A true story of castaways on a lost and hostile scrap of land, all thanks to some meddlesome Frenchmen and terrible luck.

Fifteen Years Forsaken

In Nazi-occupied Paris, “Dr. Eugène” offered Jews an alternative to deportation, slavery, and death camps. But the escape network was not what it seemed.

The Traveler And His Baggage

From the depths of poverty, Du Yuesheng rose through Shanghai’s underworld to become one of the most influential, and overlooked, figures in modern China.

The Kingpin of Shanghai

In 1958, one heavily modified airplane flew out of Las Vegas with a single objective: Don’t land.

The Unceasing Cessna Hacienda

The true story of a runaway Nazi, a determined sleuth, and a chase around the world.

Hunting For Kobyla

Robert Rogers, a man obsessed with trespassing, sets his sights on Mount St. Helens in the spring of 1980

The Mount St. Helens Trespasser

In 1924 a bankrupt businessman in Portugal launched an audacious international scheme to become one of the wealthiest men in the world.

Devouring The Heart Of Portugal

The Rube's Dilemma

Alarming events were in store for Sicily at the beginning of the summer of 1831. On 28 June, small earthquakes rocked the western end of the island, and these continued occurring day after day. On 4 July, the unpleasant scent of sulfur spread through the town of Sciacca. On the 13th, the people of St. Domenico spotted smoke from far offshore. Normally, volcanic activity would be the obvious culprit, but these black plumes were out on the water. Maybe, the residents suggested to one another, a boat was on fire. The crew of a passing ship had other ideas: the captain noted that the water under the smoke was bubbling vigorously. He was convinced that what they were dealing with was a sea monster. But a second ship brought reports of masses of dead fish in the water, entirely undevoured.
 
This disturbance was, in fact, a volcano erupting from just under the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. By the 17th of July, a new island some 25 feet high had appeared off the coast of Sicily. And that was only the beginning. The volcano went on spewing lava over the course of the next week until the island was four times its original height and seven kilometers around, with two peaks and even two small lakes. The new island lay between Europe and Africa right where the Mediterranean narrowed, putting it in the middle of an ongoing flurry of nautical trade and military maneuvers. Several countries observed simultaneously that the infant rock would likely prove extremely valuable to whichever country owned it, and at least three of them raced to claim it. As it turned out, none of them would succeed.

It Came From Beneath The Sea

In 1933, British WWI vet Maurice Wilson hatched an unorthodox plan to reach the still-untouched summit of Everest.

Lofty Ambitions

In 1970s Bali, a sudden rice crisis prompted an unexpectedly far-reaching scientific discovery

The Ancient Order Of Bali

It was the middle of a cool September night in Munich, Germany. The year was 1939. In an otherwise unoccupied auditorium, a man knelt on hands and knees chiseling a square hole into a large stone pillar. The lights were out, but a small flashlight dimmed with a handkerchief provided a pallid puddle of light. The man's chisel was also wrapped in cloth to quiet his hammer strikes. Whenever there was some unexpected sound, he froze. Whenever a truck rumbled past the building, he seized the opportunity to chisel more vigorously. It was exceedingly tedious and slow work. The fellow was a 36-year-old German handyman named "Georg Elser". But "handyman" isn't exactly the right word. In his three and a half decades he had cultivated many skills, including clock making,  cabinet building, master carpentry, and stone quarrying. And the task at hand required all of his diverse expertise.

The Clockmaker

When the U.S. Army came for their land in 1877, the Nez Perce tribe complied. But tensions boiled over, and Chief Joseph led as they ran for their lives.

From Where The Sun Now Stands

The tangled history of humanity’s search for the solar system’s uncharted planets.

Journey To The Invisible Planet

Against the odds, a tiny Icelandic town speaks of a local Black ancestor. Geneticists and historians combine forces to uncover the man’s eventful life.

A Trail Gone Cold

Under ordinary circumstances, the final evening of a cruise aboard the luxury turbo-electric ocean liner SS Morro Castle was a splendid event. Hundreds of lady and gentlemen passengers would gather in the Grand Ballroom in their finest evening attire for the customary Farewell Dinner, where veteran sailor Captain Willmott would captivate his guests with salty tales from his years at sea over endless glasses of champagne. Reality, bills, hangovers, and economic depression were all far away, on the other end of tomorrow morning's gangplank in New York. But on the night of Friday, the 7th of September 1934, circumstances aboard ship were not ordinary. Passengers were indeed draped in their finery in the ballroom, yet the captain's chair at the captain's table was conspicuously vacant. He had somewhat suddenly felt unwell. And atop the typical worries lurking outside were two near-hurricane-force storms, one approaching from the north and another from the south. The agitated sea and gusty winds were beginning to cause some sway in the decks, putting already-eaten entrées in danger of unscheduled egress. The surly weather was bound to be a considerable distraction.

