Witness History

In 2006, Ten Canoes made Australian cinema history. It became the first feature film performed entirely in Aboriginal languages and the first to bring a traditional Yolngu story to the screen. Shot in the remote swamplands of Arnhem Land, the production relied on old anthropological photographs, clan languages and ancestral hunting knowledge to recreate life before European settlement. For the cas...

In 1959, British conservationist and author Gerald Durrell opened the gates to a zoo with one clear aim - to save endangered species from extinction. Gerald had grown up fascinated by the natural world and had spent years travelling across the globe, collecting animals for major zoos in the United Kingdom. It was during these trips that he saw just how quickly the animals he loved were disappearin...

n the late 1980s and early 1990s, Manchester City supporters became famous for an unusual sight on the terraces: inflatable bananas. What began as a light-hearted joke soon turned into one of the most memorable fan crazes in English football. Uma Doraiswamy tells the story of football, terrace culture and one of the game’s most unlikely symbols. She speaks to former Manchester City striker Imre Va...

In 1990, after years of campaigning by activists, including Dr Jane Goodall, chimpanzees were declared endangered for the first time. The apes had been classed as threatened since 1976, but their situation hadn’t improved. Dr Ron Nowak led the team who wrote the new regulations, working with Dr Goodall to change the chimpanzees’ classification. He's been recalling that period with Tim O’Callaghan....

In 1985, American gorilla expert Dian Fossey was murdered in her cabin at the research station she established in the mountains of Rwanda. Lucy Burns spoke to Kelly Stewart in 2013 who worked alongside Dian for 10 years in Volcanoes National Park. Witness History is a short BBC World Service podcast about history that takes you inside big moments from the past through first-hand testimony and arch...

In 1970, Washoe the chimpanzee was widely recognised as the first non-human to learn a human language. She was taught American sign language in a revolutionary experiment led by psychology professors Allen and Trixie Gardner at the University of Reno. But the project faced scepticism from some academics who argued that humans were the only animals capable of language. Dr Roger Fouts was among thos...

In the late 1950s, psychologist Harry Harlow conducted a series of experiments on baby rhesus monkeys which would become some of the most controversial in modern science. Using wire models as surrogate mothers, he explored how infants form emotional bonds. His findings challenged the widely held belief in the West that babies form attachments to their mothers primarily because they provide food. H...

On 28 May 1959, the USA sent two monkeys, Able and Baker, into space. They were the first living creatures to survive a space flight. It was a watershed moment for the American space agency NASA and its rivalry with the Soviet Union and it helped to pave the way for manned space missions. In 2012, Mike Lanchin spoke to Lieutenant Joe Guion, commander of the USS Kiowa, whose mission was to retrieve...

Trischa Zorn-Hudson is the most decorated Paralympian in history. Competing across seven games, Trischa - who has been blind since birth - won a remarkable haul of 55 medals. In that time, she also saw the Paralympics go through drastic changes, as competitors campaigned to get similar privileges and rights as Olympic athletes. Trischa shared her memories of her career with Matt Pintus in 2024. Ey...

When the first Winnie-the-Pooh book was published in 1926, few could have imagined that the stories of a honey-loving bear would capture the hearts of readers across the world. Author A.A. Milne based the stories on the toys belonging to his young son, Christopher Robin. The books would become a global phenomenon, but they also left Christopher with a complicated relationship to the fame that foll...

In 2004, the world's first team of mine-detecting rats passed accreditation tests, opening the way for them to be used in humanitarian demining operations. The project was the brainchild of Belgian researcher Bart Weetjens, who was inspired to tackle the global landmine crisis after seeing Princess Diana walk through a minefield in Angola in 1997. Drawing on a lifelong love of rodents, he worked w...

In October 2013, people in the small Norwegian town of Rjukan experienced winter sunshine for the first time in history. This was thanks to the arrival of an unusual invention - giant mirrors high up on one of the mountains that make up the deep and narrow valley where Rjukan sits. They reflected the sun directly down to the town square – to the joy of local people who had previously lived through...

