Episodes

Pain-free surgery eluded physicians for centuries, but 26-year-old Crawford Williamson Long successfully removed a tumour from the neck of patient James Venable on 30th March, 1842 – whilst Venable was anaesthetised with ether.    Dr Long had come to appreciate the ‘exhilarating effects’ of ether as a result of attending drug-fuelled parties at medical school […]

Niagara falls, which usually flows with more than 168,000 cubic meters of water every minute, effectively stopped dead on 29th March, 1848. What was the cause? Over-tourism? Too many water-wheels? DIVINE RETRIBUTION? (Nope: strong southwest gale winds had pushed huge chunks of lake ice to the extreme northeastern tip of Lake Erie, blocking the lake’s

Edward Lawrence Levy, a bald and bespectacled 40 year old choir-master from Birmingham, became the first ever winner of an international weightlifting contest at Cafe Monaco in London on 28th March, 1891.  The event was an attempt to separate the serious sport of dumbbell lifting from the popular performing ‘strongmen’ at sideshows and variety halls,

Marc Brunel’s visionary under-water tunnel from Rotherhithe to Wapping finally opened to the public on 25th March, 1843. It had taken 18 years to build, and was massively over-budget, but was the first tunnel successfully created under a navigable river anywhere in the world. Its construction had cost lives, caused controversy and changed the way

When ultra-nationalist Yoshio Kodama was attacked by disaffected erotic actor Mitsuyasu Maeno in a kamikaze-style plane crash on his home in Tokyo on 24th March, 1976, it came as a surprise even to Maeno’s friends, who had photographed him, dressed as a World War Two pilot, taking to the skies. The bizarre event, in which

Hallelujah! Handel’s ‘Messiah’ is one of the cornerstones of Western classical music. But when it had its London premiere at Covent Garden on 23rd March 1743, it was billed as “a new sacred oratorio”, lest the real title of the show seem blasphemous. To further mitigate the problem of performing religious work in a secular

For most of America’s history, gambling has either been outright banned or incredibly tightly controlled – a tradition that began on 22nd March, 1630 when the Puritan colonists in Boston issued a decree that “all persons whatsoever that have cards, dice, or tables in their homes make away with them, under pain of punishment”. It

The world’s most famous high-security jail, Alcatraz, evicted its last prisoner on 21st March, 1963. Met by a huge crowd of reporters who asked him what he thought of ‘the rock’, armed robber Frank Weatherman responded, “Alcatraz was never no good for nobody.” For nearly thirty years the island prison had built a reputation as

The craze for paper dresses was the huge and unexpected impact of a viral marketing campaign for the Scott Paper Company that debuted in TIME magazine on 18th March, 1966.  For $1.25, readers could send off for a red bandana print or a black and white pop art dress made of cellulose. It was intended