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Page 64 of 82
Q1564
WonderHistory

In the 1920s young women painted glowing radium dials onto watches, shaping their brushes with their lips as instructed. When they began to fall ill, their fight for compensation helped create modern workplace safety law.

Radium paint made dials readable in the dark, and the work was well paid and thought glamorous — some workers painted their nails and teeth with it for a night out. Their employers knew the danger and protected their own chemists while telling the women it was harmless. Five of them, the 'Radium Girls' of New Jersey, sued while gravely ill. Their case established that workers could sue employers for occupational disease, shaped the safety standards that followed, and later informed the protection of Manhattan Project staff.

Labour historyRead card
Q1565
WonderSpace

In 1977 an Ohio radio telescope picked up a narrow, powerful signal from the direction of Sagittarius. The astronomer checking the printout circled it and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin. Nothing like it has been heard since.

The Big Ear telescope was scanning for narrowband transmissions — the kind nature rarely makes and technology often does. The signal lasted 72 seconds, exactly the window Big Ear could observe one point of sky, and it sat close to the frequency of hydrogen, a plausible channel for anyone trying to be heard. Jerry Ehman's red-pen 'Wow!' gave it its name. Repeated searches have never recovered it, and recent work suggests a natural source — a cloud of hydrogen briefly lit up. Probably not aliens. Still unexplained enough to keep the file open.

Ohio State UniversityRead card
Q1566
WonderTechnology

In 1983 an Air Canada jet ran out of fuel at 12,500 metres because someone had calculated the load in pounds instead of kilograms. The pilots glided it down and landed on a disused runway that had become a racetrack.

Canada had recently gone metric, and the fuelling sum was done with the old conversion factor, leaving the aircraft with about half the fuel it needed. Both engines stopped mid-flight. Captain Bob Pearson happened to be an experienced glider pilot; first officer Maurice Quintal remembered a former airbase at Gimli, Manitoba. It was now a drag-racing strip, with a race meeting under way. They landed the airliner on it, nose gear collapsed, and stopped short of the crowd. Nobody was seriously hurt.

Aviation historyRead card
Q1567
WonderHistory

In 1971 a lightning strike tore apart an airliner over Peru. Juliane Koepcke, seventeen, fell three kilometres still strapped to her seat, landed alive in the rainforest, and walked for eleven days to find help.

She was the only one of 92 aboard to survive, with a broken collarbone and a gashed arm. Her parents were biologists who had raised her at a jungle research station, and her father's advice saved her: follow water downstream, because moving water leads to people. She waded and floated for eleven days, keeping to the river, and reached a hut where lumber workers found her. Werner Herzog — who had narrowly missed that same flight — later made a documentary with her about it.

LANSA Flight 508Read card
Q1568
WonderHistory

In 1972 a bomb destroyed a Yugoslav airliner at 10,160 metres. Flight attendant Vesna Vulović fell in a section of the fuselage, landed in deep snow, and survived — the highest fall without a parachute anyone is known to have walked away from.

She was 22 and was not even meant to be on the flight — a scheduling mix-up put her aboard in place of another Vesna. Being trapped in a fuselage section, wedged by a food trolley, is thought to have slowed her fall, and the snow-covered slope she hit did the rest. She was in a coma for days and paralysed from the waist down for a time, but eventually walked again. She remembered nothing of the fall, and said afterwards she was never frightened of flying.

Guinness World RecordsRead card
Q1569
WonderHistory

In 1848 a railway explosion drove a metre-long iron rod through Phineas Gage's skull. He survived, walked and talked — but those who knew him said his character had changed, and modern neuroscience began.

The tamping iron entered under his cheekbone and exited through the top of his head, destroying much of his left frontal lobe. He was conscious within minutes and back on his feet in weeks. Reports that he became impulsive and unreliable were the first strong evidence that specific regions of the brain govern personality and judgement, not just movement and speech. Later scholars think the 'no longer Gage' story was exaggerated — he went on to work as a stagecoach driver in Chile, which takes considerable competence.

