Today In History with The Retrospectors

Journalists, exhibitors and producers packed the Ambassador Hotel Theater, Los Angeles on 27th September, 1922 - to see the first ever paid-for screening of a 3-D film, ‘The Power Of Love’. Using an anaglyph system (meaning the 3-D glasses had two tinted lenses; one red, one green), viewers were told they could select a happy or sad ending - by closing one of their eyes. In this episode, Arion, Re...

Rerun: Jean Bernadotte’s dad, a local prosecutor in the southwestern French city of Pau, intended for his son to follow in his footsteps as a lawyer. Instead, Jean became heir to the Swedish Crown on September 26th, 1810, and his descendants still sit on the Swedish throne to this day. Shortly after he moved to Sweden, the new crown prince was joined by his wife, Désirée, and their 11-year-old son...

Billy Graham’s Los Angeles Crusade started modestly on 25th September, 1949. But after newspaper giant William Randolph Hearst told his editors to "puff Graham", the nightly revival meetings exploded in popularity, becoming a ‘sin-smashing sensation’, and Graham soon became America’s favourite preacher. His style was perfect for the Hollywood backdrop. At just 30 years old, Graham had a youthful,...

The ‘Austenmania’ craze of the mid-90s kicked off with the BBC’s production of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, which first aired on 24th September, 1995. Now primarily remembered for Colin Firth’s ‘wet shirt’ scene, Andrew Davies’s ‘sexed up’ adaptation also starred Firth’s real-life squeeze Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet, and was the first serialisation of the novel to be filmed on location, with pictu...

The most extravagant feast of the Middle Ages took place at the London home of the Bishop of Durham on September 23rd, 1387, in honour of King Richard II.  The banquet featured dishes like broth, venison, roasted swan, and boar-heads… and  12,000 eggs.  At just 20 years old, Richard had already developed a reputation for extravagant tastes, employing 2,000 cooks to feed his court. But, despite the...

Rerun: Henry Winkler, an accomplished water-skier, had asked the producers of ‘Happy Days’ if he could showcase his skills on the sitcom. On 20th September, 1977 his wish came true - in a shark-jumping sequence so absurd it would forever be linked with the irreversible artistic decline of long-running TV series. To ‘Jump the Shark’ was a phrase coined some eight years later by college roommates Se...

Rerun: Powered by steam engines, and positioned on 60ft poles along the seafront, the Blackpool illuminations were first shown to adoring public on 19th September, 1879. 70,000 people came to see eight arc lamps, positioned 320 yards apart. Between them they provided illumination equal to 48,000 candles: an incredible spectacle considering it would still be another year before Thomas Edison patent...

The first Paralympic Games - hosting 400 athletes from 23 countries - took place in Rome on 18th September, 1960.  But it was only known by this name retrospectively: the day it took place, this festival of disabled sport was called The Ninth Annual International Stoke Mandeville Games. Sprung from a competition held at a hospital in Buckinghamshire, and pioneered by German-Jewish neurosurgeon Dr....

Mary, ‘King’ of Hungary, was coronated today in history, on 17th September, 1382.  The Hungarian nobility had never had a female monarch, and did not recognize the possibility of one in law, so decided to crown her as if she was male - but that was by no means the end of her problems. Before long, Charles of Naples was leading a rebellion to overthrow the child monarch. In this episode, The Retros...

The largest land rush in history kicked off on 16th September, 1893 - on Oklahoma's Cherokee Strip. Tens of thousands of people—horseback riders, wagons, and even a passenger train—waited for a cannon’s boom to initiate a mad race for land. The term "Boomer" became synonymous with those waiting for that cannon's boom to charge in, while "Sooners" were the sneaky folks who snuck into the land early...

Rerun: Kanye West was ejected from Radio City Music Hall at the MTV VMAs on 13th September, 2009, after drunkenly interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video. Distraught that the country star’s ‘You Belong To Me’ video has beaten Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ to the trophy, he memorably proclaimed: “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one...

Rerun: NBC premiered ‘Royal Flush’ - the pilot episode of iconic Sixties pop-comedy show The Monkees - on 12th September, 1966. And the Daydream Believers quickly found their way into America’s heart… The Beatles-a-like actors had never met or worked with each other ever before answering an ad seeking ‘four insane boys, aged 18-21’, placed by‘Five Easy Pieces’ producer Bob Rafelson. In this episod...

