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Ellen MacArthur grew up in landlocked Derbyshire, England, born in 1976, and found sailing through books rather than a seafaring family. In 2001 she finished second in the Vendee Globe, the solo, nonstop, unassisted round-the-world race, aboard the monohull Kingfisher. At 24 she was the youngest competitor ever to complete it, and her women's solo monohull circumnavigation record stood for two dec...

In 31 BCE, with Octavian's forces closing in, Cleopatra had her ships dragged overland across the Suez isthmus toward the Red Sea, because the ancient canal there had silted into a muddy trench. The first attempts to pierce this land ran west to east, linking the Nile to the Red Sea through the Wadi Tumilat, possibly as early as pharaohs like Senusret or Ramesses II. Around 600 BCE Necho II pushed...

The Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is built from the timber of a ghost ship. HMS Resolute was abandoned in the Arctic ice in 1854, and a year later she was found drifting intact about 1,200 miles away near Baffin Island. In maritime terms a ghost ship is a real derelict found adrift with its crew missing or dead, and the legends came first: the Flying Dutchman, circulating from around 1795, the...

The word battleship is shortened from ship of the line of battle, a ship stout enough to stand in the battle line. Its ancestor was the carrack, developed in Portugal by fusing the tough North Sea cog with the fighting utility of the Mediterranean galley. Carracks carried towering castles fore and aft, source of the word forecastle, where archers shot down and crews dropped heavy stones onto enemy...

The word maelstrom traces back to the Moskstraumen, a system of tidal eddies and whirlpools between two of Norway's Lofoten Islands, where twice a day strong currents and tides force huge volumes of water through a narrow, shallow strait and have swallowed fishing boats for centuries. Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 story A Descent into the Maelstrom, about an old man who survived being sucked into the vor...

The idea of riding on air dates to 1716, when Emanuel Swedenborg sketched a hovering craft powered by hand pumped air. In 1915 Austrian engineer Dagobert Müller built a working air cushion torpedo boat for the Austro-Hungarian Navy that topped 32 knots in the Adriatic, yet it was scrapped for lack of interest. In the 1950s Ford's Levapad concept cars hovered a fraction of an inch up and failed on...

In 2023 Sebastian Steudtner surfed an 86 foot wave at Nazaré, Portugal, roughly the height of an eight story building. Wave riding began in several places: Peruvian fishermen rode reed craft called caballitos de totora back to shore, children in what is now Ghana and Senegal rode wood planks and rush bundles, and stand up surfing on carved boards emerged in Polynesia around 400 AD and became woven...

In July 1969 the trimaran Teignmouth Electron was found drifting in the mid Atlantic, intact and empty, with fake navigation logs and a 25,000 word philosophical essay aboard. Its sailor, Donald Crowhurst, was an electronics engineer and weekend sailor whose radio navigation business was failing when the Sunday Times launched the 1968 Golden Globe race, a solo nonstop circumnavigation with 5,000 p...

Dead reckoning estimates where you are from a known starting point, called a fix, plus your speed, heading, and elapsed time: distance equals speed times time. The phrase is not short for deduced reckoning, a claim debunked by the record, since dead reckoning appears in 1613 and deduced reckoning not until 1931. The word dead likely refers to an object stationary in the water used as a baseline. T...

When a quiet Georgia doctor and teacher named David Bush died in 1824, his neighbors learned he was really David Bushnell, who had tried to break the British blockade with a submarine. As a Yale student in 1775 he built a clockwork flintlock that could fire gunpowder inside a sealed keg underwater, then designed a way to deliver it unseen. With his brother Ezra Bushnell, carpenter Phineas Pratt, a...

On an 18th century wooden warship the greatest danger was its own gunpowder. The bulk of it sat in a reinforced magazine deep below the waterline, while the cannons fired from the decks above, so someone had to run powder and pre-made cartridges up and down steep ladders all through a battle. That job fell mostly to powder monkeys, boy seamen aged 12 to 14, chosen for speed and small size. Between...

The first open sea lighthouse went up on the Eddystone Rocks off England in 1696, when Henry Winstanley anchored an octagonal wooden tower with 12 iron stanchions. The Great Storm of 1703 tore it away with Winstanley inside. In 1759 John Smeaton rebuilt it in granite shaped like an oak trunk, with a broad curving base that bleeds off wave energy, blocks dovetailed together and pinned with marble d...

