57 stories set here.
Ada Lovelace's 1843 translation-and-commentary on Luigi Menabrea's paper on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine contains, in Note G, what is now considered the first published computer program. The Analytical Engine was never built in Babbage's lifetime. Ada died of cancer at 36, the same age as her father.
Read the story →Alan Turing was found dead at his Wilmslow home on 8 June 1954, aged 41. The coroner ruled suicide by cyanide poisoning; a half-eaten apple lay beside the bed. The Crown Prosecution Service had convicted him of gross indecency two years earlier and ordered chemical castration as an alternative to prison. The pardon arrived in 2013.
Read the story →Anne Boleyn was beheaded at the Tower of London on 19 May 1536 with a French sword rather than the standard English execution axe. Henry VIII had paid for a substantial professional executioner to travel from Calais. The decision was made before the verdict was delivered.
Read the story →Charles Babbage received approximately £17,500 of British government funding between 1823 and 1842 to build the Difference Engine, a brass mechanical calculator for producing accurate mathematical tables. He never finished it. His subsequent Analytical Engine (1837) was a general-purpose programmable computer that he also never built. A complete Difference Engine No. 2 to his original 1849 specifications was built by the Science Museum London in 1991 and works.
Read the story →Boudicca, queen of the Iceni in eastern Britain, led a revolt against the Roman province of Britannia in 60-61 CE after the Roman procurator had her flogged and her daughters raped. Her army burned Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium and killed an estimated 80,000 colonists and Romanised Britons. She was defeated at the Battle of the Watling Street by Suetonius Paulinus's army of 10,000 against approximately 100,000 Britons.
Read the story →Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) was a 4-foot-3 former kitchen servant who became the senior assistant in her brother William Herschel's astronomical observatory at Slough. She discovered eight comets between 1786 and 1797, catalogued 561 new stars and 14 nebulae, and was the first woman in any country paid by a national government as a working scientist — £50 per year from George III from 1787.
Read the story →Dr James Barry served as a British Army surgeon for fifty years (1813–1864), rose to Inspector General of Hospitals, performed one of the first recorded successful Caesarean sections in which both mother and child survived, and was discovered at the substantial 1865 post-mortem laying-out to have been anatomically female.
Read the story →Francis Drake left Plymouth on 13 December 1577 with five ships. He returned alone in the Golden Hind on 26 September 1580 with about £400,000 of captured Spanish silver from his Pacific raid — about half the English government's annual revenue. He was the first English captain to complete a circumnavigation. Elizabeth I knighted him aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford on 4 April 1581.
Read the story →A fire began at the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane in the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666. By the time it was extinguished on 6 September it had destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, and St Paul's Cathedral across approximately 175 hectares — about four-fifths of the City of London. The documented death toll is six. The actual toll was probably higher but cannot now be reconstructed.
Read the story →Guy Fawkes was caught at midnight on 4-5 November 1605 in the cellar of the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder. The State Opening of Parliament — at which King James I, his queen, his sons, the Lords spiritual and temporal, and the Commons would all have been present — was scheduled for 11 a.m. on 5 November. Fawkes was the demolition specialist of a Catholic plot to overthrow the Protestant English government and replace it with a Catholic regent.
Read the story →Henry VIII married six times between 1509 and 1547. Two of his wives — Anne Boleyn (1536) and Catherine Howard (1542) — were beheaded at the Tower of London. Two were set aside by annulment (Catherine of Aragon, Anne of Cleves). One died of childbirth complications (Jane Seymour). One outlived him (Catherine Parr). The pursuit of his desired succession produced the foundational break with the papacy that became the English Reformation.
Read the story →At the British Association meeting in Oxford on 30 June 1860, seven months after Darwin's *Origin of Species*, the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce asked T. H. Huxley whether he claimed descent from apes on his grandfather's or grandmother's side. Huxley reportedly replied that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a bishop who used his great abilities to obscure the truth. The exchange did not happen exactly as the legend records.
Read the story →John Dee was the senior English mathematician of the late 16th century, court astrologer to Elizabeth I, scientific adviser to the substantial early English exploration ventures, and possibly the first English-language writer to use the phrase 'British Empire.' He also believed he was communicating with angels through a polished obsidian mirror.
Read the story →Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England on 10 July 1553 under the terms of Edward VI's deathbed Devise. The proclamation was a failed attempt to keep the English Crown Protestant against the legitimate claim of the Catholic Mary Tudor. Jane was deposed on 19 July 1553 after Mary's army marched on London. She was executed for treason at the Tower of London on 12 February 1554. She was 17 or 18.
