What caused the Chernobyl disaster? Reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded after a test to simulate cooling the reactor went wrong. The disaster was blamed on the workers, but they were not trained properly, and the design of the reactor was flawed. Let’s look at how a nuclear power plant works. […]
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What were the bone wars? The Bone Wars were a feud between two American fossil hunters in the 19th century. The two were Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Their war pretty much financially destroyed both of them. Edward Drinker Cope was born in 1840. His family were very wealthy and he developed an
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What was the dancing plague of 1518? The dancing plague of 1518 happened in Strasbourg, France, and up to 400 people couldn’t stop dancing for several weeks. It is said that many people died of exhaustion. Everything is said to have started in July 1518, in a town called Strasbourg, which is now in France,
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What were the ratlines? The ratlines were the routes that many Nazis used to escape from Germany after the end of World War 2. Many of them escaped to countries in South America, but some were even accepted into the United States. At the time, the name “ratline” was only used to refer to Croatian
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What is the Domesday book? The Domesday Book is the old English spelling of “Doomsday Book” and it was a survey by William the Conqueror of the financial state of England and Wales in 1086. The book wasn’t called the Domesday book until the following century. It was so named because it was a final
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Why is the border of Western Australia not straight? The border of Western Australia isn’t straight because they marked the border from the north and from the south at the same time and missed by 127 meters. If you zoom in on a Google map of Australia and look at the point where the borders
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Why did Constantinople fall? Constantinople fell because the Byzantine Empire had been declining for centuries and was no longer strong enough to hold it. Constantinople fell on 29th May, 1453. This is the day that marks the end of the Byzantine Empire, which is also the end of the Roman Empire. It is also said
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Did the Vikings get to America before Columbus? Yes. The Vikings appear to have reached North America in 1021, which is 471 years before Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World. The Vikings reached North America a long time before Columbus arrived in South America, but they didn’t stay there for very long. They settled
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How did the Suez Crisis mark the end of British power? Britain was forced to withdraw and, for the first time, realized that it could no long act unilaterally. It was a humiliating defeat for Britain and is sometimes said to be the actual end of the British Empire. The Suez Canal was opened in
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Who built the Smithsonian? The first of the Smithsonian’s many museums was built by the US government and was designed by an architect called James Renwick Jr. However, the idea for the institution and the money came from a British scientist called James Smithson, who lived from 1765 to 1829. The Smithsonian is the world’s
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