Situated on the banks of River Thames, about 9 km east of Greenwich, is a two-story brick building housing one of the most beautiful Victorian-era sewage pumping station.
Nicknamed “cathedral of the marshes” after the adjacent Erith Marshes, this magnificent building features spectacular ornamental cast ironwork. The exterior originally had a giant humbug-striped chimney, and its doorways were modeled after Norman cathedrals.
The ornate interior of Crossness Pumping Station in London. Photo credit: Jay Peg/Flickr
Sitting outside the Nuffield Hospital in Woodingdean, near Brighton and Hove, is a small, inconspicuous-looking covered well. But despite its unassuming appearance, Woodingdean Water Well holds the distinction of being the deepest hand-dug well in the world. At 390 meters, it is as deep as New York’s Empire State Building is tall.
Woodingean water well, located near the entrance of Nuffield Hospital. Photo: Yiorgos Stamoulis/Wikimedia Commons
In the spring of 1883, gold was discovered on a branch of the river Albazikha, in northern Heilongjiang province in China near the border with Russia, leading to both Chinese and Russian prospectors flocking to the area and creating a settlement on the right bank of River Amur. The settlement was named Zheltuga after the Shilka river, whose tributary is the Albazikha. The Shilka river eventually becomes Amur after its confluence with the Argun on the Russia-China border.
Some years seem longer than others, especially when you are passing through a bad phase in life such as being stuck at home because a pandemic is playing havoc around, but officially the longest year on record was 1972. It was longer than the average year by a whole two seconds. The two extra seconds were leap seconds added on June 30 and again on December 31 the same year.
Photo: Pertusinas | Dreamstime.com
When a satellite is launched into space it is not expected to last forever. The satellite carries on board a limited amount of fuel which will run out in a couple of years, or decades, or even months depending on how long the satellite was designed to remain operational. Eventually, its batteries will run out and its solar cells will degrade. Once the satellite stops responding to signals from operators on earth, or when it’s fuel depletes, it will lose the ability to correct its orbit. The thin atmosphere will slow the satellite down and degrade its orbit, and in a matter of years or decades, the satellite will fall back to earth. Some satellites are also purposefully brought down once their mission objectives are completed so as not to contribute to the space junk. There are already 20,000 artificial objects in orbit above the Earth, including 128 million pieces of space debris—the result of collision between dysfunctional satellites. While most satellites stay in orbit for only a couple of years, there is one that has been circling the earth for more than sixty years.
A backup copy of Vanguard 1 satellite built by the Naval Research Laboratory, now at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.
At eight o’clock in the morning of 3 March 1945, the air-raid sirens were heard for the first time over Hague. A short while later a wave of bombers appeared over the horizon heading straight towards the city. But instead of bombing the city center, the formation veered to the east and released their bombs over the Bezuidenhout neighborhood. Wave after wave of bombers followed dropping their load on the peaceful city.
“They have lost count. The earth trembles. Buildings and entire blocks collapse like houses of cards collapse. Still others are starting to burn and are soon ablaze,” reported The Telegraph the following day.
The bombing of the Bezuidenhout area on Saturday, March 3rd, 1945. Seen from the tower of the Church of St. James the Greater in Park Street. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
For the better part of a decade, the widely celebrated and esteemed Louvre Museum of Paris proudly displayed a supposedly ancient tiara made of solid gold. Experts at the Louvre identified it as belonging to the Scythian king Saitapharnes who ruled sometime in the 3rd century BCE. An inscription on the tiara mentioning that it was a gift from Olbia, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast, to King Saitaphernes left no doubt about the item’s authenticity and great age. But later it became clear that the tiara's new owner had been a little haste in acquiring the item. The exhibit is now locked away in storage—an embarrassment, for the tiara was proved to be a hoax perpetuated by two Russian art dealers.
A postcard ridiculing the Louvre’s dubious purchase. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Throughout history Man has shown extraordinary imagination in inventing penalties and sentences for crimes committed by fellow man. The Romans in particular had an almost theatrical quality in the way these punishments were dolled out. One of the worst was reserved for parricide—the killing of a parent— in which the prisoner was placed in a sack with several live animals and thrown into the water: the poena cullei, or “penalty of the sack”.
In his series “Restricted Areas”, Moscow-based visual artist Danila Tkachenko looks at the human impulse to use destructive technologies in order to build an utopia, which often leads to failure as documented by these abandoned sites that were once the embodiment of technological progress in the Soviet Union.
Antenna built for interplanetary connection. The Soviet Union was planning to build bases on other planets, and prepared facilities for connection which were never used and are deserted now.