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel, two years later he was assassinated. The president was killed at a military parade by a group of army officers, in October 1981. His decision to make peace with Israel had angered many Egyptians, and Sadat, and his wife, Jehan, knew that the decision was a dangerous step. Jehan Sedat spoke to Louise Hidalgo in 2015...

In June 1982, 10 Peruvian pilots were tasked with a secret mission: deliver fighter jets to Argentina as it battled the UK over the Falkland Islands. One of those pilots, Rubén Mimbela, tells Stefania Gozzer about the risks they faced and how the mission remained out of the public eye for more than 25 years. Witness History is a short BBC World Service podcast about history that takes you inside b...

On 5 June 1982, a teenage refugee from Vietnam became the first Rubik's Cube world champion. Representing the United States, 16-year-old Minh Thai took on contestants from 18 other countries at the championship in Hungary. He made history by solving the cube in 22.95 seconds. He tells Helen Ledwick about his first encounter with the iconic puzzle, his journey from Los Angeles to Budapest, and a la...

The siege of Ladysmith was a key moment in the Boer War, also known as the South African War. In 1899, British troops and civilians were trapped in the besieged South African town for 118 days. Using a BBC archive recording, James Dalton, a British Army bandsman with the Gordon Highlanders, recalls shelling, hunger, disease and the dramatic relief of Ladysmith. Produced by Helen Ledwick in collabo...

In 1947, a missing goat led to the chance discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls. These ancient Jewish manuscripts became one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century. British archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding was one of the key figures in the early investigation of the scrolls. In a BBC recording made in 1949, he describes how they were found, the painstaking excavatio...

After decades of campaigning in Japan, the pill was finally legalised in 1999. In contrast, the male impotency drug Viagra was approved for use in just six months, and legalised before the contraceptive pill for women. Politician Yoriko Madoka pushed hard for the right to take the pill and told Rebecca Kesby that sexism and male dominance in parliament is why it took so long. This programme was fi...

In 2012, the discovery of rock art in caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi changed our understanding of early human history. Archaeologist Maxime Aubert tells Leo Dunlop how his team used a new dating technique to reveal that some of the cave paintings were tens of thousands of years older than previously thought. This challenged long-held ideas that art and storytelling originated in Wester...

On an English field in 1957, the final touches were made to what was then the largest radio telescope in the world. But designing and building the Jodrell Bank Observatory hadn’t been easy. Sir Bernard Lovell, the mastermind behind the 76m wide dish, had to overcome money shortages, engineering difficulties and media scepticism. But as the space race took off in the 1960s, Jodrell Bank proved its...

Harold Riley was the only artist in the world given the opportunity to paint Nelson Mandela from life. When Mandela agreed to pose for the English artist, it marked the beginning of a remarkable relationship. Over 18 months, the pair met on six occasions in South Africa, resulting in a portrait unveiled in 2005 that later raised more than $1m for children's charities when it was sold at auction in...

In 1932, hundreds of walkers organised a mass trespass on Kinder Scout, the highest point in England's Peak District. It was a major step in the campaign by workers from the industrial city of Manchester for access to the surrounding countryside, much of which was privately owned. In 2012, Simon Watts used interviews from the BBC archives to tell the story through the memories of those who took pa...

The Fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester, England, in 1945, helping to shape the post-war struggle against colonialism and racial discrimination. Prominent black activists, intellectuals and trade union leaders from around the world attended, including Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, who would later become the leaders of independent Ghana and Kenya. In 2020, Alex Last explored the st...

In June 1948, the ‘Baby’ was invented. It was the first stored-program computer, meaning it was the first machine to work like the ones we have today. It was developed in England at the University of Manchester. The computer was huge; it filled a room that was nearly six metres square. The team who made it are now recognised as the pioneers of modern computing. Gill Kearsley has been looking throu...

In 1962, Nigerian-born Phil Magbotiwan opened a brand-new nightclub in Manchester, England. In part because of his own personal experiences of racism, Phil wanted to create somewhere where everyone would be welcome – Manchester’s first racially inclusive nightclub The Reno was born. The nightclub became a particularly important space for Manchester's mixed heritage community, who felt unwelcome in...