Witness History

In November 1975, a summit took place at Rambouillet, France, where the heads of six of the world’s most industrialised nations and their finance ministers came together. The leaders of the US, France, Germany, Britain, Japan and Italy hoped to solve the ongoing economic crisis. The summit marked the birth of an institution now known as the G7. France’s former Finance Minister, Jean-Pierre Fourcad...

On 14 October 1947, American Chuck Yeager became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. Despite having two broken ribs, Chuck reached Mach 1.06 – a speed of more than 1,100km per hour. He flew an orange, single-seated, rocket-powered Bell X-1, 13,000m above the Mojave Desert in California. Produced and presented by Rachel Naylor, in collaboration with BBC Archives. Eye-witness acco...

In 2012, a shepherd uncovered a bone belonging to a new species of dinosaur on a ranch in Patagonia, in Argentina. A team from the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio found more than 150 bones, belonging to six skeletons. The Patagotitan, a type of titanosaur, was 40 metres long, 20 metres tall and weighed 77 tonnes. Rachel Naylor spoke to Dr Diego Pol, a palaeontologist who led the dig. Eye-wi...

In 1971, an American historical document typed out on a university computer played a vital role in the digital revolution of electronic books. It became the foundation of Project Gutenberg. Michael Hart, the visionary behind the project, later became known as the ‘father of e-books’.His close friend, Greg Newby, who was Project Gutenberg’s CEO and director, tells Gill Kearsley how a bike ride to a...

It's 70 years since Miffy was created. The little rabbit with two dots for eyes and an X for a mouth went on to feature in 32 books translated into more than 50 languages. The Dutch author and illustrator Dick Bruna reveals in his own words from the BBC archive that in the beginning, his black outlined illustrations with bold colours were controversial with parents. But children loved them. Miffy,...

In 1999, the US Senate chamber in Washington DC was turned into a court to put President Bill Clinton on trial, after he admitted lying about an affair with an intern called Monica Lewinsky. In 2011, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary spoke to Neil Razzell. Joe Lockhart recounted the impeachment and the fight to save his presidency. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness Histo...

In 1965, a groundbreaking children's show using cutting-edge puppets first blast onto television screens. Thunderbirds was set in 2065 and followed the antics of secret organisation ‘International Rescue’ which was manned by Jeff Tracy, his team of five sons and agent Lady Penelope. Set up to save humanity, the characters travelled in futuristic vehicles across land, sea and air from their remote...

Emerante de Pradines was a Haitian singer, dancer and folklorist who became the first person from her country to sign a record deal. She was dedicated to de-demonising vodou music and folklore and went on to teach dance at some of America’s most prestigious universities. Her son Richard Morse speaks to Emma Forde about his mother’s life and her legacy. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archi...

The night before Halloween in 1938, 23-year-old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air performed a radio adaptation of HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds. It would become one of the most notorious radio broadcasts in history. In their own words, from the BBC's archive, Orson Welles, producer John Houseman and writer Howard Koch describe how it was "a very boring show" until they had the ide...

It's 30 years since a massacre of Bosnian Muslims during the war in the former Yugoslavia. The Srebrenica massacre, recognised by the United Nations as a genocide, was the shocking climax of the war in Bosnia. In 2014, Louise Hidalgo talked to Hasan Nuhanović whose father, brother and mother were among the 8,000 Bosnians killed. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is f...

An estimated 2 million stents are implanted into people’s hearts around the world each year – making it one of the key treatments for heart disease. The treatment was invented by Argentinian doctor Julio Palmaz, who credits a piece of metal being left by a construction worker in his home as inspiration for the structure of the stent. Collaborating with a US Army cardiologist and getting funding fr...

The 1977 murder of Father Rutilio Grande sent shockwaves through El Salvador. The 48-year-old Jesuit priest was an outspoken champion of the poor in the deeply divided central American nation. In the immediate aftermath of his murder, the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, took the unprecedented step of holding just one single mass, ordering all other churches in his archdiocese to cancel t...

