Things found — bones, ships, tombs, ideas, planets.
110 stories in this theme.
In October 1704 the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, convinced his worm-eaten ship would sink, demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island 670 km off Chile. The ship did sink. Selkirk survived alone for four years and four months, was rescued in 1709 as a goat-skinned 'wild man' — and a decade later Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe.
Read the story →At its height around 1200, Greater Angkor covered some 1,000 km² and may have held close to a million people, sustained by a vast engineered water network. By the mid-15th century the court was gone to the south. Not 'lost' — Angkor Wat never ceased to be a shrine — the city was undone, modern research suggests, by its own infrastructure meeting megadroughts and floods.
Read the story →On 1 September 1859 astronomer Richard Carrington watched a white flash erupt on the Sun. Within a day the largest geomagnetic storm on record hit Earth — auroras were seen near the equator, telegraph lines sparked and shocked their operators, and some circuits ran on auroral current alone. A repeat today would be a global infrastructure disaster.
Read the story →Between the 11th and 15th centuries a Shona state built Great Zimbabwe: granite walls up to 11 metres high, laid without mortar, at the hub of a gold trade reaching the Indian Ocean. Colonial Rhodesia officially attributed it to Phoenicians, Arabs — anyone but Africans — and censored archaeologists who reported the truth. The country took its name from the ruins at independence.
Read the story →John Harrison, a self-taught Yorkshire carpenter, spent his life building clocks accurate enough to carry longitude to sea. His 1759 watch H4 lost only seconds on a transatlantic trial — meeting the £20,000 Longitude Prize's terms — but the Board of Longitude paid in grudging halves until King George III himself intervened. A copy of H4 guided Captain Cook.
Read the story →From 1565 to 1815, one or two Spanish galleons a year crossed the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco, swapping American silver for Chinese silk and porcelain — the first sustained trade link binding Asia, the Americas, and Europe into one economy. The eastward crossing took four to six months and killed crews by the score; some thirty galleons were lost.
Read the story →The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal assembled at Nineveh the greatest library of the ancient Near East — some 30,000 clay tablets. When Nineveh burned in 612 BC, the fire that ended Assyria baked the clay hard and buried it safe. Dug up from 1849, the tablets yielded the Epic of Gilgamesh — and a flood story older than Genesis that stunned Victorian Britain.
Read the story →On 13 September 1848, a premature blast drove a 43-inch tamping iron through the skull of railroad foreman Phineas Gage at Cavendish, Vermont — in under his cheekbone, out the top of his head. He was speaking within minutes, lived another eleven and a half years, and became the most famous case in the history of neuroscience.
Read the story →Discovered in 1545 at 4,000 metres in the Andes, the Cerro Rico of Potosí produced a huge share of the early modern world's silver. By 1600 Potosí ranked among the largest cities on Earth. The forced-labour mita system fed Indigenous workers into its tunnels for 250 years, and the mountain — honeycombed and slowly collapsing — is being mined still.
Read the story →China's First Emperor was buried in 210 BC beneath a man-made mountain near Xi'an, guarded — the historian Sima Qian wrote — by crossbow traps, with rivers of mercury flowing across a model of his empire. In 1974 farmers digging a well found his terracotta army. The burial chamber itself has never been opened — and the soil above it really is laced with mercury.
Read the story →Between roughly 1250 and 1500, the people of Rapa Nui — the most remote inhabited island on Earth — carved nearly a thousand moai and moved statues of many tonnes kilometres without wheels or draft animals. The famous 'ecocide' parable of a society that destroyed itself has been heavily revised: the catastrophic collapse came after European contact — slave raids and smallpox reduced the population to 111 by 1877.
Read the story →In November 1871 the journalist Henry Morton Stanley, bankrolled by a New York newspaper, found the lost missionary-explorer David Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' became the century's most famous greeting — though Stanley tore the page from his diary and may have coined it afterwards. The two men's afterlives diverged as sharply as their legends.
Read the story →Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming admiral Zheng He led seven expeditions of up to 300 ships and 27,000 men across the Indian Ocean — to India, Arabia, and the Swahili coast, returning once with a giraffe for the emperor. Then China turned inward: the voyages stopped, and the records were left to rot or worse. Europe's small ships entered an ocean the treasure fleets had vacated.