Read the story →Lambert Simnel was crowned Edward VI of England in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, on 24 May 1487, aged about 10. He was a baker's son being impersonated by Yorkist conspirators as the imprisoned Earl of Warwick. After his army lost the Battle of Stoke Field, Henry VII pardoned him and put him to work in the royal kitchens as a spit-turner.
Read the story →The Lunar Society of Birmingham met about fourteen times a year between approximately 1765 and 1813, always on the Monday nearest the full moon (so members could ride home by moonlight). The members included James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and Josiah Wedgwood. They built the Industrial Revolution in their spare time.
Read the story →The English barons forced King John to seal Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, accepting limits on royal arbitrary action. Pope Innocent III annulled it on 24 August 1215. John repudiated it. The First Barons' War followed within weeks. The charter was reissued — with modifications — in 1216, 1217, and 1225, and the 1225 version became the canonical text that survives in English common law to the present.
Read the story →Mary Anning found her first complete ichthyosaur on the Lyme Regis cliffs in 1811 when she was twelve. She spent the next thirty-five years collecting and selling the foundational fossils of British vertebrate palaeontology. The Geological Society of London — to which she had supplied the substantial majority of its early-century specimens — admitted no women until 1904.
Read the story →Samuel Pepys kept his shorthand diary from January 1660 to May 1669. The 1665 entries — running through the worst of the Great Plague that killed approximately 100,000 Londoners — are the closest surviving day-to-day record of how the plague moved through the city, how the parish authorities tried to contain it, and how an educated middle-rank professional Londoner adjusted his daily routines around an active mass-mortality epidemic.
Read the story →Perkin Warbeck claimed from 1490 to be Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, the younger of the two Princes in the Tower. He was recognised by Margaret of Burgundy, James IV of Scotland, and Maximilian I of Austria. He landed in Cornwall in 1497 with 8,000 supporters, was captured, and was hanged at Tyburn on 23 November 1499.
Read the story →The Manchester Yeomanry charged a peaceful crowd of approximately 60,000 demonstrators demanding parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field on 16 August 1819. 18 people were killed, including a 2-year-old child. About 600 were wounded. The atrocity was nicknamed "Peterloo" — a sarcastic combination of St Peter's Field and the recent Waterloo victory.
Read the story →The Piltdown skull was unveiled by Charles Dawson at the Geological Society of London on 18 December 1912 as *Eoanthropus dawsoni* — the missing link between ape and human. It dominated British palaeoanthropology for forty years. The 1953 fluorine and chemical testing proved it was a modern human cranium combined with an orangutan jaw, stained with iron and chromium, with the teeth filed flat.
Read the story →Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 by Henry Tudor's forces. He was the last English king to die in combat and the last Plantagenet. His body was buried at Greyfriars Priory at Leicester, lost after the Reformation dissolution. The skeleton was located under a Leicester car park in September 2012 by University of Leicester archaeologists, identified by DNA, and reburied at Leicester Cathedral in March 2015.
Read the story →Rosalind Franklin produced X-ray diffraction Photo 51 of DNA in May 1952. Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson in January 1953 without her knowledge. The Watson-Crick double-helix paper appeared in *Nature* on 25 April 1953. Franklin died of ovarian cancer on 16 April 1958, aged 37. The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.
Read the story →The South Sea Company's January 1720 deal with the British Treasury exchanged government debt for company shares. The share price rose from £128 in January to £1,050 in late June. It collapsed to £190 by the end of September. Many of the Whig political class were ruined; several Treasury and Mint officials were imprisoned; Isaac Newton lost about £20,000 of his own money in the crash.
Read the story →Philip II of Spain dispatched 130 ships under the Duke of Medina Sidonia in May 1588 to invade England, depose Elizabeth I, and reverse the English Reformation. The English fleet defeated the Armada at Gravelines on 8 August 1588. The surviving Spanish ships were driven north around Scotland by storms; many wrecked on the western Irish coast. Approximately 11,000 Spanish sailors died, against fewer than 100 English casualties in combat.
Read the story →Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, claimed in 1866 to be Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a Hampshire baronetcy who had been lost at sea in 1854. Two civil and criminal trials between 1871 and 1874 produced the longest jury trials in English history at the time. Orton was sentenced to 14 years for perjury; he served 10. The case generated a working-class political movement.