In May 1974, scratch cards went on sale for the first time in the US State of Massachusetts. Free giveaway and coupon games from stores had been commonplace across the USA during the 1950s and '60s – but players could easily cheat. The mathematician John Koza was hired to make the games more secure; he succeeded in making the modern-day scratch card. He tells Johnny I’Anson how he convinced the st...

In the 1980s, scientists made a discovery that would eventually lead to the development of drugs now used worldwide to treat diabetes and to help people manage obesity through weight loss injections. One of the key scientists behind this breakthrough was Svetlana Mojsov. She discovered that a hormone called GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) plays an important role in how our bodies respond to food....

Sonny Roberts, a Jamaican carpenter, arrived in Britain in the 1950s. It was a time of racial disharmony, including the Notting Hill riots and the murder of Kelso Cochrane. In this tense atmosphere, black musicians struggled to make a name for themselves. Then in 1961, Roberts set up the UK’s first black-owned music studio, Planetone, in a basement in Kilburn. The studio gave the Caribbean communi...

In 2004, the Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, a grass-roots organisation empowering local women to plant trees. It spread to other African countries and contributed to the planting of over 30 million trees. In 2016, Alex Last spoke to her daughter, Wanjira. Eye-witness accounts bro...

In 1958, the British oil tanker, SS San Flaviano, was sunk in the harbour of Balikpapan, Indonesia, while a rebellion was underway against President Ahmed Sukarno. It’s reported the bomb was dropped by a CIA pilot authorised to aid the rebels, but confirming their involvement has required some investigating. Megan Jones has been looking into it and speaking to Joseph McCorry who was forced to evac...

The first Moomins story about a family of nature-loving white round trolls was published in 1945 during World War Two. The Moomins and the Great Flood was created by writer and artist Tove Jansson as a source of comfort during bleak times. It highlighted the struggles of those who’d been displaced by war introducing readers into the lives of Moomintroll, Moominmamma and Moominpappa. Tove's tales a...

In 1995, a single 30-something woman with big knickers and blue soup first appeared in a weekly column, published by British newspaper The Independent. Initially written anonymously by journalist Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones quickly became a cultural icon, as she tried to make sense of life and love. The book, Bridget Jones’s Diary, became a best-seller in 1996 and the character has gone on to fe...

In 1965, two writers were accused of publishing anti-Soviet material abroad. The arrest of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky was seen as symbolic of the new era in the Soviet Union. The liberal leader Nikita Khrushchev had been ousted in favour of hardliner Leonid Brezhnev, and dissenting political views were being cracked down on. In a moment considered the start of the dissident movement in the S...

In 1961, the Argentine poet and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges won the Formentor Prize for literature. Borges’ stories were characterised by mind-bending plots often featuring labyrinths, dreams and fables. Following his recognition in 1961, his reputation grew to such an extent that he is regarded as one of the most influential Latin American writers in history, as Ben Henderson reveals usi...

Published in 1991, Faceless Killers was the first of Henning Mankell’s crime novels featuring police inspector Kurt Wallander. The series changed the world of crime writing, introducing gritty social realism. The Wallander novels helped establish Scandinavia as the epicentre of crime fiction. Henning Mankell’s former agent Anneli Høier speaks to Ben Henderson about the rise of Nordic Noir. Extract...

In 2001, a few months after 9/11, economist Jim O’Neill was working at Goldman Sachs when he wrote a report about which countries might become big players in the world economy. That’s when he came up with the name BRIC - short for Brazil, Russia, India and China. At first, nothing much happened. But in 2009, those countries took his idea and ran with it, holding their first summit. Since then, the...

Eighty years ago, in the autumn of 1945, World War II surrender ceremonies took place across the Japanese Empire. The one in China was held at the Forbidden City in Beijing bringing an end to eight years of occupation. Thousands of people watched the incredible moment Japanese generals handed over their swords. The United States, China, Russia and the United Kingdom were all represented. John Stan...

On 10 October 1961, a volcanic eruption threatened the population of Tristan da Cunha, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, and all 264 islanders were evacuated to the UK.Two years later, the majority voted to return. In an interview she gave to the BBC in 1961, Mary Swain describes what it was like to survive the preceding earthquake and landside and be relocated to the other side...