Read the story →Ada Lovelace's 1843 translation-and-commentary on Luigi Menabrea's paper on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine contains, in Note G, what is now considered the first published computer program. The Analytical Engine was never built in Babbage's lifetime. Ada died of cancer at 36, the same age as her father.
Read the story →Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under Caliph al-Ma'mun in the 820s. His *al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala* gave Europe the word algebra. The Latinised version of his name — algoritmi — gave Europe the word algorithm. He introduced the Hindu decimal numeral system to the Arabic-speaking world and from there to Europe.
Read the story →Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared on 2 July 1937 between Lae, Papua New Guinea, and Howland Island. The Lockheed Electra was on the final third of a planned round-the-world equatorial circumnavigation. The largest naval search in US history at that point covered approximately 250,000 square miles but found nothing. The fate of the aircraft and its two occupants remains formally unresolved.
Read the story →Salomon August Andrée and two companions launched a hydrogen balloon called the Eagle from Danes Island in Svalbard on 11 July 1897, intending to fly over the North Pole. The balloon crashed onto the ice three days later. The three men spent three months walking to White Island, where they died in early October 1897. Their bodies, their cameras, and their journals were found by a Norwegian fishing expedition in August 1930.
Read the story →Archimedes was asked by King Hiero II of Syracuse to determine whether a goldsmith had fraudulently substituted silver for some of the gold in a royal crown. The principle of displacement — that a submerged body displaces a volume of water equal to its own volume — occurred to Archimedes in the public bath. He reportedly ran home shouting "Eureka!" without dressing. The first surviving record of the story is Vitruvius, two centuries later.
Read the story →Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) was a 4-foot-3 former kitchen servant who became the senior assistant in her brother William Herschel's astronomical observatory at Slough. She discovered eight comets between 1786 and 1797, catalogued 561 new stars and 14 nebulae, and was the first woman in any country paid by a national government as a working scientist — £50 per year from George III from 1787.
Read the story →Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script on 22 September 1822 — the famous *Lettre à M. Dacier*. He had been working on the problem for fourteen years. He reportedly fainted on the day of the breakthrough and was bedridden for five days. He died ten years later, aged 41.
Read the story →A young Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib threw a stone into a cliffside cave above the western shore of the Dead Sea in spring 1947 looking for a lost goat. He heard pottery break. The cave contained seven 2,000-year-old leather scrolls. The discovery of approximately 25,000 fragments from 11 caves over the next decade fundamentally changed the modern reconstruction of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity.
Read the story →Émilie du Châtelet's French translation and mathematical commentary on Newton's *Principia* was completed in summer 1749 while she was carrying a fourth child at age 42. She finished the manuscript at Lunéville on 1 September 1749, gave birth on 4 September, and died of puerperal fever on 10 September. The translation, published posthumously in 1759, remained the standard French Newton until the 20th century.
Read the story →Florence Nightingale arrived at the Scutari military hospital outside Constantinople on 4 November 1854 with 38 trained nurses to handle British casualties from the Crimean War. The death rate from disease in the overcrowded wards was 42 percent. Six months of systematic reform — hand-washing, ventilation, sewer cleaning, nutrition — brought it to 2 percent. Modern nursing dates its institutional origin from this campaign.
Read the story →Benjamin Franklin's June 1752 kite-and-lightning experiment is one of the most-told stories in the history of science. The contemporary documentation is thin. Modern historians of science consider it possible that Franklin never actually performed it.
Read the story →Galileo Galilei demonstrated his improved 8x telescope to the Venetian Senate from the bell tower of San Marco on 21 August 1609. The senators looked at distant ships approaching the lagoon, decided that the strategic value was substantial, and doubled Galileo's University of Padua salary to 1,000 florins per year. He was a month away from turning the same instrument on the night sky.
Read the story →Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins on 4 October 1951, aged 31. A tissue sample taken before her death became the HeLa cell line — the first human cells to grow indefinitely in laboratory culture. They have produced almost every major biomedical breakthrough of the subsequent 70 years. Her family did not know until 1973.
