The archive

Episodes

8 episodes of curious history, and counting.

The Day the US Postal Service Tried Missile Mail

On 8 June 1959, the United States Navy fired a Regulus cruise missile from the submarine USS Barbero off the coast of Florida. Inside, replacing the nuclear warhead, was a postal canister containing three thousand letters. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield watched the launch and declared it of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world. The missile travelled roughly one hundred miles, landed at Naval Air Station Mayport, and the mail was retrieved and stamped with a special ‘MISSILE MAIL’ postmark. Summerfield genuinely believed this was the future of postal delivery, envisioning coast-to-coast routes by cruise missile. The programme was never repeated. Also on this date: Robespierre presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794, weeks before his own execution; banker Alexander Fordyce fled to France in 1772, triggering a credit crisis across Britain and the Dutch Republic; two pilots died when an F-104 Starfighter collided with an XB-70 Valkyrie in 1966; and the descendants of the Bounty mutineers arrived at Norfolk Island in 1856 to begin a new settlement.

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Episode 3 8 min

Carrie Nation's Hatchet and the Day of the Tiles

On 7 June 1899, Carrie Nation walked into a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas, carrying rocks, and smashed the bottles. She was not making a point. She was enforcing the law. Kansas was a dry state, but the saloons were open, and local officials were looking elsewhere. Nation, a committed temperance campaigner whose first husband had been an alcoholic, decided that if the system would not fix the problem, she would. Her direct action, which later became synonymous with her trademark hatchet, made her one of the most recognisable women in turn-of-the-century America. She was arrested repeatedly, welcomed the platform, and argued that if laws existed and were not enforced, citizens had a right to enforce them. Also on this date: Graceland opened to the public in 1982, turning Elvis Presley’s private Memphis home into one of America’s most visited sites. In 1971, the US Supreme Court ruled in Cohen v. California that offensive speech is constitutionally protected. And in 1788, during the Day of the Tiles in Grenoble, French citizens threw roof tiles at royal troops, marking an early spark of the French Revolution. Each story shares a common thread: people who stopped waiting politely for change.

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Episode 2 10 min

The Man With the Window in His Stomach

On 6 June 1822, a musket accident at Fort Mackinac left French-Canadian fur trader Alexis St. Martin with a permanent hole in his stomach. Against all expectation, he survived, and US Army surgeon William Beaumont recognised the opportunity: for the first time in history, a living human stomach could be observed directly at work. What followed was years of groundbreaking research that transformed our understanding of digestion, but also a deeply unequal relationship between researcher and subject. This episode examines the accidental experiment that founded modern gastric physiology, alongside other events from 6 June: a near-Earth asteroid explosion over the Mediterranean in 2002 that went almost unnoticed, the 1985 exhumation that confirmed the death of Josef Mengele, and the 1933 opening of the world’s first drive-in cinema in New Jersey. A day of survival, improvisation, and the things that weren’t supposed to happen.

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Episode 5 9 min

The Last Transit of Venus and the Stories of 5 June

On 5 June 2012, millions watched Venus cross the face of the Sun for the last time in any living person’s lifetime. The next transit won’t occur until 2117. This rare celestial event once sent Captain Cook to Tahiti in 1769 and helped unlock the true scale of the solar system. But the fifth of June holds other remarkable stories: in 1983, the Soviet cruise ship Aleksandr Suvorov collided catastrophically with a railway bridge on the Volga River, killing over a hundred passengers. In 1995, physicists at the University of Colorado created the first Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter predicted by Einstein seventy years earlier. In 1956, Elvis Presley’s hip-swivelling performance of Hound Dog on The Milton Berle Show scandalised critics and ignited rock and roll on primetime television. And in 1949, Orapin Chaiyakan became the first woman elected to Thailand’s Parliament. From planetary mechanics to cultural flashpoints, this episode explores the moments that still resonate from a single day in history.