Neuroscience historyRead card
Q1570
WonderTechnology

After a walk in the Alps in 1941, George de Mestral grew curious about the burrs stuck to his dog. Under a microscope he found tiny hooks catching in loops of fur — and spent the next decade turning that into Velcro.

Most people pull the burrs off and think no more about it. De Mestral, a Swiss engineer, looked closer and saw a fastening system nature had already solved. It took years to work out how to mass-produce hooks and loops in nylon; textile manufacturers thought the idea absurd. He named it from velours and crochet — velvet and hook. It is one of the founding examples of biomimicry, the practice of copying nature's engineering, and it went to the Moon on Apollo spacesuits.

Invention historyRead card
Q1571
WonderTechnology

In 1913 a Sheffield metallurgist was trying to make gun barrels last longer. His experiment failed and the samples went on the scrap pile — where he noticed weeks later that one of them had not rusted.

Harry Brearley left school at twelve and taught himself chemistry in the evenings. Adding chromium to steel had not solved the erosion problem he was hired to fix, so the offcuts were discarded. Passing the heap later, he saw one sample still bright while the rest had gone brown — chromium forms an invisible oxide film that seals the surface. He saw at once that it belonged in cutlery rather than artillery. Sheffield called it 'rustless steel' at first, and the world eventually settled on stainless.

Invention historyRead card
Q1572
WonderFood

In 1905 Frank Epperson left a cup of fruit soda on his porch overnight with the stirring stick still in it. San Francisco froze, and he came out to find the first ice lolly. He patented it eighteen years later.

He was eleven. He showed it to friends, kept making them, and only in 1924 filed a patent for 'frozen confection on a handle', originally selling them as Epsicles. His children reportedly preferred 'Pop's 'sicles' — hence popsicle. The company was sold during the Great Depression and became a global business. It is the tidiest example of the general rule that many inventions are simply an accident somebody bothered to notice twice.

Invention historyRead card
Q1573
WonderSpace

In 1967 a PhD student found a pulse in her data repeating every 1.3 seconds — so regular it was half-jokingly labelled LGM-1, for little green men. She had discovered pulsars. The Nobel went to her supervisor.

Bell Burnell was analysing miles of paper chart from a radio telescope she had helped build at Cambridge when she noticed a bit of 'scruff' that kept returning. It proved to be a neutron star spinning several times a second and sweeping a beam past Earth — a lighthouse the size of a city, made of collapsed stellar matter. The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle, not to her. She has consistently declined to be bitter about it, and in 2018 gave a $3 million prize away to fund physics students from under-represented backgrounds.

Astronomy historyRead card
Q1574
WonderScience

In 1896 Henri Becquerel planned to test whether sunlight made uranium salts glow. Paris clouded over, so he shut everything in a drawer. Days later the photographic plate was fogged anyway — the uranium had been shining on its own.

His hypothesis was wrong in the most productive way possible: he thought sunlight was required, and the experiment proved it was not. Uranium emitted something entirely by itself. Marie and Pierre Curie took up the work, named the phenomenon radioactivity, and the three shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. A week of bad weather in Paris opened the door to nuclear physics, medical imaging and radiotherapy — and to a century of learning, painfully, how to handle what was found.

Physics historyRead card
Q1575
WonderTechnology

In 1903 a French chemist knocked a glass flask off a shelf. It cracked but held its shape — a film of dried plastic inside had kept the pieces together. Car windscreens have worked that way ever since.

The flask had held cellulose nitrate, which had evaporated and left a clear lining. Bénédictus thought little of it until he read newspaper accounts of drivers badly cut by flying windscreen glass in the new motor cars. He went back to the flask, patented laminated glass, and the motor industry — initially reluctant about the cost — adopted it once the accident figures became impossible to ignore. The same sandwich of glass and plastic is in the windscreen of every car on the road today.

