What Archimedes Did Two Thousand Years Before Newton
He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.
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Newest first. 38 so far.
The Coroner’s Report June 10, 2026 · Island on the Rhine, Basel, Bishopric of Basel (modern Switzerland)
The Pogrom That Came Before Strasbourg
Five weeks before the Strasbourg massacre, Basel built a wooden house on an island in the Rhine, locked roughly six hundred of its Jews inside, and burned it.
Read the story →The Explosion Ten Days After the Towers
On 21 September 2001 a fertilizer plant in Toulouse exploded with the force of a small nuclear bomb. France first assumed it was terrorism. It wasn't.
Read the story →The Decade Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Mud
In the 1850s the central business district of Chicago was raised four to fourteen feet on jackscrews while continuing to operate. People kept eating at the hotels.
Read the story →The King Murdered in a Castle Basement (Maybe)
Edward II of England was forced to abdicate, locked in a Gloucestershire castle, and died there in September 1327. Or did he escape and live another fourteen years?
Read the story →The Librarian Who Measured the Earth With a Shadow
Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
Read the story →The Comet That Broke the Crystal Spheres
In November 1577 a comet appeared over Europe so bright it cast shadows. A twenty-eight-year-old Dane measured its distance and demolished Aristotle's heavens.
Read the story →The Missionary Who Sailed to Greenland to Find the Vikings
Hans Egede spent fifteen years on the Greenland coast looking for Norse Christians who had been dead for three centuries. He found ruins, ice, and Inuit.
Read the story →The Mistress on Trial Twice
A decade after President Faure died in her arms, Marguerite Steinheil was charged with the murders of her mother and her husband. Paris had been waiting.
Read the story →The Plague Novel Mary Shelley Wrote in 1826
Eight years after Frankenstein, Mary Shelley published a novel about a global pandemic that kills everyone except one narrator. Critics hated it. They had reasons.
Read the story →The Prayer Book That Was a Math Textbook
In 1906 a Danish scholar in Istanbul opened a medieval Greek prayer book and noticed faint mathematics underneath the prayers. It was Archimedes.
Read the story →The Warehouse That Sat Burning for Six Years
On 4 August 2020 the same chemical that destroyed Texas City in 1947 destroyed central Beirut. It had been quietly stored in a port warehouse for six years.
Read the story →The Tree Halifax Sends Boston Every Year
Every November, Nova Scotia cuts down a 45-foot white spruce and ships it to Boston Common. The tradition is a thank-you for a relief train that arrived in 1917.
Read the story →The Mathematician the Mob Came For
Hypatia of Alexandria was the most famous philosopher in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 415 a crowd dragged her from her carriage and killed her with roof tiles.
Read the story →The Astronomer Who Defended His Mother From the Stake
In 1620 the seventy-four-year-old mother of Johannes Kepler was arrested for witchcraft. He spent six years getting her out.
Read the story →The Centuries Europe Froze
From around 1300 to 1850 the northern hemisphere ran a few degrees colder. Glaciers advanced, harvests failed, Norse Greenland died, and the Thames repeatedly froze.
Read the story → The Coroner’s Report June 9, 2026 · Chicago River, between Clark and LaSalle Street bridges, Chicago
The Picnic Boat That Tipped Over at the Dock
On 24 July 1915 a steamer chartered for a Western Electric company picnic capsized at its Chicago River mooring. 844 people died in twenty feet of water.
Read the story →The Strasbourg Pogrom of Saint Valentine's Day, 1349
Six weeks before the plague reached the city, the council of Strasbourg deposed its mayors, replaced them, and burned the city's Jewish community alive.
Read the story →The Morning the Siberian Sky Caught Fire
On 30 June 1908 something exploded above central Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. It took the first scientists nineteen years to reach the site.
Read the story →The Duel Over an Equation
In December 1566 the 20-year-old Tycho Brahe and his cousin fought in the dark with rapiers over a mathematical disagreement. Tycho lost the bridge of his nose.
Read the story →The Greek Computer at the Bottom of the Sea
Sponge divers found a corroded lump of bronze in 1901. It took a hundred and twenty years to admit what it actually was.
Read the story →The Men Who Whipped Themselves Across Europe
In the summer of 1349 thousands of penitents marched through plague-stricken Europe flogging themselves twice a day. The Pope banned them within months.
Read the story →The King Who Died on the Close Stool
On the morning of 25 October 1760 the King of Great Britain rang for his chocolate, walked to the privy, and was dead before his valet got back.
Read the story →The Doctor Who Took the Handle Off the Pump
In September 1854, John Snow walked door to door through Soho with a map, a hypothesis, and a problem the city wouldn't believe.
Read the story →The Library That Did Not Burn
Caesar's fire, the Christian mob, the Caliph's order — every famous ending of the Library of Alexandria is wrong, or only partly true. It died slowly.
Read the story →Two Minutes, Two Survivors
On 8 May 1902 a volcano on Martinique destroyed a city of thirty thousand. Two men lived to tell about it. One was in a dungeon.
Read the story →The Volcano Nobody Wrote About
Tambora killed more people than Krakatoa, cooled the planet for two years, and started the Year Without a Summer. The Western press barely noticed.
Read the story →The Captain Who Stayed on the Burning Ship
On 16 April 1947 a French freighter loaded with fertilizer caught fire at a Texas dock. Everyone but Captain de Guillebon ran. He fought the fire.
Read the story →The Winters They Roasted Oxen on the Thames
Between 1608 and 1814 the river through London froze solid often enough to hold fairs on its surface. Then they tore down a bridge, and it never froze again.
Read the story →The Laughter That Closed Fourteen Schools
In January 1962 three students at a Tanganyikan girls' school began to laugh and could not stop. By the end of the year a thousand others had joined them.
Read the story →The Summer Strasbourg Could Not Stop Dancing
In July 1518 a woman in Strasbourg began to dance in the street. By August several hundred people had joined her, and some of them had died of it.
Read the story →The Telegraph Operator Who Stayed at His Key
On 6 December 1917, Vince Coleman had ninety seconds to warn the incoming trains. He used them, and then he was gone.
Read the story →The Loudest Sound Ever Heard
On a Monday morning in August 1883, a volcano in the Sunda Strait made a noise that was registered, four thousand eight hundred kilometers away, as gunfire.
Read the story →The Astronomer Who Was Too Polite to Pee
Tycho Brahe died because nobody told him he could leave the dinner table. Four centuries later they dug him up to find out for sure.
Read the story →The Summer That Wasn’t, and the Monster It Made
In June 1816 it rained for a month at Lake Geneva. Five English visitors were stuck indoors. One of them was eighteen years old, and she had a dream.
Read the story →The French President Who Died on the Job
Félix Faure had ambitions of being Caesar. On a February afternoon in 1899, he became something else.
Read the story →The Smell That Built a City
London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.
Read the story →The Lighthouse That Outlived Its Own Civilization
For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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