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Episode 4 10 min

Camels, Cheese Monopolies, and the First Woman to Fly

On 4 June 1855, Major Henry C. Wayne boarded the USS Supply in New York harbour with orders to sail to Egypt and buy camels for the United States Army. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had convinced Congress that camels, not horses, were the answer to moving supplies across the arid American Southwest. The animals performed brilliantly in field trials, but the soldiers hated them, the horses panicked, and the Civil War ended the experiment before it could prove itself. Decades later, feral camels still wandered the Arizona desert. Seventy-one years earlier, on 4 June 1784, Élisabeth Thible became the first woman to fly in a free hot air balloon, travelling four kilometres over Lyon whilst singing operatic arias. In 1411, King Charles VI of France, who occasionally believed he was made of glass, granted Roquefort-sur-Soulzon an exclusive cheese-ripening monopoly that remains protected today. On 4 June 1913, suffragette Emily Davison stepped onto the Epsom Derby racetrack and was struck by the King’s horse; she died four days later, never seeing the voting rights she fought for. And in 1996, the Ariane 5 rocket exploded 37 seconds into its maiden flight due to a software conversion error, a £500 million lesson in reusing code without checking the specifications.

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Episode 3 9 min

The Last Great Auks and the Collectors Who Killed Them

On 3 June 1844, three Icelandic fishermen landed on the remote volcanic island of Eldey and killed the last confirmed breeding pair of great auks. The birds were strangled, their skins sold to a collector, and their egg cracked and abandoned. The species had survived ice ages and geological upheaval, but vanished within centuries of sustained human contact. What makes the extinction particularly stark is that it was not driven by necessity or ignorance. By the 1840s, naturalists and hunters alike knew the great auk was nearly gone, yet this rarity made specimens more valuable to museums and private collections, creating a market incentive that accelerated the final decline. Clare Vale explores this moment of documented extinction alongside other events from 3 June, including Chinese official Lin Zexu’s destruction of over a million kilograms of British opium in 1839, the 1969 collision between HMAS Melbourne and USS Frank E. Evans that killed 74 American sailors, and the founding of Barcelona’s Academy of the Distrustful in 1700, a scholarly society built on intellectual scepticism.

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Episode 2 8 min

A Lacrosse Match That Took a Fort, and the First Double Channel Crossing

On 2 June 1763, Ojibwe warriors executed one of the most audacious military captures in North American history. Using a lacrosse match as cover, they took Fort Michilimackinac during Pontiac’s War, a coordinated Indigenous resistance against British colonial expansion across the Great Lakes. The fort fell not through siege, but through patient planning and brilliant tactics. Nearly 150 years later, on the same date in 1910, Charles Rolls became the first person to fly across the English Channel and back without landing. The co-founder of Rolls-Royce completed the double crossing in 95 minutes, piloting a Wright biplane with just 35 horsepower. Tragically, he died in a flying accident weeks later, aged 32. Two events, separated by a century and a half, united by audacity and the willingness to attempt what looked impossible. Sometimes the move that shouldn’t work is exactly the one that does.

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Episode 1 9 min

The Monk, the Malt, and the First Written Record of Scotch Whisky

On 1 June 1494, a monk named John Cor made an entry in the Exchequer Rolls of Scotland ordering eight bolls of malt to make aqua vitae. It was a routine transaction in a royal accounts book, unremarkable at the time, yet it stands as the earliest known written record of Scotch whisky. Clara Vale explores how a monastery shopping list became the origin point of a five-hundred-year tradition, why medieval monks were distilling spirits in the first place, and what it means when history arrives not with fanfare but with a clipboard. Also on 1 June: the 2008 Universal Studios fire that destroyed a vault of irreplaceable master recordings, the 1943 downing of BOAC Flight 777 that killed actor Leslie Howard and sparked enduring conspiracy theories, and the 1974 publication of Dr Henry Heimlich’s life-saving choking intervention. Small records, big histories, and proof that the most lasting things often begin quietly.

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