Invention historyRead card
Q1576
WonderScience

In 1965 a chemist produced a liquid so cloudy and thin that the technician refused to spin it. She insisted. The fibre that came out was five times stronger than steel by weight — Kevlar.

Kwolek was at DuPont looking for a fibre strong enough for lighter tyres. The batch looked like a mistake — normally the solution should be clear and syrupy. She persuaded a reluctant colleague to run it through the spinneret anyway, and it did not break. Kevlar now appears in body armour, helmets, cables, aircraft and gloves, and is credited with saving thousands of lives. She never personally profited much from the patent, which belonged to her employer, and spent her later career encouraging girls into chemistry.

Invention historyRead card
Q1577
WonderHealth

Cattle in 1930s America were bleeding to death from spoiled hay. The chemical behind it became a rat poison — and then warfarin, the blood thinner that has kept millions of people from having strokes.

A Wisconsin farmer drove through a blizzard in 1933 with a dead cow and a bucket of blood that would not clot, looking for someone who could explain it. Biochemist Karl Link traced it to mouldy sweet clover, which produces an anticoagulant. Sold first as rat poison — rats die of internal bleeding — it was later found safe in controlled human doses. President Eisenhower was given it after his heart attack in 1955, which did much for its reputation. It remains one of the most prescribed drugs in the world.

Medical historyRead card
Q1578
WonderHistory

Britain searched for Franklin's lost Arctic ships for 170 years. They were finally found in 2014 and 2016, close to where Inuit oral accounts had always said they would be.

Franklin's 1845 expedition vanished with 129 men while seeking the Northwest Passage. Victorian search parties dismissed Inuit testimony describing where a ship had sunk and where starving sailors had walked. Those accounts, passed down for generations, turned out to be accurate: Erebus was located in 2014 and Terror in 2016, both in the areas Inuit knowledge indicated. The wrecks are remarkably preserved in cold water — divers have found plates still stacked in cupboards — and the search is now a case study in taking indigenous knowledge seriously.

Parks CanadaRead card
Q1579
WonderArt

The Amber Room was a chamber lined entirely in carved amber, gold and mirrors, called the eighth wonder of the world. German troops dismantled and shipped it in 1941, and it has not been seen since.

Built in Prussia and given to Russia's Peter the Great, it covered 55 square metres in six tonnes of amber lit by candles, glowing gold. During the invasion of the Soviet Union it was crated up and taken to Königsberg, and the trail ends there — burnt in the 1944 bombing, sunk on a ship, or hidden in a mine, depending on which theory you follow. Hunters still search. A full reconstruction, taking 24 years and using the original methods, opened near St Petersburg in 2003.

Art historyRead card
Q1580
WonderArt

Accused of selling a Dutch national treasure to the Nazis, Han van Meegeren faced execution for treason. His defence was that the painting was not a Vermeer at all — it was his own forgery. To prove it, he painted another one in his cell.

Van Meegeren was a mediocre painter dismissed by critics, so he set out to fool them. He aged canvases, mixed period pigments and baked his work to crack the varnish, then sold 'lost Vermeers' to the greatest experts of the day. One reached Hermann Göring. After the war that made him a collaborator, so he confessed to the lesser crime of fraud — and the court made him paint under supervision to check. He was convicted of forgery and became, briefly, a folk hero for having swindled the Reich.

Art historyRead card
Q1581
WonderHistory

In July 1518 a woman began dancing in the streets of Strasbourg and could not stop. Within a month around 400 people had joined her, some dancing until they dropped. Nobody has fully explained it.

The city's records are clear that it happened; physicians of the day concluded it was 'hot blood' and — disastrously — prescribed more dancing, hiring musicians and clearing halls. Explanations since have included ergot poisoning from mouldy rye and mass psychogenic illness brought on by famine, disease and dread. The second fits better: the region had endured years of hunger and plague, and stress-driven outbreaks of this kind are documented elsewhere. It is a reminder that the mind can produce physical epidemics.

