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799 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 14.

  1. Les Invalides was built for old soldiers and now holds NapoleonLouis XIV ordered Les Invalides in 1670 as a home and hospital for worn-out veterans of his endless wars. The golden-domed complex in Paris later armed the crowd that stormed the …
  2. Hawk-Eye began as a TV graphic for cricket and became a refereeWhen a bowler traps a batsman's pad, Hawk-Eye projects where the ball would have gone next, straight through the legs toward the stumps. It started in 2001 as a television gimmick…
  3. Heathrow's old star-shaped runways still hide inside its taxiwaysIn the 1950s Heathrow had six runways laid out in three pairs like a six-pointed star, so two always pointed within 30 degrees of the wind. Longer jets needed longer strips, and o…
  4. Why Queen Victoria's proclamation left room for an unborn rivalWhen Victoria inherited the British throne from her uncle William IV, her proclamation carried an odd caveat protecting any child his widow might still bear. Queen Adelaide was 44…
  5. Historians agree Jesus existed; they disagree about almost everything elseScholars across the field treat one question as closed: a Jewish preacher called Jesus of Nazareth lived in first-century Galilee. Almost everything beyond that is argued over. On…
  6. HMS Belfast survived a broken keel and a government scrapping orderLess than four months into the Second World War, a magnetic mine snapped HMS Belfast's keel in the Firth of Forth. Many assumed she was finished. Instead she was rebuilt, fought f…
  7. America's biggest bank started as Aaron Burr's water company loopholeIn 1799 Aaron Burr slipped an innocent-sounding clause into the charter of a company meant to bring clean water to New York, letting it invest spare capital in any lawful business…
  8. From one secondhand rolling mill, JSW grew into steel, ports and cricketIn 1982 Om Prakash Jindal bought a small re-rolling mill at Tarapur near Mumbai. Four decades later the JSW Group, now led by his son Sajjan Jindal, makes steel, cement, paint and…
  9. Kane Williamson began with two ducks and became New Zealand's greatest batsmanKane Williamson's one-day international career opened with a duck on his ninth ball, then another on his second ball the following match. He went on to score more Test runs than a…
  10. Leicester Square's garden exists because 17th-century parishioners complained to the kingWhen the Earl of Leicester fenced off common land in front of his new London mansion in the 1630s, local parishioners protested to Charles I. Royal arbitrators ordered part of the…
  11. Why scoring three times is called a hat-trick, and how cricket started itIn 1858 the bowler H. H. Stephenson took three wickets with three consecutive balls, and delighted spectators passed round a collection to buy him a hat. That gift gave sport one …
  12. Humans are unusually right-handed compared with other primatesAbout nine in ten people favour their right hand, a bias so strong that a study of 41 monkey and ape species found humans to be outliers. Most other primates split evenly between …
  13. Harbhajan Singh nearly quit cricket to drive trucks in AmericaAround 2000, Harbhajan Singh had been expelled from India's national cricket academy, dropped by the selectors and left as the sole provider for his mother and sisters after his f…
  14. Hardik Pandya, the leg spinner a coach turned into a match-winning pace all-rounderUntil he was 18, Hardik Pandya bowled leg spin. A Baroda coach named Sanath Kumar pushed him toward fast bowling instead, and the switch produced something India rarely had: a sea…
  15. Harold Larwood, the pit-pony boy who became cricket's most feared fast bowlerAt 18 Harold Larwood stood just 5 feet 4 inches tall, and a veteran Test batsman thought he looked like a jockey. Years of shifts at a Nottinghamshire colliery had given him shoul…
  16. Harold Wilson, the statistics-loving economist who won four elections for LabourBefore Harold Wilson ever sat in Parliament, he was counting coal. A wartime statistician at the Ministry of Fuel and Power, he later wrote the law that still governs most British…
  17. Harrods, where the first English escalator came with a brandy for nervous ridersOn 16 November 1898 Harrods unveiled England's first moving staircase, a woven leather belt flanked by mahogany. Shoppers who survived the ride were handed brandy at the top. The …
  18. Harrow School, a charity for poor parish boys that gave the world squashJohn Lyon's will left most of his money not to the school he founded but to the upkeep of two roads into London. That lopsided bequest lasted until 1991. Meanwhile his free gramma…
  19. Harry Brook, the Yorkshire batter whose Test career began faster than almost anyone'sOnly Sunil Gavaskar and Don Bradman scored more runs than Harry Brook in their first six Tests. The Yorkshireman piled up 809 in his first nine innings, beating a record Vinod Kam…
  20. Harvey Nichols, the Knightsbridge linen shop that grew into a luxury chainHarvey Nichols began in 1831 as a modest linen shop run by Benjamin Harvey in Knightsbridge. When he died, his widow Anne teamed up with their son-in-law James Nichols, and the pa…
