The Daily Time Drop

Milestones From Exoplanets to Elizabeth Taylor On this episode of The Daily Time Drop, we explore a series of fascinating events from history. We start in 1995 with the discovery of 51 Pegasi b by astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. This gas giant was the first exoplanet found orbiting a sun-like star, sparking a new era in astronomy. Fast forward to 2007, we follow the incredible journey...

The Unlikely Impact of Linux and the Tylenol Crisis In this episode of The Daily Time Drop, host Clara Vale delves into two very different historical moments that reveal a lot about human decision-making and its consequences. We begin in 1991 with Linus Torvalds, a young Finnish student whose casual online announcement set off a technological revolution. His creation, Linux, became an open-source...

Hydrogen Balloons to SpaceRaces: Human Endeavour’s Limits Imagine setting off across the ocean in a hydrogen balloon. On this date, adventurer Reza Baluchi attempted just that, aiming to travel from Florida to Bermuda. His makeshift journey quickly turned into a rescue mission less than 70 miles from shore. Fast forward ten years, and innovation took to the skies with SpaceShipOne, which won the A...

The Unending Hunt for the Golden Owl Explore the captivating tale of The Hunt for the Golden Owl, a treasure hunt that spanned over thirty years, initiated by French author Max Valentin and artist Michel Becker in 1993. Discover the extraordinary story of a bronze owl and a grand prize of a golden owl adorned with diamonds. Despite Valentin’s cryptic style and the frustrations faced by treasure hu...

The Nottingham Cheese Riot and Beyond In this episode of The Daily Time Drop, Clara Vale delves into a peculiar chapter of history: the Nottingham Cheese Riot of 1766. What began as an ordinary day at Nottingham’s Goose Fair transformed into a chaotic scene due to soaring cheese prices. Locals, outraged by the cost hike, took matters—and cheese—into their own hands, resulting in a riot quelled onl...

Milestone Moments: Breaking Barriers and Reshaping History On today’s episode of The Daily Time Drop, host Clara Vale delves into a day rich with historical significance and cultural milestones. We explore how Claudia Sheinbaum made history in 2024 as Mexico’s first female president and the country’s first president of Jewish heritage. This groundbreaking moment challenges conventions and inspires...

Between Cartoons and Sea Giants: A Day to Remember On today’s episode of The Daily Time Drop, we explore two significant events that unfolded on the same date, though a year apart. Host Clara Vale delves into the controversy ignited by the publication of cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. These cartoons, which depicted Prophet Muhammad, sparked global protests and raised int...

Unexpected Twists in History on 28th September Join Clara Vale in this episode of The Daily Time Drop as we uncover a series of surprising historical events that occurred on the 28th of September. From the glitzy night race of Formula One in Singapore to grand revelations in the realms of space and ocean exploration, Clara navigates through a tapestry of human ingenuity and folly. Discover ‘Crashg...

When a Nation Becomes a Biosphere Explore the fascinating stories of how São Tomé and Príncipe became the first country to be recognised as a World Biosphere Reserve. This episode also delves into the unique Vorónezh Incident of 1989, where alleged extraterrestrial activity captivated a Soviet town. We then journey to 1998, marking the launch of Google as it revolutionised internet search. Finally...

A Night That Dodged a Nuclear Storm In 1983, Stanislav Petrov made a decision that may have saved humanity. Amid the Cold War tensions, Petrov chose to dismiss a false missile alarm potentially preventing a nuclear catastrophe. This episode of The Daily Time Drop unravels his story, exploring the fine line between intuition and luck in critical moments. We then fast-forward to 2022 to discuss NASA...

The Vanishing Newspaper of 1690 and Other Curious Tales In today’s episode of The Daily Time Drop, host Clara Vale unravels the story of America’s first newspaper, ‘Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick’, which vanished almost as soon as it appeared in 1690 Boston. Clara explores why this bold venture by Benjamin Harris met with swift governmental opposition. From there, she transports l...

The Salad Bar Bioterror Attack That Changed America On 24 September 1984, members of the Rajneeshpuram commune in rural Oregon began deliberately contaminating salad bars in The Dalles with Salmonella bacteria. Over the following weeks, 751 people fell ill in what became the largest bioterrorist attack on American soil. The motive was chillingly simple: suppress voter turnout in a local election....