Read the story →At the British Association meeting in Oxford on 30 June 1860, seven months after Darwin's *Origin of Species*, the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce asked T. H. Huxley whether he claimed descent from apes on his grandfather's or grandmother's side. Huxley reportedly replied that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a bishop who used his great abilities to obscure the truth. The exchange did not happen exactly as the legend records.
Read the story →Ibn Sina's *Canon of Medicine*, compiled at Isfahan around 1025, synthesised Greek, Roman, Persian, and Arabic medical traditions into a five-volume systematic treatise. Translated into Latin in Toledo by Gerard of Cremona around 1180, it became the standard medical-school textbook at Paris, Padua, Montpellier, and Bologna for almost five centuries. The first English translation appeared in 1930.
Read the story →Jean-François de La Pérouse's two-ship Pacific expedition departed Brest in August 1785 with 220 men. Their last known position was Botany Bay in March 1788. The ships and crews disappeared in the southwest Pacific. The Irish merchant Peter Dillon located the wreckage on a reef off Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands in 1827 — thirty-nine years after the disappearance.
Read the story →Joseph Lister introduced carbolic acid antiseptic surgery at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in 1865 after reading Pasteur's germ-theory work. Post-operative mortality on his ward fell from about 46% to about 15% within three years. The British medical establishment took a substantial fifteen years to accept the method.
Read the story →The Lunar Society of Birmingham met about fourteen times a year between approximately 1765 and 1813, always on the Monday nearest the full moon (so members could ride home by moonlight). The members included James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and Josiah Wedgwood. They built the Industrial Revolution in their spare time.
Read the story →Ferdinand Magellan died on the island of Mactan in the Philippines on 27 April 1521 in a skirmish with the local chief Lapu-Lapu. His fleet of five ships had left Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1519 with 270 men. Eighteen survivors aboard the single remaining ship Victoria reached Spain on 6 September 1522 under Juan Sebastián Elcano. The voyage was the first complete circumnavigation of the planet.
Read the story →Maria Sibylla Merian, a 52-year-old Frankfurt-born artist and naturalist, sailed alone with her younger daughter to the Dutch colony of Suriname in June 1699. Over two years she documented the life cycles of approximately 90 South American insect species, ate the same food as her enslaved Indigenous and African informants, and produced the 1705 *Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium* — one of the founding works of modern entomology.
Read the story →Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911. She died of aplastic anaemia at 66 in 1934 — a substantial direct consequence of forty years of unprotected exposure to the radium and polonium she had isolated. Her laboratory notebooks remain radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes.
Read the story →Mary Anning found her first complete ichthyosaur on the Lyme Regis cliffs in 1811 when she was twelve. She spent the next thirty-five years collecting and selling the foundational fossils of British vertebrate palaeontology. The Geological Society of London — to which she had supplied the substantial majority of its early-century specimens — admitted no women until 1904.
Read the story →In June 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed that his five guests each write a ghost story. The volcanic winter from the Tambora eruption had ended summer in Europe. Mary Godwin, 18, wrote the opening of *Frankenstein*. Dr John Polidori wrote *The Vampyre*. Modern science fiction and modern vampire fiction began in the same villa in the same week.
Read the story →Dmitri Mendeleev published the first version of the periodic table in March 1869. He later told biographers he had seen the arrangement in a dream after three days of fruitless waking work. The dream story is probably substantially embellished, but the table works.
Read the story →Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the Lunar Module Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility at 20:17 UTC on 20 July 1969. Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface at 02:56 UTC on 21 July 1969. The two astronauts spent 2 hours 31 minutes outside the spacecraft and returned with 21.55 kg of lunar samples.
Read the story →Olbers' paradox asks why the night sky is dark rather than uniformly bright. In an infinite, eternal, static universe with uniformly distributed stars, every line of sight should eventually intersect a stellar surface — making the entire sky as bright as the sun. The answer requires the universe to be finite in age, or expanding, or both.
Read the story →The Piltdown skull was unveiled by Charles Dawson at the Geological Society of London on 18 December 1912 as *Eoanthropus dawsoni* — the missing link between ape and human. It dominated British palaeoanthropology for forty years. The 1953 fluorine and chemical testing proved it was a modern human cranium combined with an orangutan jaw, stained with iron and chromium, with the teeth filed flat.
