No One Saw It Coming

It’s small enough to fit in your pocket and it’s saved countless lives. The asthma puffer has had a long journey, stretching back thousands of years to various treatments including asthma cigarettes.  But the asthma puffer as we know it today is all thanks to a young girl’s throwaway comment over breakfast in the 1950s.  Dr Daniel Duke from Monash University tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British S...

London, 1854. A mysterious and deadly illness is sweeping through Soho, and people are dropping like flies. The leading theory? “Bad air.” But one doctor isn’t convinced. John Snow begins to trace the outbreak — not through symptoms, but through streets.  Journalist and author Sandra Hempel tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) the story of how a hand-drawn map, a pub, and a pump sparked th...

A Changi prisoner of war. A fridge full of urine. A handful of dead guinea pigs. And one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the 20th century. Greg de Moore, Associate Professor of Psychiatry based at Sydney's Westmead Hospital, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) about the story of Australian doctor John Cade and his pioneering work in bipolar treatment.  From the horrors of a...

One of the most important scientific discoveries of the last century was the first immortal human cell line, known as “HeLa”. It enabled significant medical breakthroughs, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines. But for decades no one knew that the name 'HeLa' stood for Henrietta Lacks, an African American mother who died of an aggressive cervica...

He soared into the sky in a balloon to prove a scientific theory and landed in the world of espionage.  This is a story about a man with a fabulous moustache who called himself Professor, who was accused of being the devil in the American Civil War and ended up becoming a spy in a big balloon, triggering the creation of the US Air Force. Yes, really.  Matt Bevan from ABC's If You’re Listening tell...

It’s one of the greatest museum heists in Australian history - a theft whose repercussions are still being felt today. And yet, no one really knows about it. Journalist and author Walter Marsh sits down with Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) and shares the story of a mysterious British gentleman who duped Australian museums and stole thousands of butterflies right under their noses.  Binge al...

Yes, Adolf Hitler - the guy who was apparently so 'pure' that he never even drank coffee - was secretly a drug addict.  Norman Ohler, author of the bestselling book Blitzed, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) how a strange celebrity wellness doctor named Theodor Morell became Hitler's personal physician and used Hitler as a guinea pig for his experimental drugs. By the end of WW2, the Na...

This is the story of a gadget lover from Australia who wanted to pirate music and instead created one of the greatest life saving devices in the history of air travel.  Janice Witham, journalist and author, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) about the creation of the black box. It’s now ubiquitous in aviation but at the time, its creator David Warren fought against scepticism and bureauc...

28 June 1969 was a regular Saturday night at the Stonewall Inn. Until it wasn’t.  “The bar lights blinked on and off. I'd never seen that happen before so I asked my friend what's going on, and my friend said, oh, just another raid. Well, it turned out not to be just the kind of raid that they were used to.” While Mark Segal had spent many nights at the unlicensed gay bar, none were like the one t...

If you had a premature baby in America in the 1900s, chances were they would not survive. That is, until Martin Couney came along... In a bizarre attraction in Coney Island, 'Dr Couney' took the children that medicine deemed 'not worth saving' and displayed them to the public in rows of cutting-edge incubators. Over the years, he saved thousands of babies' lives. But the strangest thing was, Marti...

It's the event that's seen as the trigger for World War One, but it didn't happen quite the way the history books let on...  Australian author Paul Ham tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) what really happened on the 28th of June 1914, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo.  Far from a metic...

When you picture someone wearing high heels, what do you imagine? I'm guessing it's not horseriding archers on a Persian battlefield...  But it turns out the high heel was indeed invented for men, as a brutally effective tool of war. And it was only because of colonialism, and later capitalism, that this iconic footwear made it to Europe and became embedded in women's fashion.  Shoe historian Eliz...

It was the most glamorous job girls could get during WW1... until it turned fatal.  In an emotional episode of No One Saw It Coming, author Kate Moore tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the harrowing true story of the Radium Girls, a group of dial painters who had no idea the job they loved was slowly killing them. When the world turned their back on the Radium Girls, they fo...

Today trade unions are an integral part of the political landscape, at least in countries like Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. But this hasn’t always been the case…  In the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, there was a real fear that the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution might be replicated in England and as a result trade unions or ‘friendly societies’...

If you thought reality TV began in the ‘90s or early 2000s with MTV’s The Real World or Big Brother, think again…  According to Pulitzer-Prize winning critic and New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum, the genre actually pre-dates television altogether, beginning with audience participation shows on radio in the 1940’s. But she tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole, Mastermind) that it’...

What does a volcano in Iceland have to do with the religious and political struggles going on across the world today? Well it turns out, a LOT…  Back in 536AD, the skies turned dark and the world cooled. It was all thanks to a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, that no one even knew had happened. It led to a mysterious plague, which swept through the Roman and Persian Empires. In the great Byza...

What if the reason being on a treadmill feels like such a punishment is actually by design!? Back in the 1800’s the British Empire started installing ‘tread-mills’ in prisons as a way to both punish criminals and make them more productive. In fact, it was so soul-crushing that the poet Oscar Wilde wrote about its horrors from prison and is thought to have died as a result of the hours he spent on...

You can probably picture that iconic moment, when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. But what if his ‘one small step for man’ was actually thanks to a group of unlikely women?  In the 1960’s when President JFK accelerated the space race, NASA needed someone to design a spacesuit capable of putting man on the moon. When the big defense contractors failed to meet the challenge, NASA had no cho...

What if Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo weren’t really the best artists of the Renaissance, they were just the subject of some really good PR?  In this episode of No One Saw it Coming, TikToker and Art Historian Mary McGillivray tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the story of a salty Italian gossip writer called Giorgio Vasari, whose writing still influences the way w...

Try to stop famine, or save your own life? This was the impossible choice facing the Russian scientists behind the world's first seed bank during World War 2, when the Soviet city of Leningrad came under siege by the Nazis. Food was so scarce at the time that throughout the city people were forced to eat wallpaper, boiled leather, even their own pets, to stay alive.  But this set of Russian botani...

You probably know the names of famous freestyle swimmers - whether it’s Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky, Ian Thorpe or Dawn Fraser. But do you know where the ‘freestyle’ swimming stroke actually comes from? It turns out it all started at a swimming carnival at Sydney’s Bronte Beach back in 1901… In this episode of No One Saw It Coming, Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) goes on a jou...

Bob Hawke, Bill Clinton, Malcolm Turnbull – all were recipients of the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest and most prestigious academic scholarships in the world. It was started posthumously by a man named Cecil Rhodes; a man whose legacy has recently been the subject of heated debates and a protest movement to decolonise education known as #RhodesMustFall.  The reckoning with Cecil Rhodes has...

Before selfies, before CT scans, before social media filters and front-facing cameras… there was the X-Ray. Discovered by accident in a 19th-century lab, it went on to become a craze. Displayed as a sideshow attraction, people would x-ray their hands, their bags, their feet, even cuddling their loved one!  Suzie Sheehy is an Accelerator Physicist by day and on the side, she writes books like  The...

Have you ever tried absinthe - that fluorescent green spirit that people used to set on fire in the 90’s?  It’s had a pretty bad reputation over the years. In fact, it was illegal in a lot of countries for almost a century!  But back in France during the period known as the Belle Époque, it was the drink associated with great artists and writers like Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh an...

These days chemotherapy or ‘chemo’ is a common treatment for cancer. But did you know that part of the reason it exists today is because of a terrible accident that happened in Italy during World War 2? The Bari bombing was known as the ‘Little Pearl Harbour’ and it saw hundreds of American and British soldiers killed by mustard gas that was being secretly transported to Europe inside an American...