Medical historyRead card
Q1582
WonderHistory

After a munitions ship exploded in Halifax harbour in 1917, Boston sent doctors and supplies overnight. Nova Scotia has sent Boston a Christmas tree nearly every year since.

The blast was the largest man-made explosion before nuclear weapons — roughly 2,000 people died and a square mile of the city was flattened. Boston's relief train left within hours, through a blizzard, arriving with medical staff before many Canadian teams could. Halifax sent a tree in thanks the following Christmas, and revived the gesture permanently in 1971. Every year Nova Scotia picks a large spruce and ships it to Boston Common, where it is lit in early December — a thank-you note over a century long.

HistoryRead card
Q1583
WonderHistory

In 897 Pope Stephen VI had the body of Pope Formosus dug up, dressed in papal robes and propped on a throne to stand trial. A deacon was made to answer on the corpse's behalf. It was found guilty.

Formosus had been dead for months. The charges were political — the papacy was a prize fought over by Roman factions — and the verdict stripped him of his titles, annulled his acts and had three fingers removed from his right hand, the ones used in blessing. The body was thrown into the Tiber. Public revulsion was such that Stephen was imprisoned and strangled within the year, and later popes annulled the trial. It remains the strangest proceeding in the history of the Church.

HistoryRead card
Q1584
WonderHistory

In 1918 nearly 200 American soldiers were trapped behind German lines and being shelled by their own artillery. A homing pigeon called Cher Ami flew 40 km through fire, shot through the breast, to deliver the message that stopped it.

The 'Lost Battalion' had sent two earlier birds; both were shot down. Cher Ami got through despite being hit, arriving blinded in one eye with a leg hanging by a tendon and the message capsule still attached to it. The barrage lifted and 194 men were rescued. Army medics saved the bird and carved it a small wooden leg. Cher Ami was awarded the French Croix de Guerre and is preserved at the Smithsonian, where it has been on display for over a century.

Military historyRead card
Q1585
WonderHistory

In twelfth-century Suffolk, villagers found a boy and girl with green-tinged skin who spoke an unknown language and would eat nothing but raw beans. The girl grew up, married locally, and said they had come from a land with no sun.

Two independent chroniclers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, recorded the story within living memory of the events. The boy sickened and died; the girl learned English, lost her colour once she ate a wider diet, and settled. The likeliest reading is not magic but hunger: green skin fits severe malnutrition, and the children may have been Flemish orphans, speaking an unfamiliar tongue after their community was scattered. It is one of the few English folk tales with sober medieval sources behind it.

Medieval chroniclesRead card
Q1586
WonderTechnology

In 1938 Douglas Corrigan was refused permission to fly the Atlantic. He took off from New York saying he was going to California, and landed 28 hours later in Dublin, claiming he had misread his compass. Nobody believed him, and nobody minded.

Corrigan had helped build Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis and had been applying for years to make his own crossing; his patched-up aircraft was repeatedly judged unfit. So he filed for a transcontinental flight, pointed the nose east into the cloud, and turned up in Ireland. Officials suspended his licence for precisely the length of his voyage home. America adored him — he got a ticker-tape parade bigger than Lindbergh's — and he maintained the compass story, straight-faced, for the rest of his life.

Aviation historyRead card
Q1587
WonderScience

After surgery in 1953, Henry Molaison could no longer form new long-term memories. He met his doctors afresh for fifty years — and in doing so became the most important patient in the history of memory research.

An operation to control severe epilepsy removed much of his hippocampus on both sides. It stopped the seizures and stopped his memory. Crucially, he could still learn physical skills — practising a tracing task, he improved daily while insisting each time he had never done it before. That split proved memory is not one system but several, stored in different places, and it underpins nearly everything we now know about how remembering works. Only after his death was his name published; in life he was known simply as H.M.

Neuroscience historyRead card