  21. Cardinal Wolsey gave Hampton Court to Henry VIII hoping to surviveThomas Wolsey spent seven years and 200,000 crowns making Hampton Court the finest palace in England. Then, in 1529, sensing that Henry VIII and his enemies were closing in, the c…
  22. London's gentlemen's clubs began as legal refuges for aristocratic gamblingWhite's, Brooks's and Boodle's, the first gentlemen's clubs of London's West End, owed part of their appeal to a legal loophole: gambling was banned except in members-only establi…
  23. Glenn Maxwell's reverse sweeps make fielding captains run out of fieldersGlenn Maxwell hits cricket balls where fielders are not supposed to need to stand. Reverse sweeps, switch-hit pulls and improvised flicks mean captains struggle to cover every sco…
  24. The stray cricket ball that may have cost Australia the 2005 AshesOn the morning of the second Test at Edgbaston in 2005, Glenn McGrath stepped on a loose cricket ball during warm-ups and wrecked his ankle. England piled up 407 runs on the first…
  25. Cricket's vocabulary hides a mock funeral, a car logo and class warCricket's most famous trophy began as a joke obituary. In 1882, after Australia beat England on English soil for the first time, The Sporting Times announced that English cricket …
  26. From a jute mill to Delhi's airport: GMR's unlikely routeIn 1978 G. M. Rao bought a jute mill in Rajam, Andhra Pradesh. His group went on to dabble in banking, breweries, software and sugar, then shed almost all of it. Today GMR runs De…
  27. India's smallest state spent roughly 451 years as a Portuguese capitalGoa is India's smallest state by area, a strip of coast between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea. For about four and a half centuries it was ruled from Lisbon, serving as the…
  28. Hampden Park once squeezed in nearly 150,000 fans, plus thousands without ticketsIn 1937, 149,415 people officially paid to watch Scotland play England at Hampden Park in Glasgow, still Europe's biggest crowd for an international match. At least 20,000 more go…
  29. Hampshire is shortened to Hants because of a Domesday Book spellingWhy does Hampshire abbreviate to Hants, with no p or m in sight? The Saxons called the district around Southampton Hamtunscīr, and the Domesday Book wrote it as Hantescire. That c…
  30. A dead man's will helped save Hampstead Heath from London's buildersWhen Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson inherited the Manor of Hampstead in 1821, a new road promised fortunes from housing. But his father's will barred him from selling the land or leasin…
  31. Before newspapers, London's Fleet Street was known for tanneries, taverns and bishopsFleet Street is shorthand for the British national press, but printers only arrived in the early 16th century. For centuries before that, the road beside the River Fleet was a mix…
  32. Francis Bacon drifted as a decorator and gambler before painting seriously in his late twentiesFor several years either side of 1930, Francis Bacon drifted between designing interiors, gambling and living the high life, and only turned seriously to painting in his late twen…
  33. Fred Trueman became the first bowler to reach 300 Test wicketsFiery Fred Trueman, a genuinely fast bowler from a Yorkshire mining district, was the first player to take 300 wickets in Test cricket. He might have taken more, but his running b…
  34. Clubs once owned players indefinitely until free agency cracked the reserve clauseFor much of professional sport's history, a reserve clause let clubs hold on to players for as long as they liked. Free agency, the right to shop yourself to other teams once out …
  35. A Uruguayan PE teacher built futsal from five other sports' rulebooksIn 1930, Montevideo physical education teacher Juan Carlos Ceriani wanted a football game YMCAs could play indoors. He borrowed team size and match length from basketball, goalkee…
  36. Gary Sweet's first starring role was playing Don Bradman in BodylineIn 1984 Adelaide-raised actor Gary Sweet landed his first lead, as the batting great Donald Bradman in Bodyline, a miniseries about the bitter 1932–33 Test series between England …
  37. William Murdoch lit his walk home with a bladder full of coal gasBefore gas lit whole cities, the Scottish engineer William Murdoch carried a lantern made from a gas-filled bladder attached to a jet, and used it to find his way home at night. I…
  38. Gautam Gambhir top-scored in two World Cup final wins, then coached IndiaGautam Gambhir hit 75 off 54 balls in the 2007 World Twenty20 final and 97 off 122 in the 2011 World Cup final, both India victories. The left-handed opener later became India's h…
  39. Cricket played for 150 years before anyone officially decided what first-class meantCricket scorecards survive from as early as 1744, but the label first-class only became official for matches starting in May 1895, and only in Britain. A worldwide definition wait…
  40. Firefighters cut holes in burning roofs on purpose, and it saves livesWatching crews smash windows and hack openings in a roof can look like extra damage. It is deliberate. Venting releases smoke, poisonous gases and trapped heat, which helps locate…