Read the story →The Peasants' Revolt began in Essex on 30 May 1381 in response to the third Poll Tax in four years. About 60,000 rebels marched on London by mid-June. They beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury on Tower Hill. The Lord Mayor William Walworth stabbed the rebel leader Wat Tyler in the throat at Smithfield on 15 June while Tyler was negotiating face-to-face with the 14-year-old King Richard II.
Read the story →Josiah Wedgwood produced the *Am I Not a Man and a Brother?* anti-slavery medallion in 1787 as a free contribution to the substantial Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. About 15,000 were distributed in the first two years. It became the substantially substantively most-circulated political image of the 18th century and the substantial visual template of the British abolitionist movement.
Read the story →Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron — born in December 1815, separated from him within weeks, never seeing him again. She grew up under intensive maternal anti-Byron mathematical discipline and produced in 1843 the seven Notes on the Analytical Engine that contain what is now considered the first published computer program.
Read the story →Joseph Paxton was a gardener at Chatsworth House when he produced the winning Crystal Palace design in nine days. He had no formal architectural training. The 92,000-square-metre glass-and-iron structure that housed the 1851 Great Exhibition was the largest enclosed space in the world when it opened.
Read the story →Edward Walter Maunder was Royal Greenwich Observatory's senior solar astronomer from 1873 to 1913. He identified the unusual 1645–1715 sunspot deficit in the Greenwich archive and substantially defined it as a coherent solar-activity phenomenon. He married his junior collaborator Annie Russell in 1895 — and her contribution to the work was substantially larger than the published record acknowledged.
Read the story →Henry Colburn was the dominant London publisher of fashionable fiction in the 1820s and 1830s. He published John Polidori's *The Vampyre*, Mary Shelley's *The Last Man*, Benjamin Disraeli's first novel, and most of the early-Victorian "silver-fork" society fiction. He was bankrupt in 1832, recovered, and was bankrupt again in 1853.
Read the story →John Snow administered chloroform or ether to approximately 4,000 surgical patients between 1847 and his death in 1858, including Queen Victoria. He kept a detailed daily logbook of every case — patient name, operation, dose, response, complications. The logbook survives. It is the most complete primary record of mid-19th-century clinical anaesthesia practice anywhere.
Read the story →In 1912 an English amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson announced the discovery of an ape-jawed, human-craniumed skull in a Sussex gravel pit — a substantial 'missing link' in human evolution. The Piltdown skull was accepted as authentic for 41 years. A 1953 fluorine-dating analysis revealed it as a deliberate composite of a medieval human cranium, an orangutan jaw, and a chimpanzee tooth, all stained to look ancient.
Read the story →Augusta of Saxe-Gotha was 32 when her husband Frederick, Prince of Wales, died unexpectedly in 1751. She lived another twenty-one years as the senior court figure of the Leicester House faction, raised the future George III, and substantially shaped the early Hanoverian succession before her death in 1772.
Read the story →Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mother Frances was John William Polidori's younger sister. She preserved her brother's papers after his 1821 suicide. Her son William Michael edited the diary for publication in 1911 — almost a century after the Lake Geneva summer that had produced *The Vampyre*.
Read the story →John Iwyn was a 13th-century London mercer who donated a small property on the southern edge of Newgate Street to the newly-arrived English Franciscans in 1224. The donation became the foundation site of the Greyfriars church and friary — the most important Franciscan foundation in medieval England and the eventual burial site of four major English queens.
Read the story →The Lion Brewery on Broad Street stood about thirty metres from the contaminated pump that killed five hundred people in the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak. None of its seventy workers died. They drank approximately four pints of beer each daily from the brewery's own well — and the well was uncontaminated.
Read the story →Leicester House stood on the north side of Leicester Square from 1635 to 1791. It served twice in the 18th century as the alternative royal court for the heir-presumptive who was politically estranged from the reigning Hanoverian monarch — under George II's rebellion against George I, and again under Frederick Prince of Wales's rebellion against George II.
Read the story →The Franciscan Greyfriars Church on Newgate Street was the burial site of four major English royal women — Isabella of France, Margaret of France, Eleanor of Provence's heart, and Joan of the Tower. The church was dissolved in 1538, destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire, and the modern street pattern was laid out over the unrecovered burials.
Read the story →William Montagu was Edward III's closest personal friend from boyhood. He was 29 in October 1330 when he led the small group of armed knights who climbed through the secret tunnel into Nottingham Castle, seized Roger Mortimer in the queen's bedchamber, and gave Edward III sole control of the English crown. Montagu was rewarded with the earldom of Salisbury.
