties pop-comedy show The Monkees – on 12th September, 1966. And the Daydream Believers quickly found their way into America’s heart… The Beatles-a-like actors had never met or worked with each other ever before answering an ad seeking ‘four insane boys, aged 18-21’, placed by‘Five

High-speed collisions between locomotives became mainstream entertainment on 9th September, 1896, when Joe Connolly – AKA “Head-On Joe” – staged the first of the 70 deliberate trainwrecks with which he entered the record books. The trend lasted until the 1930s and attracted tens of thousands of spectators to state fairs across the United States. The

Margaret Gorman, a schoolgirl from Washington DC, was crowned ‘Miss Intercity Beauty’ at the “Fall Frolic” in Atlantic City on 8th September, 1921 – an event that would eventually become known as Miss America, and watched by 75% of American households. She and her fellow competitors took part in an early incarnation of the swimsuit

Rerun. Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov was shot by a poisoned pellet whilst walking on Waterloo Bridge on 7th September, 1978. Four days later, he was dead. He believed the bullet – believed to be filled with ricin – had emanated from the umbrella of a Soviet secret agent. The British press labelled his assasination the

Peter The Great levied a tax on facial hair on 5th September, 1698, requiring every man in Moscow to shave or stump up some cash – although there were exemptions for the Orthodox Church. The hare-brained scheme occurred to the eccentric Peter on his expeditions through Europe, where he came to see clean chins as

The Carrington Event – the largest solar storm in recorded history – occurred on 2nd September, 1859. Although its effects would later be felt by millions around the world, it had initially only been spotted by one amateur, British astronomer: Richard Carrington. What he’d witnessed was a giant Coronal Mass Ejection – a significant release

Rerun. The Nokia 3310 – featuring Snake II, pop-on/off covers, and a discreetly concealed antenna – was launched on 1st September, 2000 at a boardsports event in Dusseldorf, Germany. Nicknamed ‘the brick’, the handset went on to shift 126 million units— more than 20 times as many as the first-generation iPhone. In this episode, Olly,

Cadbury’s Dairy Milk re-energised its flagging brand in the UK on 31st August, 2007, when its iconic ‘Gorilla’ ad premiered in the Big Brother final on Channel 4. The 90-second commercial, which featured a gorilla drumming along to Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’, was an instant hit on YouTube (a novelty back in 2007),