The Irishman who won the famous Madison Six of 1896 was English. And everyone knew, except the history books.
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Fists, bribes, guns and wheels: Plugger Bill Martin, cycling’s first official hard man
One by one, the riders entered Martin’s hotel room. On the bed, bribes were laid out in piles of notes and sovereigns; Martin, loaded revolver by his side, addressed each successive visitor, stating the terms of their contract. “Quite right, Bill,” came the replies. Notes…
The Last Passenger Pigeon
In the Spring of 1860, a flock estimated at 3.7 billion Passenger Pigeons flew over Ontario. Eleven years later, some 136 million breeding pairs nested in Wisconsin, with birds landing in such large numbers that limbs were often sheared off the trees. With numbers like…
America’s Loneliest Road
Running from Ocean City, Maryland on the U.S. east coast all the way to Sacramento in California, U.S. Route 50 cuts an impressive swathe through alpine forests, desert valleys, ghost towns and petroglyphs. It’s the bit that crosses a 287-mile stretch of Nevada, from Ely…
Bouvet Island – ‘The Last Place on Earth’
It seems fitting that the most isolated spot on the planet should be an inhospitable, glacier-covered rock sitting smack in the path of the ‘furious fifties’ storm winds. More than 1700 and 2500 kms respectively from nearest neighbours Antarctica and Cape Agulhus (South Africa) Bouvet…
Jerry Gretzinger’s Map
It started as a doodle 50 years ago. Since then, Jerry Gretzinger has added a new hand-drawn panel to his map of an imaginary world every day. At 2000 sq feet and counting, the map includes fictional towns, cities, rivers, railroads…an entire world detailed on…
The oldest surviving film
While Thomas Edison and/or the Lumiere brothers are popularly credited with the invention of the moving picture – something which Edison, a notorious credit taker did little to discourage – history suggests otherwise. As, indeed, does this very short film clip, shot in Roundhay, near…
The World’s Loneliest Tree
At 400kms from its nearest neighbour, L’Arbre du Ténéré (The Tree of Ténéré) was once considered the most isolated tree on earth. A lone landmark for caravan routes through the Ténéré region of the Sahara desert, it guided travellers en route to Algiers towards a…
The Alfred Denny Museum
Since opening its doors to students in 1905, the Alfred Denny Zoology Museum at Sheffield University remained a largely unknown cabinet of curiosities in the north of England – Until September 2012, when it opened to the public, and delights such as Arthur the Half-Hedgehog,…