Heath Matthews enlisted in the Canadian Army Special Force for service in Korea shortly after the outbreak of war in 1950. He was 18 years old at the time. He served in Korea with Charles Company, 1st Battalion The Royal Canadian Regiment (1 RCR) during 1952 – 1953. While acting as a signaller, Heath Matthews participated in a company-sized fighting patrol on the night of 21-22 June 1952. The action was a raid against a Chinese position near Hill 166, west of the Jamestown Line....

Training for an engineering career, he attended the Technical University at Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague. At Graz he first saw the Gramme dynamo, which operated as a generator and, when reversed, became an electric motor, and he conceived a way to use alternating current to advantage. Later, at Budapest, he visualized the principle of the rotating magnetic field and developed plans for an induction motor that would become his first step toward the successful utilization of alternating current....

At that moment in time everything he’s been raised to work within, the social constructs which make up every part of his life just exploded and shattered to nothing, and he’s lying there, slumped in a trench, afraid for his life, hearing and seeing death around him, his entire psyche broken. Even more haunting when you think that people didn’t smile for the pictures back then. The circumstances of the First World War pushed hundreds of thousands of men beyond the limits of human endurance....

The authors, photographer John Thomson and journalist Adolphe Smith, aimed to reveal by the innovative use of photography and essays the conditions of a life of poverty in London. Born in Scotland in 1837, John Thomson was a pioneering documentary photographer, one of a breed for whom arduous travel under extremely difficult conditions did little to dampen enthusiasm. Exploring and photographing China for ten years (1862-72), he published his photographs and texts of his journeys in The Antiquities of Cambodia (1867), Illustration of China and its People (1873-74), and The Straits of Malacca, Indo China and China (1877)....

Despite its importance and the extensive coverage it received at the time, much of the imagery we have of the war is in black and white. However, this article has shed new light on the conflict by showcasing rare color photographs from the era. The article features a series of stunning photographs that capture the essence of the First World War. From soldiers on the front lines to civilians struggling to survive, the images provide a unique and vivid perspective on a conflict that has often been depicted in stark, monochromatic tones....

His second-in-command, Dr. Thomas Poulter, returned from a previous Antarctic expedition (in 1934) with the idea for a massive, purpose-built transport vehicle for Antarctic exploration. It was envisioned as an unstoppable machine for long-distance travel on the continent’s endless swaths of snow and ice, especially during the harsh weather conditions. On April 29, 1939, Poulter and The Research Foundation of the Armour Institute of Technology showed the plans to officials in Washington, D....

This powerful storm emerged on Sunday, February 5, 1978, and persisted until February 7. Boston faced an unprecedented snowfall, registering a record-breaking 27.1 inches (69 cm), while Providence also set a record with 27.6 inches (70 cm). Atlantic City witnessed its all-time storm accumulation of 20.1 inches (51 cm). In Chester County, two suburban towns near Philadelphia experienced 20.2 inches (51 cm) of snow, and the City of Philadelphia received 16....

The Moscow McDonald’s initiative was a joint venture between McDonald’s of Canada and the Moscow city council. A plan first envisioned when George Cohon, founder, and CEO of McDonald’s Canada, met Soviet Union officials at the ’76 Summer Olympics in Montreal. And almost a quarter of a century later, on January 31st, 1990 it became a reality. The Russian capital’s inaugural McDonald’s set the record for most customers on its first day of opening by serving over 30,000 hungry punters....

Extraordinary to think that spools of magnetic tape, easily eroded and prone to tangling, were the medium of choice. But so it was. The 1970s were nothing if not a decade of convenience, and the video cassette was certainly that. At first, the market was growing slowly because video cassettes were not affordable; however, when the prices dropped in the mid-80s, the market thrived and revenue for home video superseded theatrical box office....

Soon word leaked out and by the end of the week, a gold rush had started. During the early 1980s, tens of thousands of prospectors flocked to the Serra Pelada site, which at its peak was said to be not only the largest open-air gold mine in the world but also the most violent. At first, the only way to get to the remote site was by plane or foot....