In the late 1920s naturalist William Beebe, working from Nonsuch Island in Bermuda, wanted to study a column of ocean two miles deep, but diving helmets and submarines of the day could not do it. He announced plans for a cylindrical vessel, which engineer Otis Barton recognized as a death trap. Barton designed a sphere instead, paid for it, kept ownership, and insisted on joining every dive. The s...

In spring 2016 the UK's Natural Environment Research Council opened an online poll to name its new 200 million pound polar research ship, then being built in Birkenhead. BBC radio presenter James Hand suggested Boaty McBoatface, a nod to an owl named Hootie McOwlface, and it won 33 percent of the vote against 11 percent for second place, inspiring the term McBoatfacing. Science minister Jo Johnson...

The oldest continuous trophy in international sport is a bottomless sterling silver ewer made by Garrard & Co. in London in 1848. Henry William Paget, first Marquess of Anglesey, bought it and gave it to the Royal Yacht Squadron as the prize for its 1851 race around the Isle of Wight, where the New York Yacht Club schooner America beat 15 British yachts as Queen Victoria watched. Valued at 100...

Bartolomeu Dias was born around 1450 into a Portuguese seafaring family: his ancestor Dinis Dias had reached the Cape Verde peninsula in the 1440s. Records place him at the building of São Jorge da Mina in 1481 and likely on Diogo Cão's voyages to the Congo, and by 1486 he was a cavalier at King John II's court and superintendent of the royal warehouses, paid an annuity for services to come. Aroun...

Auguste Piccard, born in Basel, Switzerland in 1884 alongside his twin brother Jean-Félix, studied at the ETH in Zurich, became a physics professor at the Free University of Brussels in 1922, and sat at the Solvay Congresses with Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein. Physicists needed clean measurements of cosmic rays, which the atmosphere degrades, so with funding from the Belgian FNRS he...

The Vendée Globe is a solo, nonstop, unassisted race around the world over roughly 44,000 kilometers, about 24,000 nautical miles. It was created as the Globe Challenge by French sailor Philippe Jeantot, who had twice won the staged BOC Challenge in the 60 foot class (1982 to 1983 and 1986 to 1987) and wanted to remove the safety net of port stops. The first edition in 1989 to 1990 had 13 starters...

Abel Tasman gave his name to a sea, an island state, a national park, a glacier, and a bridge, yet his employer judged his career a failure. Born around 1603 in the landlocked Dutch village of Lutjegast, he was an uneducated working class seaman who learned navigation on the job, joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and moved to Batavia, modern Jakarta, in 1633. In August 1642 the Council of...

Macchiato means stained or spotted, and the name began as a workflow fix. In busy mid 20th century Italian espresso bars, a plain espresso and one with a splash of milk looked identical under the crema, so baristas marked the milk cups with a dollop of foam that waiters could spot at a glance. Portugal's version, café pingado, means coffee with a drop. The traditional recipe has the highest espres...

Doppio simply means double, and a standard doppio yields 60 milliliters, about 2.0 US fluid ounces, brewed from twice the ground coffee in a larger portafilter basket. The single shot, or solo, came first, and its size was not chosen for flavor. It was the most coffee early lever machines could extract, since forcing water through a swollen bed of grounds at nine bars, roughly 130 pounds per squar...

The café wall illusion makes perfectly parallel rows of bricks look tilted into wedges. The recipe is exact: alternating dark and light bricks, rows staggered by about half a brick, and mortar lines in an intermediate gray between the two brick tones. Psychologist Hugo Münsterberg recorded a version in 1894, and in 1898 A.H. Pierce described it as the kindergarten illusion after the woven paper ma...

Ristretto means shortened in Italian, and the French call it café serré. A standard double espresso uses 14 to 18 grams of finely ground coffee extracted into about 40 milliliters over 20 to 30 seconds. A double ristretto keeps the same dose and time but pushes through only half the water, about 20 milliliters. That is not a reduction like a pan sauce, where water evaporates from a finished liquid...

The orange handle on a diner's decaf pot traces back to Bremen, Germany, in 1903, where coffee merchant Ludwig Roselius developed a commercial decaffeination process: steam the green beans, flush out the caffeine with a solvent, first benzene, then roast. He sold the coffee in Europe as Kaffee HAG, and for France he coined Sanka from sans caféine. His first US push around 1909 and 1910 used the cl...

The French press goes by many names: plunger in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, cafetière in the UK and Ireland, and Stempelkanne, or stamp pot, in Germany. A French metalsmith and a merchant, Jacques-Victor Delforge, patented a screen on a rod in 1852, but it had no seal, so pushing it down sent grounds up the sides into the coffee. The fix came from Milan in 1928 and 1929, when designe...