A small but vibrant city high up on Atlas Mountains, Ouarzazate, in south-central Morocco, has long been called the “door to the desert”. It is also called the “Hollywood of Africa” because of the large number of films that have been shot here and the surrounding desert. Since at least the sixties, Hollywood directors have come here whenever they needed to shoot a Biblical movie or a movie set in the Middle East. The Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), The Living Daylights (1987), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Mummy (1999), Gladiator (2000), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Babel (2006), and The Game of Thrones (2011-19), are just a few of the titles. Ouarzazate is also home to one of the largest movie studios in the world, Atlas Studios.
Photo: Javarman | Dreamstime.com
For centuries we have used the sexagesimal system of measuring time, where each day is divided into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 second. Why do we do this? Is it out of habit, or is there any inherent advantage of measuring time by base 60?
The ancient Greeks were the first to introduce the concept of hour after Horae, the goddesses of the seasons and the natural portions of time. The number of Horae varied according to different sources, and while the most common is three, by Late Antiquity, their numbers had inflated to twelve, from which came the idea of dividing the day and the night into 12 hours each. The division of the hour into 60 minutes and of the minute into 60 seconds came from the Babylonians who used a sexagesimal system for mathematics and astronomy. The Babylonians divided the day into 360 parts, because that was their estimate for the number of days in a year. Diving a circle into 360 degrees was also their idea.
“Apollo with the Hours” by Georg Friedrich Kersting (1822)
A small heritage market town called Listowel in County Kerry, Ireland, is home to one of the strangest monorail system ever built. Instead of lying flat on the ground, the single rail sits above the ground on a trestle held by supports on either side, each making an “A” shape. Specially-built carriages would sit astride the trestles like panniers on a camel’s back.
Indeed, it was camels that inspired French engineer Charles Lartigue to come up with this system. While in Algeria, Lartigue had seen camels carrying heavy loads balanced in panniers high on their backs and this inspired him to design a new type of railway. In Lartigue’s system, the single rail was raised to about waist-height by triangular supports whose base was about four feet wide. A pair of additional rails on either side of the main rail were provided for guidewheels of the locomotives and rolling stock to help stabilize the train while in motion.
A replica of the Lartigue Monorail that ran between Ballybunion and Listowel for 36 years. Photo: Steve Edge/Flickr
Gympie-Gympie sounds adorable, but if you pay any attention to its scientific name Dendrocnide moroides, you would know its to be avoided. Dendrocnide is derived from the Ancient Greek word déndron, meaning “tree”, and knídē, which means “stinging needle.” Indeed, Dendrocnide moroides, with its soft and fuzzy heart shaped leaves, is believed to be Australia’s most poisonous plant. The plant’s fuzzy appearance is due to it being covered by thousand of small hair-like stingers which carry a toxin so potent that victims have writhed in pain for weeks.
Photo: Steve & Alison1/Flickr
One of Australia’s famous pioneer monuments is located in the small town of Gundagai about half way between Melbourne and Sydney. The monument constitutes a dog sitting on top of a tucker box, which is the Australian equivalent of a lunchbox, but larger. Erected in 1926, the memorial pays homage to the bullockies or bullock cart drivers who transported building materials and supplies to remote towns and settlements over great distances under great hardship. The statue was inspired by a doggerel poem about a bullock cart driver named Bill, whose cart got bogged down at creek, and while he swore at his bullocks, his canine friend sat on his lunchbox, or worse, and spoiled his food.
Dog on the Tuckerbox. Photo: Zeytun Images | Dreamstime.com
Housed in glass cases in the basement of Sansevero Chapel in Naples, Italy, are two extraordinary exhibits. Called “anatomical machines”, they are two skeletons, one belonging to a man and the other to women. Draped over their bones is an intricate maze of veins, arteries and capillaries that crawl all over the skeletons’ legs, arms, skulls and ribs. For centuries it was rumored that the veins and arteries were real and the two figures were murdered to have their circulatory system preserved by some trick of alchemy.
Photo: get directly down/Flickr
Nearly every German family in every German town contributed something to the two World Wars. For many, it was their men. For others, it was precious metal.
“I gave gold for iron” became the slogan of the collection campaign launched in 1914, in which the Germans were asked to donate materials essential to the war effort. The slogan has its origins in the War of the Sixth Coalition fought by the Kingdom of Prussia and its allies, in 1813-14, to achieve liberation of Germany from French occupation. During the war, Princess Marianne of Prussia appealed to all women of Prussia to exchange their gold jewelry for a brooch or a ring made of iron with the inscription “I GAVE GOLD FOR IRON” which the women could flaunt as a symbol of their patriotism.