The Spacecraft Lost by a Spreadsheet Error, and Other Tales of Ambition On 23 September 1999, NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter after a catastrophic navigation error caused by one team using imperial units and another using metric. The spacecraft, which cost $125 million and had travelled for nine months, burned up in the Martian atmosphere. This episode examines that expensive mista...

The Vela Incident and Other Enigmatic Events Explore the fascinating events of September 22nd across history. We delve into the mysterious Vela Incident of 1979, where a flash detected by a U.S. satellite stirred international curiosity and debate over potential covert nuclear tests. Then, moving to 1976, we discuss the FDA’s ban on Red Dye No. 4, highlighting the impact on manufacturers and the u...

The Five Thousand Percent Man and the Cabinet Duel On 21 September 2015, the price of a life-saving drug called Daraprim rose from $13.50 to $750 per tablet overnight, a 5,455% increase that sparked global outrage and forced a national conversation about pharmaceutical pricing. Clare Vale unpacks Martin Shkreli’s infamous decision and its human cost, then steps back to 1809, when two serving Briti...

A Tsunami, a Rocket, and Three Thousand People Who Nearly Stormed Area 51 On 20 September 1498, the Nankai earthquake sent a tsunami crashing into coastal Japan, destroying the wooden hall around the Great Buddha of Kōtoku-in. The forty-foot bronze statue survived, and for over five centuries has sat in the open air without a roof. Five hundred and two years later, on the same date in 2000, someon...

Trollface, Ötzi’s Murder, and the Day Mexico’s Earthquake Drill Became Real On 19 September 2008, an 18-year-old student in Oakland uploaded a deliberately crude drawing that became one of the internet’s most recognisable images. Trollface, created by Carlos Ramírez in Microsoft Paint, evolved from a joke comic about online provocation into a copyrighted icon that earned its creator hundreds of th...

Philippe Croizon Swims the Channel, Exploding Walkie-Talkies, and the Return of the Zeppelin On 18 September 2010, Philippe Croizon became the first quadruple amputee to swim the English Channel, completing the crossing in thirteen hours and twenty-six minutes using prosthetic fins and core propulsion. The same date in 2024 saw coordinated attacks in Lebanon when modified walkie-talkies used by He...

The Man Who Found the Invisible World On 17 September 1683, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society describing what he had observed in scrapings from human teeth: tiny creatures, moving with apparent purpose, completely invisible to the naked eye. The Dutch draper, who ground his own lenses and built microscopes capable of magnifications up to 270 times, had become the first person in h...

The Balloon Escape Over the Iron Curtain and a Pope Excommunicated After Death On 16 September 1979, two East German families flew a homemade hot air balloon over the Iron Curtain in one of the Cold War’s most audacious escapes. The Strelzyks and Wetzels, ordinary citizens from Pössneck, built a 28-metre balloon from taffeta and cotton bought in secret, then flew eight people, including four child...

The Locomotive That Outlasted Everything and a Spacecraft’s Final Dive On 15 September 1981, the John Bull, a steam locomotive built in 1831, ran under its own power outside Washington DC, making it the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world. One hundred and fifty years after its construction, it proved that some engineering simply refuses to be retired. We also look at the 1813 attack on B...

Gravitational Waves, Black Holes, and the Day Britain Lost Eleven Days On 14 September 2015, the LIGO detectors in Louisiana and Washington State captured the first direct observation of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein a century earlier. The signal came from two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light-years away, their merger converting three solar masses into pure...

The Glowing Scrap: When a Forgotten Radiotherapy Machine Contaminated a City On 13 September 1987, two scavengers in Goiânia, Brazil broke into an abandoned radiotherapy clinic and stole a teletherapy machine containing caesium-137. They did not know what it was. They only knew it looked valuable. Over the following days, the ruptured radioactive capsule spread contamination across multiple househ...

Nepal’s Discord Democracy, the Faroe Islands’ Football Miracle, and a Spacecraft Chasing a Potato On 12 September across recent decades, history delivered an improbable collection of human moments. In 2025, Nepal elected interim Prime Minister Sushila Karki through a parliamentary vote held on Discord, the gaming chat platform. In 1990, the Faroe Islands, a nation of 47,000 with a fisherman in goa...

Chess in the Clouds, Rogue Waves, and a Song Called The Great Fire On 11 September 1995, two of the world’s greatest chess players faced each other on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Garry Kasparov defended his world title against Viswanathan Anand in a match that announced a new era of the game, staged in a location that would, six years later, carry an entirely different...