Recovering the ethnically Polish territory of Pomerania, Poznan, and Silesia, as well as the largely German Free City of Danzig were the major objectives. Nevertheless, the restrictions of Versailles and Germany’s internal weakness made such plans impossible to realize. Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 capitalized on German’s desire to regain lost territories, to which Nazi leaders added the goal of destroying an independent Poland. According to author Alexander Rossino, prior to the war Hitler was at least as anti-Polish as anti-Semitic in his opinions....

Olympic also held the title of the largest British-built liner until RMS Queen Mary was launched in 1934, interrupted only by the short careers of Titanic and Britannic. The keel for the Olympic, Harland & Wolff Yard No. 400, was laid on December 16, 1908 under the Harland & Wolff Shipyard’s new Arrol Gantry. It was here that she and her sister, Titanic, were built side by side. T itanic‘s progress trailed some months in the Olympic‘s wake, and would enter service some time after Olympic....

During the festivities of the 30th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic of East Germany in 1979, photographer Regis Bossu was able to take a photograph of the decisive moment wherein Leonid Brezhnev and President Erich Honecker were practicing a socialist fraternal kiss. After the photograph was taken, a lot of magazines used it immediately with one magazine captioning it as “The Kiss”. “The Fraternal Kiss” is an example of how a single image can go beyond pure representation and elevate documentary photography to another level....

It became wildly famous for multiple reasons. As you can see, Loren’s expression in the picture alone says a lot. The story goes that Italian actress Sophia Loren was being welcomed to Hollywood by Paramount Pictures at a dinner party at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. Loren had achieved considerable success in Europe as an actress. She had been the most photographed actor at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. During that same year, 20th Century-Fox had begun to market American actress Jayne Mansfield as the studio’s “blonde-bombshell” successor to Marilyn Monroe after the success of the 1956 film The Girl Can’t Help It....

The Delhi Durbar was organized by Lord Curzon, India’s viceroy at the time. original plan was for Edward himself to come to India for a special coronation ceremony, but when the King refused (he was conspicuously less interested in India than Victoria had been), Curzon decided to stage a massive spectacle instead. After two years’ planning, the ceremonies began on 29 December 1902 with a lavish parade of elephants through the streets....

The Russian Pacific Fleet with the Tsesarevich stopped in Kagoshima, then Nagasaki, and then Kobe. The young Nicholas had been reading Pierre Loti’s atmospheric novel Madame Chrysanthemum and noted in his diary that he hoped he might acquire a temporary geisha “wife”. From Kobe, the Tsesarevich journeyed overland to Kyoto, where he was met by a delegation headed by Prince Arisugawa Taruhito. This was the first visit by such an important foreign prince to Japan since Prince Heinrich of Prussia in 1880 and two British princes in 1881, and the military influence of the Russian Empire was growing rapidly in the Far East....

It’s a form of theatrical entertainment featuring parodic humor, usually consisting of comic skits and sometimes a chorus line or striptease. Burlesque originated in nineteenth-century music hall entertainments and vaudeville. In the early twentieth century, it emerged as a popular blend of satire, performance art, and adult entertainment. The word derives from the Italian burlesco, which, in turn, is derived from the Italian burla – a joke, ridicule, or mockery....

These projects rank as the greatest municipal water-supply enterprise ever undertaken, and as an engineering work is probably second only to the Panama Canal. In 1898, Greater New York with a population of 3.5 million was formed through the consolidation of Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. New York water engineers in the early decades of the twentieth century began to look further afield, to sources in the Catskill Mountains beyond the Hudson River....

Vending machines are defined as self-contained automatic machines that dispense goods (such as candy or soft drink) or provide services (such as a weighing scale) when coins are inserted. The earliest known reference to a vending machine is in the work of Hero of Alexandria, an engineer and mathematician in first-century Roman Egypt. His machine accepted a coin and then dispensed holy water. When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever....

This is how Willy Brandt described the situation many years later in his memoirs: “As I stood on the edge of Germany’s historical abyss, feeling the burden of millions of murders, I did what people do when words fail”. The event took place on December 7, 1970, in what was then the Communist People’s Republic of Poland during a visit to a monument to the Nazi-era Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After laying down a wreath, Brandt, very surprisingly, and to all appearances spontaneously, knelt....