Today In History with The Retrospectors

Rerun. Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov was shot by a poisoned pellet whilst walking on Waterloo Bridge on 7th September, 1978. Four days later, he was dead. He believed the bullet - believed to be filled with ricin - had emanated from the umbrella of a Soviet secret agent. The British press labelled his assasination the ‘Poison Brolly Riddle’. In this episode, Olly, Rebecca and Arion explain how Ma...

Charles II, the 21 year-old King of Scotland, sought refuge up an oak tree at Boscobel House on 6th September, 1651. Having been chased out of Worcester by Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads, he feared for his life, and was disguised as a working class woodsman. The escape was much re-told upon his restoration to the throne, and highly romanticised; being committed to poetry by Cowley, prose by Peyps -...

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 Olly unco...

Our friends at The Week (where, fun fact, The Retrospectors met) have a great podcast we'd like to share with you for your Saturday listening pleasure. It's called The Overview, and it's the perfect accompaniment to our shows this week on the SOLAR APOCALYPSE and NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY - because it's about the future of nuclear power. As the world races to decarbonise, nuclear power is being touted as...

The Carrington Event - the largest solar storm in recorded history - occurred on 2nd September, 1859. Although its effects would later be felt by millions around the world, it had initially only been spotted by one amateur, British astronomer: Richard Carrington. What he’d witnessed was a giant Coronal Mass Ejection - a significant release of plasma and accompanying magnetic field from the Sun's c...

Rerun. The Nokia 3310 - featuring Snake II, pop-on/off covers, and a discreetly concealed antenna - was launched on 1st September, 2000 at a boardsports event in Dusseldorf, Germany. Nicknamed ‘the brick’, the handset went on to shift 126 million units— more than 20 times as many as the first-generation iPhone. In this episode, Olly, Rebecca and Arion marvel at a time when only 50% of people in th...

Cadbury’s Dairy Milk re-energised its flagging brand in the UK on 31st August, 2007, when its iconic ‘Gorilla’ ad premiered in the Big Brother final on Channel 4. The 90-second commercial, which featured a gorilla drumming along to Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’, was an instant hit on YouTube (a novelty back in 2007), and turned around sales for the chocolate company after a series of PR misfi...

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 each re...

When Julius Caesar showed up in the Channel with thousands of men on 26th August 55 BC, he doubtless intended to get a bit further than the coast of Kent. Unfortunately for him, he had moored his ships where they could be pelted from the cliffs, and the Gaulish chief he sent in advance had been imprisoned. Nonetheless, he reported back to Rome that his British adventure had been enormously worthwh...

Rerun. John, Paul, George and Ringo travelled to a transcendental meditation workshop in Bangor, Wales on 25th August, 1967 - at the invitation of ‘giggling guru’, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The event changed everything for The Fab Four - influencing their music, their philosophy, and ultimately contributing to the end of the band. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly question whether the retreat...

In the temple at Philae, an Egyptian Priest called Nesmeterakhem created the last ever known hieroglyphic inscription on 24th August, 394. Although ostensibly praising the God Mandulis, the scribe spent just as long commemorating his own presence - and the names of his Mum and Dad. For centuries, Western academics assumed his words might be more mysterious and spiritual than the somewhat prosaic r...

Stockholm Syndrome - the condition in which hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors during captivity - was named after a bank robbery that began on 23rd August, 1973. It lasted for five days, with 73% of the Swedish public tuning in to watch it.   The robber was Jan-Erik Olsson, who pulled a loaded submachine gun, fired at the ceiling and, disguising his voice to sound like an Ame...

The world’s first notable air raid occurred on 22nd August, 1849, when the Austrian Army attacked Venice using a fleet of 200 miniature hot air balloons, each delivering a 33lb pound bomb.  Following a disastrous first attempt - when the balloons blew back on to their own men - this time the Austrians equipped each balloon with a long copper wire to trigger the detonation.  In this episode, Arion,...

Court witnesses have promised to tell ‘the whole truth’ since the 13th century; but, on 19th August, 1992, the U.S. Appeals Court permitted Wallace Ward to stand trial under his own oath - pledging not ‘truth’, but ‘fully integrated honesty’. Ward, the president of a Nevada-based mail order company, had coined the phrase himself when he devised Neothink, a cultish belief system structured around c...

