A childless bachelor lawyer with a taste for practical jokes wrote one last prank into his will: a fortune for the Toronto woman who could produce the most babies in ten years. Then the Depression arrived, and what began as a joke became a desperate, decade-long race.
An illiterate leather-dresser who called himself a lord, Timothy Dexter took every ruinous piece of advice his rivals gave him – ship coal to Newcastle, warming pans to the tropics, cats to the Caribbean – and turned every one of them into a fortune.
In 1859 an American farmer shot a British pig rooting in his potato patch. Within weeks, hundreds of soldiers, a fleet of warships, and 2,000 sailors faced off on a foggy little island – and the only casualty was the pig.
Toronto is YYZ, Vancouver is YVR, Ottawa is YOW – almost every Canadian airport code begins with Y. The reason is older than the airplane itself, buried in the two-letter Morse codes of a vanished railway telegraph network.
In 1629 the pride of the Dutch East India Company struck a reef off Western Australia. What happened to the survivors on those waterless islands was not a tragedy of the sea but of men – one of the darkest mutinies and massacres in history.
In 1859 a ruined San Francisco businessman walked into a newspaper office and declared himself Emperor of the United States. For twenty-one years a whole city played along – and when he died, tens of thousands came to mourn their emperor.
In the freezing early hours of an Australian winter morning in 1944, more than a thousand Japanese prisoners rushed the fences of a POW camp armed with baseball bats and sharpened cutlery. It became the largest prison break of the Second World War.
In the final week of World War II, a handful of American GIs, a band of anti-Nazi German soldiers, and a castle full of France’s imprisoned elite made a stand together against the Waffen-SS. It is remembered as the strangest battle of the war — and the only time Americans and Germans are known to have fought as allies.
One harvest day in 12th-century Suffolk, the reapers found two children standing by an old wolf pit. Their skin was green, their clothes were strange, and they spoke a language no one had ever heard. This is the enduring medieval mystery of the Green Children of Woolpit.
When the First World War broke out, the world’s most famous scientist did not retreat to her laboratory. Marie Curie taught herself to drive, built a fleet of X-ray trucks, and took them to the front — where they helped image more than a million wounded men.