Read the story →Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 by Henry Tudor's forces. He was the last English king to die in combat and the last Plantagenet. His body was buried at Greyfriars Priory at Leicester, lost after the Reformation dissolution. The skeleton was located under a Leicester car park in September 2012 by University of Leicester archaeologists, identified by DNA, and reburied at Leicester Cathedral in March 2015.
Read the story →John White returned to the Roanoke colony on 18 August 1590 — three years after he had left for England to resupply — to find the entire 115-person colony gone. The houses were dismantled, the heavier equipment buried, and the word CROATOAN was carved on a post. White assumed the colonists had moved to the Croatoan tribe's island 50 miles south. He never returned to confirm. Their fate is unresolved.
Read the story →Rosalind Franklin produced X-ray diffraction Photo 51 of DNA in May 1952. Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson in January 1953 without her knowledge. The Watson-Crick double-helix paper appeared in *Nature* on 25 April 1953. Franklin died of ovarian cancer on 16 April 1958, aged 37. The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.
Read the story →Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four companions reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, thirty-three days after Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition had got there first. All five died of exhaustion, frostbite, and starvation on the return march. Scott's body and his journal were found by a search party eight months later, eleven miles from the One Ton Depot they had been trying to reach.
Read the story →Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was beset in the Weddell Sea pack ice on 19 January 1915 and was crushed and sank on 21 November 1915. The twenty-eight men reached uninhabited Elephant Island in April 1916; Shackleton then crossed 800 miles of the southern ocean in an open lifeboat to South Georgia. All twenty-eight survived. The wreck was located on the Weddell Sea floor in 2022.
Read the story →The *Sushruta Samhita*, a Sanskrit surgical treatise compiled around 600 BCE, describes 1,120 illnesses and 300 surgical procedures, including a forehead-flap rhinoplasty technique used to reconstruct noses cut off as judicial punishment. The 1794 *Gentleman's Magazine* of London published an account of the same procedure performed in Pune, observed by two British East India Company surgeons. Modern plastic surgery traces its lineage to that 1794 report.
Read the story →Gaspare Tagliacozzi's *De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem* (1597) described the first systematic European reconstructive surgical technique for nose loss — using a substantial skin flap rotated from the patient's upper arm. The technique required the patient to keep the arm strapped to the face for several weeks while the graft established blood supply.
Read the story →Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island was 187 feet tall, built between 1901 and 1903 as a global wireless-power transmission station. J.P. Morgan stopped funding it in 1903. Tesla mortgaged the tower in 1915 and lost the property in 1917 when the steel was sold for $1,750 scrap value. The site is now the Tesla Science Center.
Read the story →Constantin von Tischendorf visited Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in May 1844 looking for old biblical manuscripts. He spotted 43 vellum leaves of an unfamiliar Greek script in a wastebasket of materials the monks were preparing to burn for fuel. The leaves were 4th-century — the oldest substantially complete Christian Bible manuscript known. He took 43 leaves home. A second 1859 visit secured the rest.
Read the story →Howard Carter's workmen uncovered the first sealed step of Tutankhamun's tomb on 4 November 1922 in the Valley of the Kings. Carter had been hired by the Earl of Carnarvon in 1907 and had spent six years on the specific Tutankhamun excavation. Carnarvon had been about to cancel funding. The discovery of the substantially intact 18th-Dynasty royal tomb was the most significant Egyptological find of the 20th century.
Read the story →King Frederick II of Denmark granted Tycho Brahe the island of Hven in the Øresund Strait in February 1576 with funding to build a state-supported astronomical observatory. The resulting Uraniborg and Stjerneborg observatories operated from 1576 to 1597 and produced the most accurate pre-telescopic positional astronomy in history. The data set was the foundation on which Kepler's three laws of planetary motion were derived.
Read the story →Andreas Vesalius's *De humani corporis fabrica*, published at Basel in June 1543, was an anatomical atlas based on the direct dissection of approximately thirty human cadavers in Padua between 1540 and 1542. The book identified approximately 200 specific errors in Galen's anatomy. The conclusion that Galen had dissected only animals — never humans — ended 1,300 years of medical-faculty authority.
