When a government is at war, they’ve got to pull out all the stops. And sometimes, that means listening to ideas that would ordinarily seem totally insane. Or, in the case of Lord Mountbatten during the Second World War, an actual mad scientist. This is how gigantic Pyke aircraft carriers made of ice won the […]
Author: Brad Dare
Juan Pujol – Britain’s Master Spy
Playing Both Sides From The Start Juan Pujol, the man who would later become Agent GARBO, was born in 1912 to a liberal family in Barcelona. He was conscripted into a cavalry unit when he turned 18 but quickly discovered that a soldier’s life was not for him. When the Spanish Civil War broke out […]
The First Air-cushion Vehicle – Levkov’s Hovercraft
If you look up “first hovercraft” online, the top results state that the first viable hovercrafts were developed by British inventor Christopher Cockerell in the 50s and 60s. Unless you look hard, you won’t see the name of a Soviet inventor: Vladimir Levkov. This bright spark invented a working hovercraft in the early 1930s, and […]
Grigory Kulik – The Worst General Ever
Ever look at someone in an authority position and think: how did someone so useless get so much power on Earth? It’s a story as old as time, but they probably have connections. The more powerful their friends, the more they can get away with, and when you’re mates with the Bolshevik Tsar Joseph Stalin, […]