Nevertheless, the Morro Castle was a large and modern cruise ship quite capable of handling inclement weather. Chief Warms was in command of the bridge for the night shift, and he knew well enough to keep her slicing through the sea near top speed to minimize passenger discomfort. The ship made 20 knots against a gale-force headwind, so shuffleboard was out of the question, but in the Grand Ballroom, festooned with colorful flags and balloons, drinks were drunk and rugs were cut. The waitstaff served a steady supply of Cuban lobster broiled in butter, ham in champagne sauce, roast turkey, and candied sweet potatoes. The ship’s orchestra served a steady supply of dance tunes.

Just before 8:00pm, the orchestra abruptly stopped playing mid-song. The previously foxtrotting passengers turned to see what was the matter, and there at the bandstand they saw cruise director Bob Smith beckoning for everyone's attention. He announced that he had some sad news to share. Their captain, Robert Willmott, had died suddenly in his quarters. The official farewell party and dance contest were therefore canceled, but the orchestra and barkeeps would remain on station late into the evening for passengers who wished to linger. Smith instructed the passengers to have a pleasant evening, and departed.

The ship's doctor had determined the captain's cause of death as "heart attack brought on by acute indigestion." He had been just 52 years old. William Warms and the other officers were shocked and saddened by the turn of events, but there was also an unmistakable undertow of apprehension on the bridge. In recent weeks Captain Willmott had confided in some of his fellow officers that he had reason to believe that a "red" was aboard the ship plotting revenge against the Morro Castle and her captain. Although Willmott had never seemed particularly prone to paranoia, his remarks had been dismissed as such. The wild sabotage speculations were more difficult to ignore under the new circumstances, but scrutiny would have to wait. Chief Warms--now Acting Captain Warms--was understandably anxious. It was he who had discovered the captain's body face-down and motionless in his bathtub, and he was having trouble keeping the image out of his mind. Now he was obliged to assume command during some of the worst sailing weather he had ever seen, and he had already been awake for over twenty-four hours. Even if sleep had been possible under such conditions, there was no time for it. It was going to be a long night.

The Derelict

"I don’t think it belongs here." Such was the assessment of Bob Vinson, the graveyard shift supervisor at Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The "here" Vinson referred to was a nook just outside the telephone equipment room in the employees-only portion of the second floor of the hotel. The "it" was a curious piece of equipment of unknown origin loitering conspicuously in the cramped side room. It was a metallic gray box about the size of a desk, with a smaller box attached on top near the rear right corner. The front face of the smaller box was an incomprehensible control panel occupied by 28 metal toggle switches in five neat rows, each labeled with a numbered sticker. All of these switches were situated in the down position except for #23, which was toggled up—an oddly ominous asymmetry.

It was approximately 6:30am on Tuesday, 26 August 1980, and although Bob Vinson had been on shift all night long, he hadn't heard any large equipment delivery commotion from his nearby office, and he was sure this thing hadn't been there an hour earlier. Whoever had left the machine had taken the time to place each corner on blocks of wood, and these blocks pressed deep dimples into the red-orange carpet, suggesting that the equipment had significant mass. In spite of its resemblance to some kind of manufactured electromechanical office machine, it had no power cord, and no obvious power switch, just the 28 enigmatic toggles. To add alarm to intrigue, Vinson had found that some of the keyholes for the doors leading into the area had been hastily jammed using what appeared to be toothpicks and glue.

An envelope with "Harvey's Management" typewritten on one side lay on the carpet alongside the object. Vinson was reasonably suspicious that the envelope did not contain anything as harmless as an invoice. "Stay here," Vinson instructed the custodian who had been examining the mystery object with him. "Don’t touch it. Don’t let anyone fool with it. I’ll be right back."

Vinson soon returned with companions, having summoned members of Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino security, who had subsequently summoned sheriff 's deputies and the fire department. After prodding the envelope with a broomstick to ensure it wasn't booby-trapped, those to whom it was concerned gingerly extracted three pages of typed text from the envelope. The letter claimed that this device was a bomb.

The Zero Armed Bandit

As a civilian, the beloved American Civil War general and two-term president failed at every attempt to make money. Except for one.

The Reconstruction of Ulysses S. Grant

In the 1950s, an anonymous terrorist planted a pipe bomb in a New York City public space. Then another. And another.

Ghoulish Acts & Dastardly Deeds

On 12 November 1971, in the presidential palace in the Republic of Chile, President Salvador Allende and a British theorist named Stafford Beer engaged in a highly improbable conversation. Beer was a world-renowned cybernetician and Allende was the newly elected leader of the impoverished republic.

