In 1769, a Franciscan priest Father Juan Crespí accompanied a group of Spanish soldiers on the first European land expedition through California. In his journal he described a ‘beautiful river from the northwest’ and named it ‘Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de la Porciúncula’. In 1781 a settlement by the river was established. This settlement was…
Rocketgrams are mail delivered by firing crude rockets towards their destinations. Stephen Hector Taylor-Smith, an Indian aerospace engineer, launched the first rocketgram in the 1930s. In the ten-year span of his experiments he made around 270 launches. The first successful livestock dispatch was of a cock and a hen, Adam and Eve, across the Damodar…
World’s first recorded women’s test match was played in 1725 in Surrey, England, between Bramley and Hambledon villages. The Bramley team sported white dress and blue ribbons while the Hambledon team wore white dress and red ribbons. This report appeared in The Reading Mercury on July 26, 1745.
The original word for chess is the Sanskrit chaturanga, meaning four members of an army, which were most likely elephants, horses, chariots and foot soldiers. According to a German Indologist researching on the origin of chess, in the 6th century, the Maukhari rulers of Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh, used to play chaturanga with 16 cabinet terracotta…
Prof. Henrich Focke, a German inventor, devised the first practical helicopter called the Focke-Wulf Fw 16, which was successfully flown in 1936. By 1938 it set many world records for altitude, speed and flight duration. It could be flown by a pilot after only one hour of pilot briefing.
The fourth of July is celebrated as the Independence Day in the US. Coincidentally, three US Presidents died on the fourth of July. They were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who died on the same day in 1826, and James Monroe, who died in 1831.