Church bells of all sizes await their fate in a “bell cemetery” in Wilten, Austria. Photo: Stadtarchiv / Stadtmuseum Innsbruck
Tucked away at a corner of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, dwarfed by buildings on three, sides stands a relic of Cold War—a humongous steel sphere 40 feet across with volume of 1 million liters. For most of its existence, the sphere remained hidden enclosed under a large wood and metal cube. But the timber has now disintegrated away revealing this extraordinary contraption with a sinister past.
Fort Detrick was the center of the US biological weapons program from 1943 to 1969. Much of the tests involving aerosols of infectious agents was conducted inside this steel sphere, lovingly referred to as the Eight Ball.
One-Million-Liter Test Sphere in Google Maps
Buried deep within the archives of the US Navy, lied a mystery that was only recently solved. On August 4, 1972, dozens of naval mines that the United States had planted in the sea off the port of Haiphong during the Vietnam war went off simultaneously and prematurely. The mines were magnetic sea mines that were designed to sense changes in the magnetic field due to the presence of a large object of iron, such as the hull of a ship. These mines can only be triggered by passing ships, but on this occasion the sea was clear.
At the time, the military suspected solar interference might be involved in the explosion, but the research was classified until now. Since the declassification, a group of civilian researchers revisited the incident and confirmed that the mines were indeed triggered by a powerful solar storm.
Dropping supplies including combat vehicles to troops on the ground was one of the biggest achievements of the military during World War 2. It allowed soldiers behind enemy lines to capture and hold important objectives until more heavily equipped friendly troops could arrive. Some tanks like the M22 Locust and later the American M551 Sheridan and the Russian BMD-3 were developed specifically for dropping by parachute from an airplane.
The biggest problem with air-dropping vehicles was that their crews got dropped separately, so the vehicles or the dropped artillery couldn’t be brought into action immediately. There was also the risk that enemy troops might get hold of the dropped supplies before the crew arrived. One way to prevent this was to attach gliders to combat vehicles and gently steer them into the battlefield along with the crews. Once on the ground, the tank would shed its wings and get into action in a very short time.
Image credit: Fiddlers Green Paper Models
When the Waterloo Bridge over River Thames opened in the December 1945, Deputy Prime Minister, Herbert Morrison spoke on its inauguration:
The men who built Waterloo Bridge are fortunate men. They know that although their names may be forgotten, their work will be a pride and use to London for many generations to come.
Although well-meaning, what Morrison failed to acknowledge was that a substantial number of workers who built the bridge were actually women.
Waterloo Bridge in London. Photo: Maurie Hill | Dreamstime.com
Not everybody gets modern art. From Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans to a banana stuck to the wall, there are plenty of examples from the perplexing world of contemporary artwork that defies logic. While most people, when confronted by a piece of cubism or surrealism that’s not to their taste, would simply shrug their shoulders and walk away, Hitler chose to destroy any art that he didn’t like.
Visitors look at works in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, which opened on July 19,1937. Pictured are Lovis Corinth's Ecce homo(second from left) and Franz Marc's Tower of the Blue Horses (wall at right), next to Wilhelm Lehmbruck's sculpture Kneeling Woman. Photo: Museum of Modern Art
South of Martinique, an island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, lies a small basalt island called Diamond Rock. With an imposing peak of 175 meters, the island is said to appear like a cut piece of the eponymous jewel during certain hours of the day. Despite being a mere rocky outcrop, Diamond Rock has quite a history.
HMS Diamond Rock from Martinique. Photo: Marc Bruxelle | Dreamstime.com
Sometime between 579 and 323 BC during the Achaemenid Persian period, the Citadel of Bam (in Persian Arg-é Bam) was built in southeastern present-day Iran, a huge fortress made of clay that is considered to be the largest adobe building.
It is located next to the city of the same name in the province of Kerman and near the border with Pakistan, and consists of a large fort that contains an inner citadel (although today the entire complex is called a citadel).
We think that charity always flows from the richer nations to the poorer ones, but sometimes it also flows the other way. When Ireland was starving during the potato famine in the 1840s, the Choctaw Nation of American Indians, despite being impoverished themselves and living in extreme hardship, donated an equivalent of $170 to the troubled nation. More recently, in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the Masai tribe of Kenya sent 14 cows to the United States. Although these gifts, rather than being actually helpful, were simply tokens of goodwill and solidarity, there was one charity they really helped.
Maharajah's well. Photo: Andrew-M-Whitman/Flickr
What’s the heaviest thing you can buy from Amazon? The internet says it’s a 1,500-pound, 6-feet tall gun safe, but back when Sears was the go-to marketplace for everything mail-order, the American retail behemoth even sold houses. The buyer could choose from among hundreds of designs, pay in installments, and have the complete house shipped via railroad boxcars in separate piece of lumber, each numbered and carefully cut to fit its particular place in the house. All the buyer needed to do was find a local carpenter to do the assembling.