Read the story →The Voynich Manuscript is a 240-page illuminated codex written in an unknown script and an unknown language, with botanical, astronomical, balneological, and pharmaceutical illustrations. Radiocarbon dating of the vellum places production between 1404 and 1438. No one has produced a generally accepted translation in the six centuries since.
Read the story →Alfred Russel Wallace, a self-funded specimen-collecting naturalist, was lying in a malarial fever on the island of Ternate in the eastern Dutch East Indies in February 1858 when he worked out the theory of natural selection. He wrote it up in two days and posted the manuscript to Charles Darwin. Darwin had been refining the same theory privately for twenty years. The two papers were read together at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858.
Read the story →The Wright brothers flew the world's first powered, heavier-than-air, sustained, controllable aircraft on the morning of 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The first flight covered 36 metres in 12 seconds. The fourth flight that day covered 260 metres in 59 seconds. Within 66 years the same trajectory of aviation development had landed humans on the Moon.
Read the story →Edward Walter Maunder was Royal Greenwich Observatory's senior solar astronomer from 1873 to 1913. He identified the unusual 1645–1715 sunspot deficit in the Greenwich archive and substantially defined it as a coherent solar-activity phenomenon. He married his junior collaborator Annie Russell in 1895 — and her contribution to the work was substantially larger than the published record acknowledged.
Read the story →Hans Egede arrived in Greenland in 1721 expecting to find the lost Norse community. He found Inuit. Over the following fourteen years he learned the local Kalaallisut language well enough to compile the first European dictionary and grammar of any Inuit language — published in 1750 by his son Paul.
Read the story →Hippocrates of Chios was a Greek geometer of the late 5th century BC — not the famous physician of Cos. He was the first European mathematician to compute the exact area of a region bounded by curves, an achievement that opened the path Eudoxus and Archimedes would later complete with the method of exhaustion.
Read the story →Hyperides was one of the ten canonical Attic orators of the 4th century BC. Almost all of his speeches were lost in late antiquity. Three substantial portions were recovered in 2002 from the same Constantinople prayer book that preserves the Archimedes Palimpsest, using multispectral imaging.
Read the story →The same Greek sponge divers who found the [Antikythera mechanism](/articles/antikythera-mechanism) in 1900–1901 brought up a 1.96-metre bronze statue of a young man. He is one of perhaps a dozen complete or near-complete classical Greek bronzes that have survived to the present. He has been in Athens for almost 125 years.
Read the story →Annie Scott Dill Russell Maunder was a Cambridge-trained mathematician who spent thirty years at the Royal Greenwich Observatory photographing the Sun. She discovered the substantive equator-ward drift of sunspots through the solar cycle and co-authored the historical work that gave her husband Edward Maunder credit for what should have been a joint discovery.
Read the story →Aristarchus of Samos proposed around 270 BC that the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around. The classical and late-antique Greek astronomical mainstream — including Hipparchus and Ptolemy — rejected the proposal on empirical grounds. The work survives only through a single passage in Archimedes.
Read the story →Cicero served as quaestor at Syracuse in 75 BC and used his Roman authority to clear a brambled rural cemetery looking for the tomb of Archimedes, dead 137 years earlier. He found it. The Syracusan locals had forgotten which one was the tomb of the greatest mathematician of antiquity.
Read the story →The medieval Cologne Jewish ritual bath — a 13.5-metre-deep stone shaft sunk to reach groundwater — was rediscovered during 1956 building works in the cathedral-square excavations. It is substantially the only substantially intact 12th-century mikveh north of the Alps and substantively defines the standing archaeology of the medieval Cologne Jewish community.
Read the story →Eratosthenes's famous measurement of the Earth's circumference depended on a peculiar geographical fact about the southern Egyptian town of Syene. On the summer solstice, the Sun stood exactly at the zenith there — a single annual moment that defined the line we now call the Tropic of Cancer.
Read the story →Filippo Pacini examined the intestinal tissue of cholera victims in Florence in 1854 — the same year [John Snow](/articles/john-snow-broad-street-pump) was mapping the Broad Street pump — and identified a comma-shaped bacterium he called *Vibrio cholerae*. The discovery was published in Italian, in an Italian journal, and was almost entirely ignored. [Robert Koch](/articles/robert-koch-cholera-1883) rediscovered the same organism in Egypt in 1883 and got the credit.