Read the story →Annie Scott Dill Russell Maunder was a Cambridge-trained mathematician who spent thirty years at the Royal Greenwich Observatory photographing the Sun. She discovered the substantive equator-ward drift of sunspots through the solar cycle and co-authored the historical work that gave her husband Edward Maunder credit for what should have been a joint discovery.
Read the story →The Great Fire of London began in a Pudding Lane bakery on the night of 2 September 1666 and burned for five days, destroying about 13,200 houses and most of the medieval City. It killed almost nobody — official records list six dead — but ended the 1665 plague and gave Christopher Wren the largest urban-rebuilding contract in English history.
Read the story →Between the spring and the autumn of 1665, plague killed roughly 70,000 to 100,000 Londoners — about a quarter of the city's population. It was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in England. Six months later the Great Fire burned down most of the worst-affected districts.
Read the story →The Greyfriars Church at Newgate was the wealthiest Franciscan house in medieval London. It held the tombs of Isabella of France, Joan of the Tower, Eleanor of Provence, and Marguerite of France. The church was demolished in 1547 after the Dissolution; the bones now lie under modern Newgate streets and have never been recovered.
Read the story →The Greyfriars Church at Newgate was the Franciscan mother house in England and the burial site of Queens Margaret of France, Isabella of France, and Joan of the Tower. Henry VIII's Dissolution stripped the church of its monastic income; the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the rebuilt structure; the World War II Blitz finished the remains.
Read the story →The Stone Gate at the southern end of Old London Bridge displayed the severed heads of executed traitors on iron-tipped pikes from approximately 1305 to 1660. William Wallace's head went up first. By the 1660 closure the gate had displayed the heads of several hundred traitors, regicides, and political enemies of the Crown.
Read the story →Hugh Despenser the Younger was Edward II's principal favourite from about 1318 until the king's deposition in 1326. His public execution at Hereford was one of the most elaborately brutal of the English medieval period — and the man who had ruled England with him died in a Berkeley castle basement nine months later.
Read the story →From 1305 to 1660 — three and a half centuries — the southern gatehouse of [Old London Bridge](/articles/old-london-bridge) carried the displayed heads of traitors executed by the English crown. The first head was William Wallace's; the last was probably Oliver Cromwell's. The boiled heads were dipped in tar before mounting and were managed by an officer of the City of London known as the Keeper of the Heads.
Read the story →John, 2nd Baron Hervey was vice-chamberlain to George II from 1730 to 1740. His private *Memoirs* — kept up nightly for ten years, suppressed by his family for ninety, finally published 1848 — are the single best source on the personalities and politics of the early-Hanoverian court. Lord Hervey was also the witty pen behind much of the period's anonymous verse satire.
Read the story →Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed the differential and integral calculus in the 1670s and 1680s. Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism in 1699. The subsequent thirty-year priority war split the European mathematical community along Newtonian-British and Leibnizian-Continental lines and substantially retarded British mathematics for the next century.
Read the story →Nonsuch House was a four-story prefabricated Dutch timber palace built in the Low Countries in 1577, dismantled, shipped to London, and reassembled on Old London Bridge using only wooden pegs. It stood there for 180 years, was demolished in 1757, and gave its name to a generation of substantial-luxury London building.
Read the story →Thomas Harriot observed the Moon through a telescope in July 1609, sunspots in late 1610, and the moons of Jupiter probably in early 1610. Each of these observations was made independently of Galileo, in some cases earlier. Harriot published nothing. He died in 1621 with about 5,000 pages of unpublished astronomical manuscripts.
Read the story →Thomas Harriot observed sunspots in December 1610 — months before Galileo's published priority claim — telescopically observed the Moon weeks before Galileo's *Sidereus Nuncius*, and worked out the law of refraction twenty years before Snell. He published almost none of it. He died in 1621 of nasal cancer leaving over 8,000 pages of unpublished manuscripts.
Read the story →William Montagu was Edward III's closest personal friend from childhood. On the night of 19 October 1330 he led the small armed party that entered Nottingham Castle through an underground tunnel, broke into Isabella's bedchamber, and seized Roger Mortimer. The coup ended the Mortimer-Isabella regency and made Edward III an effective king at seventeen.
Read the story →William Montagu was Edward III's close personal friend and the principal organiser of the October 1330 coup at Nottingham Castle that overthrew the Mortimer-Isabella regency. He led the small armed party through the underground passage. He died of wounds eleven years later jousting at his own son's wedding.
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