The Bordereau That Tore France in Half
A torn-up scrap of paper from a German embassy wastebasket convicted the wrong man in 1894. France spent the next twelve years arguing about it.
Read the story →A century
19th century
14 stories from this century.
The Doctor Who Invented the Vampire and Took Prussic Acid
John Polidori was twenty-five. He had written the first English vampire novel, been disowned by Byron, and lost a libel suit. He drank prussic acid on a Wednesday.
Read the story →The Town Where the Boss Owned the Houses
George Pullman built a model factory town south of Chicago in 1880. He ran it like a benevolent autocracy until 1894, when his workers stopped accepting the rent.
Read the story →The Fire That Killed Two Thousand and Got Forgotten the Same Night
On the same evening as the Great Chicago Fire, a wildfire two hundred and fifty kilometers north killed five times as many people. Almost nobody heard about it.
Read the story →The Fire That Was Not the Cow's Fault
The Great Chicago Fire killed three hundred people and burned a quarter of the city. Mrs. O'Leary's cow had nothing to do with it. A reporter admitted he made the story up.
Read the story →The Curate Who Doubted John Snow
Henry Whitehead set out to disprove John Snow's water theory. He spent six months knocking on doors in Soho. By the end he had identified the index case.
Read the story →The Decade Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Mud
In the 1850s the central business district of Chicago was raised four to fourteen feet on jackscrews while continuing to operate. People kept eating at the hotels.
Read the story →The Plague Novel Mary Shelley Wrote in 1826
Eight years after Frankenstein, Mary Shelley published a novel about a global pandemic that kills everyone except one narrator. Critics hated it. They had reasons.
Read the story →The Doctor Who Took the Handle Off the Pump
In September 1854, John Snow walked door to door through Soho with a map, a hypothesis, and a problem the city wouldn't believe.
Read the story →The Volcano Nobody Wrote About
Tambora killed more people than Krakatoa, cooled the planet for two years, and started the Year Without a Summer. The Western press barely noticed.
Read the story →The Loudest Sound Ever Heard
On a Monday morning in August 1883, a volcano in the Sunda Strait made a noise that was registered, four thousand eight hundred kilometers away, as gunfire.
Read the story →The Summer That Wasn’t, and the Monster It Made
In June 1816 it rained for a month at Lake Geneva. Five English visitors were stuck indoors. One of them was eighteen years old, and she had a dream.
Read the story →The French President Who Died on the Job
Félix Faure had ambitions of being Caesar. On a February afternoon in 1899, he became something else.
Read the story →The Smell That Built a City
London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.
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