  41. English billiards needed rules to stop champions scoring foreverEnglish billiards uses just three balls, and the best players could keep a break going almost indefinitely. So the rules cap repetition: a sixteenth consecutive hazard or a sevent…
  42. A cemetery purchase gave the City of London the legal key to save Epping ForestIn 1853 the City of London bought a farm near Epping Forest to build a cemetery. That quietly made the City a forest commoner, entitled to graze cattle there. When landowners fenc…
  43. A struggling grain trading firm grew into the company behind India's first Hindi satellite channelEssel Group began in 1926 as a grain dealer in a Haryana market town and was deep in debt by 1967. Its turnaround came through government food contracts, packaging tubes and then …
  44. Euston's first trains were hauled up the hill by cable, not locomotiveWhen Euston opened in 1837 as London's first inter-city terminus, steam engines could not manage the steep climb from the platforms over Regent's Canal to Camden. So trains headin…
  45. Everton began as a chapel team so its cricketers had something to play in winterEverton Football Club started in 1878 as St. Domingo's FC, set up so members of a Methodist chapel congregation in Liverpool could keep playing sport after the cricket season ende…
  46. Falmouth was where news of Trafalgar landed and Darwin stepped off the BeagleAs the nearest big harbour to the mouth of the English Channel, Falmouth was often Britain's first point of contact with the wider world. Word of Nelson's victory and death at Tra…
  47. Cricket swing comes from turbulence clinging to one side of the ballMany fans believe a cricket ball swings because air rushes faster over its polished side. That is a myth. Swing comes from turbulence: on the side where air becomes turbulent, it …
  48. India once went 30 Olympic hockey matches without defeatFrom Amsterdam in 1928 to Rome in 1960, India's men won 30 consecutive Olympic hockey matches, part of a run of seven golds in eight Games. At Los Angeles in 1932 they beat the Un…
  49. Dinesh Karthik reached India's team first, then spent years behind DhoniDinesh Karthik debuted for India as wicketkeeper in 2004, before MS Dhoni. Within months Dhoni's explosive batting had taken the gloves, and Karthik spent much of the following tw…
  50. Cricket turned Hotstar into one of the world's biggest streaming servicesHotstar launched in February 2015 timed to the Cricket World Cup, and the sport never stopped driving it. During India's 2019 World Cup semi-final against New Zealand, 25.3 millio…
  51. India's biggest TV network has passed from Hong Kong to Murdoch to Disney to RelianceThe company now called JioStar began in 1990 as Star TV, a Hong Kong satellite venture beaming Hollywood-style English channels across Asia. Since then Rupert Murdoch, the Walt Di…
  52. Schoolyard dodgeball has grown up into a sport with world championshipsMost people remember dodgeball as a chaotic gym-class game. It now has international federations, a world championship held every year since 2012 and a rulebook that specifies cou…
  53. Ealing holds England's oldest surviving census, a tally of 85 householdsIn January 1599 someone went door to door in the Middlesex village of Ealing and listed all 85 households: every resident's name, age, relationship and job. It is the earliest Eng…
  54. Earls Court hid a giant pool under its exhibition floorBeneath the main hall of London's Earls Court lay a basin 60 metres long and 30 wide. Filling it took four days and some 2.25 million gallons of water, pumped only at night to spa…
  55. Mughal Bengal alone out-produced western Europe, by one estimateUnder the Mughals, the province of Bengal is said to have generated almost half the empire's output and about 12 percent of the world's, more than all of western Europe combined. …
  56. The Assam wicketkeeper who quit cricket at 21 and now runs India's boardDevajit Saikia kept wicket for Assam in the Ranji Trophy, then walked away from professional cricket at 21 to concentrate on his studies. He became a lawyer, later Assam's Advocat…
  57. The DOI: a permanent address for research that only works if publishers maintain itWeb addresses break all the time, which is a problem for scholarship built on citations. The digital object identifier, or DOI, gives each paper, dataset or report a fixed name th…
  58. An NFL team spent three seasons as visitors in a soccer stadiumFrom 2017 to 2019 the Los Angeles Chargers played home games in a soccer ground in Carson, California, while their new stadium in Inglewood rose. It was the smallest venue in the …
  59. The buyout firm that owned Formula One later bought an IPL teamCVC Capital Partners spent a decade as the controlling owner of Formula One before selling to Liberty Media in a deal worth $4.4 billion. The private equity firm then turned to ot…
  60. David Gower hit his very first Test delivery for fourAt Edgbaston in 1978, a young left-hander from Leicestershire pulled the first ball he ever faced in Test cricket, from Pakistan's Liaqat Ali, to the boundary. David Gower went on…

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