Captain Peter Warner and his crew made a startling discovery as they sailed past the uninhabited island of Atta in the Pacific on 11th September, 1966: six naked, shaggy-haired teenage boys, who had been stranded there for fifteen months. Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke, and Mano had escaped from their boarding school in Tonga's capital, Nuku'alofa, having "borrowed" a boat and embarked on a spo...

Chicagoans gathered around their radio sets on 10th September, 1924 - to hear Judge John R. Caverly sentence wealthy teenagers and lovers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to life in prison for the brutal murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks. The couple showed no remorse, exhibited a complete lack of empathy, and said they had committed their crime "because we damn well wanted to", but were nonetheles...

The viral phrase ‘OMG’ has a much longer history than you might think… first being recorded on 9th September, 1917, in a letter from Lord John Fisher, a 75-year-old retired admiral, to Winston Churchill.  Fisher used it sarcastically, riffing on the idea of a new order of knighthood; playing off the similar-sounding "OM," the Order of Merit, which he himself had received. While his pun was witty,...

Rerun: Clarence Saunders opened the world’s first self-service supermarket, ‘Piggly Wiggly’, in Memphis, Tennessee on 6th September, 1916. Calculating that the revenues gained through impulse purchases would outweigh those lost from shoplifting, Saunders’ concept forever changed the world of shopping for groceries - but his business acumen did not last. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly rev...

Rerun: Peter The Great levied a tax on facial hair on 5th September, 1698, requiring every man in Moscow to shave or stump up some cash - although there were exemptions for the Orthodox Church. The hare-brained scheme occurred to the eccentric Peter on his expeditions through Europe, where he came to see clean chins as symbolic of progress and sophistication. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Ol...

When 90 Irish nobles, led by the Earl of Tyrconnell and the Earl of Tyrone, fled for Normandy in the dead of night on 4th September, 1607, their intentions were not entirely clear.  Their escape, which became known as the ‘Flight of the Earls’, was mainly a bid for freedom from the tightening grip of English Protestant rule - but did they intend to return, securing support for a rebellion against...

In today’s episode Arion, Rebecca and Olly look into the founding of the massive multinational e-commerce company eBay. On the day it went live it was named AuctionWeb, and was just one project among many being built by its creator, Pierre Omidyar. In fact, a significant part of the site was dedicated to information about Ebola, which happened to be a pet interest of Omidyar. In this episode, The...

Millperra, a quiet suburb in southwest Sydney, is now best known for a tragic event that took place on 2nd September, 1984: a violent shootout between two biker gangs, the Comancheros and the Bandidos, which became known as the ‘Father’s Day Massacre’. As 19 armed Comancheros ambushed the Bandidos in a car park during a motorcycle swap meet, the situation quickly spiralled out of control, with gun...

Rerun: After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets and Americans agreed to install a ‘hot line’ between their Presidents. On 30th August, 1963, a 10,000 mile transatlantic Washington-Moscow cable went live from the Pentagon to Red Square. In the public imagination (in part thanks to Kubrik’s ‘Dr Strangelove’), it remains a red telephone - but it is, in fact, a pair of beige teletype machines that...

When Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Reed Hastings and Mark Randolph registered the website that would become Netflix on 29th August, 1997, they named it ‘Kibble’ after a previous idea they had for a dogfood company. But their new concept - mailing DVDs out in the post - would become one of the big success stories of the dotcom era. To test the model, they sent a Patsy Cline CD through the mail; with...

Larry Donovan made headlines by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge on 28th August, 1886: a daring feat that earned him the name of the ‘Champion Jumper of the World’ and a reputation for daredevil jumps that ultimately led to his early death. Donovan, who worked for the Police Gazette, an early men's magazine filled with sensational stories, prepared for the jump via a mix of practicality and showman...

The awesome, brutal power of the Krakatoa eruption, which had the explosive force of a 200-megatonne bomb, killed more than 36,000 people and cooled the entire Earth by an average of 0.6°C. Curiously, Krakatoa is not the most powerful volcanic eruption in history, but it is perhaps the most famous because it became one of the first global catastrophes, due in large part to the newly installed worl...

Rerun: Howard Hawks’ film noir ‘The Big Sleep’ finally hit cinemas on 23rd August, 1946, after extra crowd-pleasing repartee had been inserted, featuring real life couple Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. But more flirtation meant less exposition - making the plot of the detective story notoriously difficult to follow, even to the extent that the filmmakers had to call author Raymond Chandler to...