Beer, a towering middle-aged man with a long beard, sat face to face with the horn-rimmed, mustachioed, grandfatherly president and spoke at great length in the solemn palace. A translator whispered the substance of Beer’s extraordinary proposition into Allende’s ear. The brilliant Brit was essentially suggesting that Chile’s entire economy–transportation, banking, manufacturing, mining, and more–could all be wired to feed realtime data into a central computer mainframe where specialized cybernetic software could help the country to manage resources, to detect problems before they arise, and to experiment with economic policies on a sophisticated simulator before applying them to reality. With such a pioneering system, Beer suggested, the impoverished Chile could become an exceedingly wealthy nation.

In the early 1970s the scale of Beer’s proposed network was unprecedented. One of the largest computer networks of the day was a mere fifteen machines in the US, the military progenitor to the Internet known as ARPANET. Beer was suggesting a network with hundreds or thousands of endpoints. Moreover, the computational complexity of his concept eclipsed even that of the Apollo moon missions, which were still ongoing at that time. After a few hours of conversation President Allende responded to the audacious proposition: Chile must indeed become the world’s first cybernetic government, for the good of the people. Work was to start straight away.

Stafford Beer practically ran across the street to share the news with his awaiting technical team, and much celebratory drinking occurred that evening. But the ambitious cybernetic network would never become fully operational if the CIA had anything to say about it.

Nineteen Seventy Three

The little known story of an age-old scam

The Eponymous Mr. Ponzi

The 18th century misadventures of HMS Wager and her reluctant crew

Dead Reckoning

It was the summer of 1936 when Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the atom-smashing cyclotron, received a visit from Emilio Segrè, a scientific colleague from Italy. Segrè explained that he had come all the way to America to ask a very small favor: He wondered whether Lawrence would part with a few strips of thin metal from an old cyclotron unit. Dr Lawrence was happy to oblige; as far as he was concerned the stuff Segrè sought was mere radioactive trash. He sealed some scraps of the foil in an envelope and mailed it to Segrè's lab in Sicily. Unbeknownst to Lawrence, Segrè was on a surreptitious scientific errand.

At that time the majority of chemical elements had been isolated and added to the periodic table, yet there was an unsightly hole where an element with 43 protons ought to be. Elements with 42 and 44 protons--42molybdenum and 44ruthenium respectively--had been isolated decades earlier, but element 43 was yet to be seen. Considerable accolades awaited whichever scientist could isolate the elusive element, so chemists worldwide were scanning through tons of ores with their spectroscopes, watching for the anticipated pattern.

Upon receiving Dr Lawrence's radioactive mail back in Italy, Segrè and his colleague Carlo Perrier subjected the strips of molybdenum foil to a carefully choreographed succession of bunsen burners, salts, chemicals, and acids. The resulting precipitate confirmed their hypothesis: element 42 was the answer. The radiation in Lawrence's cyclotron had converted a few 42molybdenum atoms into element 43, and one ten-billionth of a gram of the stuff now sat in the bottom of their beaker. They dubbed their plundered discovery “technetium” for the Greek word technetos, meaning "artificial." It was considered to be the first element made by man rather than nature, and its “short” half-life--anywhere from a few nanoseconds to a few million years depending on the isotope--was the reason there’s negligible naturally-occurring technetium left on modern Earth.

In the years since this discovery scientists have employed increasingly sophisticated apparatuses to bang particles together to create and isolate increasingly heavy never-before-seen elements, an effort which continues even today. Most of the obese nuclei beyond 92uranium are too unstable to stay assembled for more than a moment, to the extent that it makes one wonder why researchers expend such time, effort, and expense to fabricate these fickle fragments of matter. But according to our current understanding of quantum mechanics, if we can pack enough protons and neutrons into these husky nuclei we may encounter something astonishing.

The Isle of Doctor Seaborg

French mathematician Évariste Galois lived a full life. When he wasn't trying to overthrow the government, he was reinventing algebra.

Radical Solutions

The Spy of Night and Fog

When an ancient, unexpected imprint is discovered in a stone quarry, scientists endeavor to explain its mysterious origin.

Chronicles of Charnia

The true story of the 18th century's greatest femme fatale, and the most unfortunate of her victims.

Dupes and Duplicity

How a female engineer defied all norms to save England in the Second World War.

How Miss Shilling's Orifice Helped Win the War

How a booming oil town aimed to become a western metropolis through one of the most ill-conceived boxing matches of all time.

Pugilism On The Plains

Nikolai Vavilov dedicated his life to improving Soviet agriculture and eradicating famine, but his allegiance to science would ultimately lead to his downfall.

A Blight On Soviet Science

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