The secret runaway success of Kenneth Gandar-Dower’s racing cheetahs.
Encouraged by his early success, Columbia Pictures offered Seuss a contract for a feature-length, live-action musical with a budget of more than $2 million — an amount usually reserved for Disney juggernauts like “Alice in Wonderland” or “Cinderella,” and equivalent to roughly $20 million today. It did not go well.
When the two trailblazers of animated film finally met in 1941, the one named Walt Disney was quickly becoming a legend. The other, an Argentine named Quirino Cristiani, was on an equal but opposite trajectory toward obscurity.
Nestled in a valley high in the Himalayas in northern India is a small lake named Roopkund, known locally as Mystery Lake.
The opening of a canal in 1848 led to the birth of modern financial derivatives, and the early demise of some of the men who traded them.
In the 1950s, an anonymous terrorist planted a pipe bomb in a New York City public space. Then another. And another.
Britain’s practice of transporting convicts to American colonies was a fearsome punishment, but not for the chronic criminal James Dalton.
The story of a tragic hotel fire of Rube Goldberg proportions.
As a civilian, the beloved American Civil War general and two-term president failed at every attempt to make money. Except for one.
A 300-year-old hunt for the unsung hero of Salzburg.
A remote bay in Alaska is home to an odd and occasionally catastrophic geology. In 1958, a handful of people experienced this firsthand.
Taxi driver candidates in London must be able to determine the shortest route between any two locations in the city, and may be asked to pinpoint one of around 25,000 different points of interest in the city. And learning all that literally changes their brains.
In 1931, an unassuming Australian and his crew set out in an antiquated, ill-prepared submarine in an attempt to sail under the polar ice cap to the North Pole.
In contrast to most other famous food icons, Colonel Sanders was once a living, breathing person, and his life story is considerably more tumultuous than the white-washed corporate biography suggests.
Voltaire probably won around half a million livres — a large fortune, which he then made even larger in a series of canny investments. Soon Voltaire was a very rich man, rich enough to become a moneylender to the powerful and famous, rich enough that he no longer had to stake his financial well-being on that most unreliable and detestable profession — writing.