Get updates from Amusingplanet via email, on your phone or read them on Specificfeeds on your own custom news page.
You can filter the news from Amusingplanet that get delivered to you using tags or topics or you can opt for all of them. Unsubscription is also very simple.
See the latest news from Amusingplanet below.
Site title: Amusing Planet - Amazing Places, Wonderful People, Weird Stuff
Is this your feed? Claim it!
On the evening of 17 September 1908, a young American officer named Thomas Selfridge climbed into a fragile wooden aircraft at Fort Myer, Virginia. Minutes later, he would become the first person in history to die in the crash of a powered airplane.
The machine was a Wright Flyer, designed and flown by Orville Wright, one half of the famous Wright brothers. The demonst...
In 480 BC, Xerxes the Great, the fourth king of the Achaemenid Empire, launched the largest invasion the Greek world had yet faced. Xerxes’s father Darius I had already attempted to subdue Greece but was defeated at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Xerxes inherited both the empire and the unfinished ambition.
After suppressing revolts in Egypt and Babylon, he spent ye...
In the 3rd century BCE, at the height of the Hellenistic age’s appetite for spectacle and scale, a ship was built so vast that even ancient writers struggled to describe it without awe. It was called the Tessarakonteres, or “forty-rowed”, and it was the largest and most ambitious naval constructions of antiquity.
Credit:
In the early 19th century, the idea of exporting ice to the tropics sounded like a joke. Ice was heavy, fragile, and melted. Yet one Boston entrepreneur built a global industry out of frozen New England ponds and earned the nickname “The Ice King.” His name was Frederic Tudor.
Ice Harvesting in Massachusetts, early 1850s. Credit:
Few writers have multiplied themselves as radically, or as deliberately, as Fernando Pessoa. The Portuguese poet did not merely use pen names. He invented entire authors, complete with biographies, temperaments, philosophies, and distinctive literary styles. He called them heteronyms, and through them he built one of the strangest and most intricate bodies of work in modern l...