Read the story →When the Bourbon-era treasure hunters were finished with Pompeii, the site was a substantially-mined ruin without a coherent excavation record. Giuseppe Fiorelli took over the directorship in 1863 and turned the site into the founding example of modern archaeological method. His most-famous innovation was to pour liquid plaster into the empty voids left by [Vesuvius's victims](/articles/vesuvius-pompeii-79).
Read the story →Lake Cheko is a 500-metre-wide elliptical lake about 8 km northwest of the Tunguska blast epicentre. In 2007 an Italian research team proposed that the lake is the impact crater of a small unfragmented portion of the 1908 Tunguska body. The interpretation is substantially contested.
Read the story →Claudius Ptolemy's *Mathēmatikē Syntaxis* — known to Europe as the *Almagest* through its 9th-century Arabic translation — was the single dominant astronomical reference work of the Western world from approximately 150 AD to 1543. Most of its observational content was inherited from Hipparchus of Rhodes three centuries earlier.
Read the story →In May 1818, an expedition led by [Stamford Raffles](/articles/stamford-raffles-singapore) and the surgeon-botanist Joseph Arnold found a 1-metre red flower in the Sumatran rainforest. It weighed about 7 kilograms, smelled of carrion, and had no leaves, stem, or roots. Arnold caught a fever and died on the trip back. The flower was named for both of them.
Read the story →Borobudur is a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple complex in central Java with about 2,672 narrative relief panels and 504 Buddha statues. It was abandoned in the 14th century, progressively buried by jungle and volcanic ash, and rediscovered in 1814 on orders of the British lieutenant-governor Sir Stamford Raffles.
Read the story →Roger L. Easton Jr. of the Rochester Institute of Technology led the multispectral imaging programme that recovered text from the Archimedes Palimpsest between 1999 and 2008. The technique combines ultraviolet, visible, and infrared photography with substantial computational analysis to detect ink residues invisible to the unaided eye.
Read the story →Thomas Harriot observed the Moon through a telescope in July 1609, sunspots in late 1610, and the moons of Jupiter probably in early 1610. Each of these observations was made independently of Galileo, in some cases earlier. Harriot published nothing. He died in 1621 with about 5,000 pages of unpublished astronomical manuscripts.
Read the story →Thomas Harriot observed sunspots in December 1610 — months before Galileo's published priority claim — telescopically observed the Moon weeks before Galileo's *Sidereus Nuncius*, and worked out the law of refraction twenty years before Snell. He published almost none of it. He died in 1621 of nasal cancer leaving over 8,000 pages of unpublished manuscripts.
Read the story →The mural quadrant at Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory was a brass arc mounted on a north-south wall and used for measuring the meridian altitudes of stars and planets. It was the largest and most accurate astronomical instrument of the pre-telescopic period and produced most of the data that Kepler would later use to derive the laws of planetary motion.
Read the story →When [Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD](/articles/vesuvius-pompeii-79), it buried a Roman seaside villa at Herculaneum under 25 metres of pyroclastic debris. Inside the villa was a working library of about 1,800 papyrus scrolls — the only intact classical library that has ever been recovered. The scrolls were carbonised by the heat. Modern X-ray imaging is finally reading them.
Read the story →Alfred Lacroix arrived on Martinique six weeks after the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée had killed thirty thousand people. He spent the next four years on the island reconstructing exactly what had happened. The science of volcanology, more or less, is what he found.
Read the story →The Antikythera mechanism was not the only thing on the 60 BC Greek shipwreck. Spongers in 1900 brought up four life-size bronze sculptures and a marble youth that nobody could date. Then they found the planetary computer. The other finds have been quietly upstaged for a century.
Read the story →When the Knights Hospitaller built the Castle of Saint Peter at Bodrum in the early 15th century, they used the marble of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World — as quarry stone. The Mausoleum had stood for 1,700 years. The castle stands today.
Read the story →On 15 February 2013 a 20-metre stony asteroid exploded over the southern Russian Urals at an altitude of about 30 kilometres. The blast injured 1,500 people, mostly from flying glass. It was the largest atmospheric impact event since Tunguska in 1908 — and the first to be captured on car-dashboard video.
