Gas mantle

A Coleman white gas lantern mantle glowing at full brightness

Original Soviet space dog environmentally controlled safety module used on sub-orbital and orbital spaceflights

Front page cover of the newspaper L'Aurore for Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J'Accuse...! , written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair . The headline reads I Accuse...! Letter to the President of the Republic .

Before electricity, a mesh sock soaked in radioactive thorium dioxide burned inside every middle-class parlour lamp. The mantles crumbled to radioactive dust when touched. Millions were sold; none came with warnings.

Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization

IMRO's internal purge squads killed so many of their own members — by some counts more than Ottoman officials ever did — that by the 1920s the organization was functionally a self-consuming assassination machine.

Soviet space dogs

The USSR launched at least 57 dogs into space between 1951 and 1966; strays from Moscow streets were preferred because they were deemed psychologically tougher, and most early flights were explicitly one-way.

J'Accuse...!

Zola's open letter, published across the front page of L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, named eleven army and government officials by name. The editor printed 300,000 copies; Paris sold out before noon.

Presidency of Rodrigo Duterte

A sitting president joked, live on stage, that he should have 'gone first' before soldiers raped and killed Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill in 1989. The crowd laughed. He won the election anyway.

Vindolanda tablets

A Roman soldier stationed at Hadrian's Wall received a birthday party invitation and a parcel of socks from his mother — the oldest surviving personal letter written by a woman in Latin.

Hit 'Em Up

On a 1996 Death Row single, Tupac claimed to have slept with Faith Evans — Biggie's wife — while Biggie was alive. He said it over his own label's production, for all radio to hear.

Endless Ocean

Endless Ocean has no enemies, no fail state, and no score. A manta ray glides past. A whale appears in the deep distance and keeps swimming. Players have reported sitting still underwater for twenty minutes, just watching.

Mycenae

The limestone blocks at Mycenae's walls weigh up to 6 tonnes each, fitted without mortar across a circuit that stood 900 years before the Greeks of Thucydides's era declared their ancestors could not have built it.