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Benedictine monk Dom Perignon is said to have discovered champagne on 4th August, 1693. 200 million bottles are now produced and sold every year. The sparkliness was originally considered a defect – because carbonated wine caused the fragile bottles of the era to burst. Until stronger glass was developed in the mid-19th century, mass-produced champagne […]

Eyebrows were raised when Dave Manning – a previously unknown film critic – was suddenly receiving star billing on Hollywood movie posters. He turned out to be fictional. This climaxed with a lawsuit, settled by Sony on 3rd August, 2005. Manning had been created by Columbia Pictures executive Matthew Kramer, who’d co-opted the name David

William II, son of William The Conqueror, took a hunting trip to the New Forest on 2nd August, 1100 – and was shot dead by an arrow, which punctured his lung.  But, whodunnit? Chroniclers laid the blame at the door of Walter Tirel, who quickly fled to France. But could it have really been fratricide,

The ‘Cool Britannia’ party – held at 10 Downing Street on 30th July, 1997 – quickly became one of the most iconic events of the New Labour era. Celebrities including Helen Mirren, Eddie Izzard and Lenny Henry were invited to Britain’s seat of power to sup champagne with Tony Blair, the youngest Prime Minister since

Robert Paden-Powell took twenty boys to Brownsea Island, Poole on 29th July, 1907, to embark on a ten-day camp. The trip was, essentially, a laboratory for his subsequent books – and, therefore, the global Boy Scout movement.  Each day started with cocoa and exercises, and ended with campfire yarns. In between, there was a lot

William James Herschel, a British colonial magistrate in India, first used fingerprints as a means of identification on 28th July, 1858 – not to catch a criminal, but to implement two-step verification on a contract. In Britain, the technology was first used to solve the theft of some billiard balls in 1902. These days, it’s

Sir Walter Raleigh brought tobacco back to Britain from Virginia on 27th July 1586 – and, in so doing, triggered a craze for smoking, which at the time was considered a tonic for halitosis, and even a cure for cancer. Despite Queen Elizabeth I being an advocate for the new drug, it didn’t take long

Linguist L. L. Zamenhof published ‘Dr. Esperanto’s International Language’ on 26th July, 1887 – and in so doing launched Esperanto, the most popular ‘constructed language’ on Earth. Thanks to apps like Duolingo, there are still around 2 million esperantists today. It was once even proposed as the official language of the incipient League of Nations

Concerned that it was too London-centric, the BBC commissioned a series of pop-up outside broadcasts for its youth music station Radio 1, kicking off modestly in Newquay on 23rd July, 1973. The events exploded in popularity, and spawned an annual tour of bucket-and-spade Britain, becoming the iconic ‘Radio 1 Roadshow’. Despite the concerts pulling in

Billed as a concours for ‘horseless carriages’, the Paris–Rouen competition which took place on 22nd July, 1894, is now widely considered the world’s first motor race.  Only 21 vehicles qualified. Some of them had solid iron tyres. One was an eight passenger wagonette that weighed four tonnes. The car that came in first – a