For The First Time (or the last time)

We'll be away for a bit of relaxation and recharging. New posts will resume in the first week of October (unless I discover something re...

A Hansom cab is a type of horse-drawn carriage first designed and patented in 1834 by English architect Joseph Hansom. Originally known as t...

Horace Lawson Hunley (1823 - 1863), was a Confederate marine engineer during the American Civil War. He developed early, hand-powered submar...

In the 1600s, famed Italian astronomer Galileo suggested that two objects of different weight would fall at the same speed. A possibly apocr...

When Herbert Marcus, his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman, and her husband, A.L. ("Al") Neiman, opened a store in downtown Dallas on Se...

In 1610, Century Italian astronomer/mathematician/inventor Galileo Galilei used a a telescope he built to observe the solar system, and dedu...

Angry demonstrators and rabbis as well as a ban on gambling failed to stop the opening of Israel's first horse racetrack, as thousands o...

Pillows were used for decoration, and comfort on hard seating surfaces, as far back as ancient Egypt; but pillows that raise the head above ...

Althea Gibson (1927 – 2003) was an American sportswoman who, on August 22, 1950, became the first African-American woman to be a competitor...

Competitive eater Sonya ("The Black Widow") Thomas weighs just 105 pounds, but she scarfed down 5.17 pounds of chicken wings in 12...

Founded in 1848, by an act of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts, the Boston Public Library (BPL) was the first large free municip...

Expeditions to the South and North Poles began as early as the 1500s, but many of them encountered extreme conditions that forced them to tu...

Japan is shaking up its fuel economy standards and Toyota has announced that the Prius has already met the new, tougher 2015 fuel efficiency...

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced yesterday that it placed its final order for paper tickets. Some 16.5 million p...

Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister (born in 1929) is a British former athlete best known as the first man to run the mile in less than four minutes...

The paper ballot system, with standardized voting forms, was first adopted in the Australian state of Victoria in 1856, and in the remaining...

At one time, married women in the US could not make wills, be the guardian of their children, receive wages earned, or own or inherit proper...

Ancient baseball history is a little fuzzy, but it appears that both Ross Barnes and Charlie Jones hit homers in a game between the Chicago ...

Sheila Drummond used her driver on the 144-yard fourth hole at a country club in Mahoning Valley, PA on Sunday -- a hole that's given he...

The F. W. Woolworth Company (often referred to as Woolworth's) was a retail company that was one of the original American five-and-dime ...