Read the story →In 529 the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools of Athens. The Academy that traced its descent to Plato had operated for almost 900 years. Its surviving teachers, led by Damascius, walked east into Sasanian Persia. Five years later they walked back.
Read the story →John Snow is remembered for the 1854 Broad Street pump and the founding of modern epidemiology. His other career — as the leading 19th-century English authority on inhaled anaesthesia — is less famous but at the time was substantially more profitable. He gave Queen Victoria chloroform during the births of her eighth and ninth children.
Read the story →Michael Maestlin taught mathematics and astronomy at Tübingen from 1583 to 1631. He was the man who privately taught the young Johannes Kepler that the Copernican heliocentric system was probably correct, while officially continuing to teach the Ptolemaic system that the university curriculum required.
Read the story →In 1257 an Indonesian volcano called Samalas erupted with the largest eruption of the last seven thousand years. The sulphate signal appears in polar ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica. Medieval European chronicles record the cold summer of 1258. It took until 2013 to identify the source.
Read the story →On the evening of 11 November 1572 a bright new star appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was visible for sixteen months. Tycho Brahe — twenty-five at the time — measured it carefully enough to prove it sat above the Moon. The Aristotelian heavens that were supposed to be unchanging had quietly changed.
Read the story →Uraniborg was the most expensive scientific instrument in 16th-century Europe — an island observatory built for Tycho Brahe at royal expense. He worked there for 20 years, made the most accurate pre-telescope astronomical observations ever, then fled in 1597. The Crown demolished it the next year.
Read the story →Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, employed 45,000 people at peak. Between 1924 and 1932 a team of Harvard researchers studied the workforce in increasing detail. The eventual finding — that workers behave differently when they know they're being watched — gave its name to the Hawthorne Effect.
Read the story →The standard narrative of European maritime expansion credits Vasco da Gama with finding the sea route from Africa to India in 1498. The Portuguese sailed the route. The man who navigated them across the Indian Ocean was almost certainly an Arab named Ahmad ibn Majid.
Read the story →Hipparchus of Rhodes catalogued a thousand stars, invented trigonometry, discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and may have built the original of the Antikythera mechanism. Almost none of his writing survives.
Read the story →Within months of the Aztec capital's fall, the Spanish surveyor Alonso García Bravo laid out the colonial grid of Mexico City directly on top of the destroyed lake-city. The Templo Mayor was buried under the cathedral. It stayed buried until 1978.
Read the story →According to Plutarch, Mark Antony stripped the library at Pergamon — the second-largest collection in the Hellenistic world — and gave its 200,000 volumes to Cleopatra. The story is probably exaggerated. The library was certainly emptied.
Read the story →Robert Koch went to Alexandria in 1883 to find the cause of cholera. He found it on the second day and confirmed it in Calcutta four months later. John Snow had been right thirty years earlier without ever seeing the bacterium.
Read the story →In 391 the Patriarch of Alexandria, with imperial authority, took a mob to the Serapeum and tore it apart. The temple had been the most important Egyptian library outside the Mouseion. After this day there was no library at Alexandria worth the name.
Read the story →On 24 October 79 AD Vesuvius opened above the Bay of Naples and buried two Roman towns under twenty feet of pumice and ash. The people who died in Pompeii were killed in the first wave of the second day, by a cloud of superheated gas at six hundred degrees Celsius.
Read the story →In 1610 four astronomers in four countries pointed early telescopes at the Sun and saw spots. They spent the next decade arguing about who had seen them first.
Read the story →King Mausolus died in 353 BC. His widow built him a tomb so spectacular that for two thousand years every grand tomb in Europe was called by his name.
Read the story →The Colossus of Rhodes stood for fifty-four years and lay in ruins for nearly nine hundred. A Jewish merchant from Edessa bought the bronze.
Read the story →Before Eudoxus, Greek mathematicians could prove statements about simple shapes. Eudoxus invented the method that let them prove statements about curves.
Read the story →Henry Whitehead set out to disprove John Snow's water theory. He spent six months knocking on doors in Soho. By the end he had identified the index case.
Read the story →Between 1645 and 1715 the surface of the Sun was nearly blank. Sunspot counts dropped to almost zero. Europe froze. Astronomers noticed, then forgot.
Read the story →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.
Read the story →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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