Rerun. A weather map was first broadcast on TV on 18th August, 1926 - but there were no fancy graphics, no on-screen forecaster, and only one intended recipient: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, DC. In the UK, the Met Office had been producing weather forecasts since 1861, but the BBC didn’t bring a ‘weatherman’ to British screens until 1954. In this episode, Ario...

Louis XIV was among the V.I.P. guests at Nicolas Fouquet’s lavish houseparty on 17th August, 1661 - and was supposedly so consumed with jealousy that he had Fouquet arrested for treason. Although not entirely true, the story adds to the mystique of Vaux-le-Vicomte, the opulent chateau Fouquet created with the design team who later went on to reimagine Versailles. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca an...

Aviation in the 1920s could be a lethal business, as proven on 16th August 1927, when only 2 of the 15 planes that entered The Dole Derby - a $35,000 contest to fly from California to Hawaii - successfully reached their destination.  The brainchild of pineapple magnate James D. Dole, the competition inspired the public imagination - and a crowd of 100,000 people - but claimed the lives of TEN part...

Camp Siegfried hosted a ‘Nazi Camp Fete’ for 40,000 attendees on 15th August, 1938. The Summer resort, on Yaphank, Long Island, was the epicentre of the German-American Bund: an organisation devoted to establishing a Nazi stronghold across the United States.  Alongside campfire building and swimming lessons, young attendees were taught to emulate the Hitler Youth and host mini Nuremberg-style rall...

When 42 bodies buried near Liverpool Street Station in London were dug up as part of the works on Crossrail on 12th August, 2015, they were thought to be victims of the Great Plague of 1665. The incident shone a light on the cemetery in which they were buried - a pauper’s grave at Bethlem Hospital; the institution more commonly known as ‘Bedlam’. From its establishment in 1247, Bedlam ‘lunatic asy...

Rerun. The 7,885 year-long calendar that the Mayan people used to measure long stretches of time, ‘The Long Count’, began on 11th August, 3114 B.C. The combination of a Haabʼ and a Tzolkʼin date identifies a day in a combination which does not occur again for 18,980 days (52 Haabʼ cycles of 365 days equals 73 Tzolkʼin cycles of 260 days, approximately 52 years), a period known as the Calendar Roun...

Rin Tin Tin, the German Shepherd who starred in more than 27 Hollywood films, died on 10th August, 1932 at the age of 13. Radio stations around the country interrupted programming to announce his death and then broadcast an hour long tribute to him.  Discovered in war-torn France by American corporal Lee Duncan, he was taken back to the USA and trained to be a stunt dog, but it was his emotional c...

Construction began on a white marble bell tower for Pisa’s new Cathedral complex on 9th August, 1173. Little did the engineers working on the project know that their building would become famous all over the world, because of its principal flaw: it wasn’t straight. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is now one of Europe’s biggest tourist attractions, and perhaps the most monitored building in the world. Mi...

Abbey Road was a street known only to North Londoners until The Beatles posed on the zebra crossing outside EMI Studios on 8th August, 1969. Photographer Iain MacMillan took just six snaps, one of which graced the front cover of their penultimate album, ‘Abbey Road’. The image became instantly iconic, partly due to the decision not to name the band or the album on the front of LP. It even spurred...

Little Orphan Annie, Harold Gray’s plucky heroine, made her newspaper debut on 5th August, 1924. The iconic comic strip then ran for an astonishing 86 years. Although now most associated with the saccharine musical it inspired, ‘Annie’ was MUCH edgier in comic form - gangsters and Nazis made an appearance, and Daddy Warbucks was so disappointed by the election of FDR that he DIED (briefly. Before...

Rerun. Benedictine monk Dom Perignon is said to have discovered champagne on 4th August, 1693. 200 million bottles are now produced and sold every year. The sparkliness was originally considered a defect - because carbonated wine caused the fragile bottles of the era to burst. Until stronger glass was developed in the mid-19th century, mass-produced champagne was impossible to manufacture, so it g...