B-36 bomber was one of the largest propeller-driven aircraft ever built. Designed during WW2 it was intended to bomb Germany from the US, but was not finished in time, and ended up as a nuclear bomber in the Cold War.
One of the first truly global industries was whaling—and it was dominated by the young United States of America.
The “Charles W Morgan”
The Egyptian game known as Senet is one of the oldest known board games, perhaps dating all the way back to pre-Dynastic Egypt before 3,500 BCE.
In the years after the Civil War, a cultural conflict in El Paso TX over a salt deposit led to conflict and violence.
At 5am on November 11, 1918, the French, British, American and German representatives signed the armistice treaty that formally ended hostilities in the First World War. Under the terms of the Armistice, the war would officially end at 11am that day. All the troops in the trenches had to do was sit tight for the next 6 hours, and everyone would, after four years of the bloodiest stalemate in European history, get to go home intact. Instead, allied forces launched a series of attacks, producing over 10,000 casualties on the last morning of a war that was already over.
(NOTE: I re-run this diary every November 11 both to remind us why this is “Veteran’s Day “and what a useless slaughter “war” is.)
The introduction of the Caudron multi-engined bomber began the development of air power as a weapon with long-range offensive capabilities and potential strategic power.
In 1917, two ships collided in Halifax harbor, resulting in the largest explosion in history up to that time.
