Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

This blog has frequently pioneered ‘wrong time’ objects: things that appear decades or generations before we might reasonably expect them to. Here is an instance (not our first, wrong time car readers might remember) of a motor car about one hundred and fifty years before the car was invented. We are in London in 1742 […]

Greek slingshot with letters ‘catch’ (dexai)!

Swimming looks here like a bar-code… Presumably a problem with printing? Leif writes, 29 Mar 2018: The image is an illustration from Everard Digby’s De Arte Natandi (The Art of Swimming) published in 1587, considered the first English treatise on the practice. The work includes forty woodcuts, which are really brilliant. The attached image gives […]

Stressful days – just discovered our house is riddled with woodworm – are ameliorated by making lists. This is one I’ve been playing around with all afternoon: the demography of Victorian fancy dress parties. You know the drill. Invitation arrives with instructions to turn up on the Sunday afternoon in a costume and identity of […]

Egyptian spelling: sorry…

Humans adapt new technologies quickly to almost every imaginable use. This was true with flight. The first manned hot air balloon flew in 1782. The first military use of hot air balloons came at the Battle of Fleurus in 1794: France became the first nation to ever use air power in war. However, what about […]

If you need to track a pharaoh’s eye, this is how to do it.

Ok this is a bit of a cheeky addition to the list. It is not your typical mermaid, but then it is not your typical monster either. We are in 1742 in London. To be seen, at the Mitre Tavern, Charing-Cross. The largest Thames-Monster, or miraculous man-eater, that was ever in the World, taken on […]

   Introduction: Eyes like Saucers Eyes like saucers comes up again and again in accounts of the supernatural: ghosts sometimes have them, ditto demons and ‘black dogs’ almost always have them. But why? What do these descriptions mean? Where do they come from? Monsters Let’s start with some typical creepy saucer descriptions. A bogey at […]

This is one of these stories that snaked across Europe from newspaper of record to newspaper of record. We picked it up considerably downstream in the, erm, Framlingham Weekly News, 12 Sep 1903 (deep England, scones for tea, talk of Cathay and ‘the Turks’). Who knows if there was a genuine rumour behind this in […]

Fainting in Paris in 1967: usual curiosity and indifference.

Hydrogen Balloon Explosion 1918, Fort Sill. 24 Apr 2018: Ruth writes in, please correct the captions on this article! It is Fort SILL!! The fact that it is in Oklahoma and I’ve been there so I’m definitely familiar with it. And it is the burial place of Geronimo. And Hey! I’ve even got pictures of […]

Another 1920s fountain.

The Giant Sloth? The giant ground sloth is one of the most charismatic of extinct creatures. Dwelling in South America Megatherium was, when it tore down trees, and walked over the pampa, the size of a small elephant and was finally hunted out of existence about 10,000 years ago: one of the victims of homo […]

1892 Franz Ferdinand goes hunting.