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The long now

History

Empires, inventions, ruptures and overlooked lives that still shape the present tense.

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Q1313
WonderHistory

During WWII, a bear named Wojtek was officially enlisted in the Polish army and carried artillery shells into battle.

Adopted as a cub by Polish soldiers in Iran in 1942, Wojtek grew into a 200-kilogram brown bear. To bring him aboard a British transport ship, the men formally enlisted him — with a name, rank and serial number — in the 22nd Artillery Supply Company. At the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944 he carried crates of shells to the guns, reportedly never dropping one. He spent his last years in Edinburgh Zoo.

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Q1316
WonderScience

Marie Curie's notebooks are still so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes.

Curie handled radium with bare hands and carried glowing test tubes in her pockets, unaware of the danger. More than a century on, her laboratory notebooks — held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris — remain contaminated with radium-226, whose half-life is 1,600 years. They are stored in lead-lined boxes, and researchers must sign a waiver and wear protection to view them. They will stay hazardous for another 1,500 years.

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Q1319
WonderScience

The largest desert on Earth is Antarctica.

A desert is defined by how little precipitation it receives, not by heat or sand. By that measure Antarctica — about 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million sq mi) where almost no rain or snow falls in the dry interior — is the biggest desert on the planet, larger than the Sahara. Parts of its 'Dry Valleys' may not have seen rainfall in millions of years.

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Q1322
WonderScience

The point on Earth's surface closest to outer space is not Everest, but Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.

Everest is the highest above sea level, but Earth is not a perfect sphere — it bulges at the equator. Chimborazo sits almost on that bulge, one degree south of the equator, so although its summit is over 2,500 metres (8,200 feet) lower than Everest's by sea level, it stands about 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) farther from the planet's centre. Measured from the middle of the Earth, its peak is the closest solid ground to space.

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Q1323
WonderScience

The Sahara was green grassland dotted with lakes as recently as 6,000 years ago.

For thousands of years during the 'African Humid Period', a wobble in Earth's orbit shifted the monsoon north and turned today's largest hot desert into savanna. Rock art there shows people herding cattle, and swimming, beside lakes and rivers now buried under sand. The greening ended only a few thousand years ago as the climate slowly dried — a reminder that even deserts are chapters, not permanent states.

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Q1327
WonderTechnology

Nintendo is older than the automobile industry — it was founded in 1889 to make playing cards.

Long before video games, Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a small shop in Kyoto in 1889 selling handmade 'hanafuda' flower cards. Nintendo made playing cards for decades, dabbling in taxis, instant rice and love hotels before finding its future in electronic games in the 1970s. It still prints playing cards in Japan today — a company that has quietly outlived most of the industries it was born alongside.

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Q1329
WonderScience

Carrots were purple and yellow long before the familiar orange ones existed.

The earliest cultivated carrots, grown in and around Persia over a thousand years ago, were purple and yellow. The orange carrot we treat as default appeared much later, bred up in the Netherlands around the 16th–17th centuries, and only then spread across the world. The 'normal' colour of a vegetable turns out to be a fairly recent human choice, not a fact of nature.

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Q1330
WonderHistory

Scotland's official national animal is the unicorn.

Since at least the 1400s the unicorn — a symbol of purity, independence and untameable strength in medieval myth — has been a heraldic emblem of Scotland, and it still appears, chained, on the royal coat of arms. The chain was said to signify a power so fierce that only a king could hold it. A nation chose, quite deliberately, a creature that does not exist to stand for what it values.

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Q1335
WonderHistory

A king penguin at Edinburgh Zoo has been knighted and holds a real rank in Norway's King's Guard.

Since 1972 the Norwegian King's Guard has adopted a king penguin as its mascot, promoting the bird over the years during ceremonial visits. The current holder, Sir Nils Olav III, was knighted with royal approval in 2008 and has since risen to Major General. Passed down through a line of penguins, the tradition is affectionate and entirely official — soldiers really do parade and salute him.

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Q1336
WonderHistory

The first passengers of a hot-air balloon were a sheep, a duck and a rooster.

In September 1783, before risking a human, the Montgolfier brothers sent up a balloon over Versailles carrying three animals as a test — watched by King Louis XVI and a vast crowd. The eight-minute flight was meant to check whether the air high above was safe to breathe. All three landed unharmed, and two months later humans made the first crewed ascent. Progress, as often, sent the animals first.

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Q1342
WonderHistory

Çatalhöyük had no streets in the usual sense; people entered many homes through roofs and moved across connected rooftops.

The Neolithic settlement's dense layout challenges modern assumptions about streets, doors and neighbourhoods. Roof access may have helped organise movement, work and social life in a very different urban pattern. This matters globally because cities did not have to begin like ours. The lesson: human settlement has more than one blueprint.

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Q1354
WonderHistory

A 13th-century prayer book hid lost Archimedes texts beneath its prayers.

The book was made by scraping and reusing older parchment, including a 10th-century copy of Archimedes. Danish scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg recognised the hidden text in Constantinople in 1906; after a 1998 auction, imaging work at the Walters helped reveal more. Lost knowledge sometimes survives as a ghost under another book.

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Q1360
WonderHistory

Tyrian purple was a luxury dye made from sea snails.

In the ancient Mediterranean, producing Tyrian purple required laborious work with marine snails, which made the dye rare, costly and politically charged. Purple became royal not because it was naturally noble, but because it was brutally difficult to make.

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