HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-22T14:01:03.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/topic/science-and-technology/feed/atom Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[Malaria once ravaged Britain. Could it come back?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/malaria-once-ravaged-britain-could-it-come-back/ 2026-10-22T14:01:03.000Z 2026-10-22T14:00:22.000Z According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there were 263 million cases of malaria and 597,000 deaths around the world in 2023. The life-threatening disease, spread by infected mosquito bites, is most associated with sub-Saharan Africa, but it used to be a scourge in the UK.
From the 15th to 19th centuries, the marshland areas of southeast England, the Fens and up the Yorkshire coast were ravaged by malaria, although under names like ‘marsh fever’ and ‘ague’. Spread by the Anopheles mosquito, it came with high levels of mortality. Parishes in marshland areas in the 1600s and 1700s recorded deaths rates from ague at between 60 and 80 per 1,000 people, or two or three times as much as non-marshland parishes.
This was also a time when people believed in the miasma theory, which claimed that diseases spread through foul-smelling air. So, even though it is extremely rare for malaria to be passed from person to person, there was a fear that once someone came down with ague, the whole community could be in danger.
How widespread was malaria and what were the cures?
Ague was so prevalent that it merited mentions in literature throughout the centuries, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. William Shakespeare referred to the disease in a number of his plays, including Julius Caesar, Macbeth and The Tempest. In King Lear, he even coined the term, “ague-proof”.
Not only the poor living on marshland perished, either, since malaria could be found along the length of the River Thames, bringing it to the capital of London. James VI and I contracted the disease as his health finally failed in 1625, and Oliver Cromwell succumbed to malaria in 1658.
Common remedies included opium and alcohol, although they didn’t prove to be overly effective. The treatment of malaria truly improved with the introduction of quinine, found in the bark of the cinchona trees of South America. It was called Jesuit’s Bark, as it had been brought to Europe by Jesuit missionaries.
This association with Catholics, however, meant that physicians in Protestant England were initially reluctant to administer the medicine. After its first use in England, attributed to Robert Brady in 1660, quinine grew in popularity after being used to treat Charles II.
Why did malaria die out in the UK?
Malaria gradually died out in England, helped by better healthcare, sanitation and housing, along with the drainage of marshlands. Larger livestock populations may have also distracted mosquitoes from biting humans, too.
The disease remained a threat until the 20th century, though. The last outbreak in the UK occurred in the years after the First World War, when British soldiers serving in the Balkans, where malaria was endemic, fell ill in huge numbers. When they were brought back to the UK for recuperation, especially to areas with lots of mosquitoes, such as the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, the infection spread quickly.
It is thought that there were nearly 500 cases between 1917 and 1921, although this paled in comparison to the Spanish Flu that wreaked havoc in Europe at the same time.
Could malaria return?
The last indigenous case of malaria in the UK came in the 1950s, and by 1975 WHO declared the eradication of the disease in Europe.
While highly unlikely to be endemic once more, scientists have suggested that climate change and the volume of traffic with areas where malaria remains a serious risk could bring new types of mosquitoes to the UK.
]]> Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[Victorian London's poop explosion: why even Queen Victoria couldn't escape the stench]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/victorian-londons-poop-explosion-why-even-queen-victoria-couldnt-escape-the-stench/ 2026-10-12T10:31:04.000Z 2026-10-12T10:30:16.000Z The River Thames has long been a major artery of London, used for transportation and trade with ships constantly moving up and down delivering and picking up people and goods. But at the same time that it helped build the British capital into a bustling metropolis, and the very centre of a global empire, it was also used as a dumping ground for waste.
Whether the chemicals from the factories, animal parts from abattoirs, or household sewage, much of the city’s effluent ended up in the river. By the turn of the 19th century, the state of the Thames was dire. What’s more, it was the source of London’s drinking water, allowing diseases to wreak havoc. There were three cholera epidemics between 1832 and 1854.
- Read more | What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion
To make matters worse, the population rose rapidly to beyond 2.5 million by 1850. And even the introduction of the more-hygienic water closets exacerbated the problem as flushing toilets meant there was more sewer water flowing into the river. The antiquated system of small sewers and cesspits was overwhelmed.
Newspapers clamoured for change, with illustrated papers like Punch personifying the river into a disgusting old man called Father Thames. Scientists and engineers drew up plans of how to deal with London’s sewage problem, but still nothing was done. A desperate Michael Faraday warned that a single “hot season” would give the people of London “sad proof of the folly of our carelessness”.
The summer of stink
Faraday’s warning came true in 1858. An unusually hot summer, with temperature rising over 30°C, saw the river levels drop, which left the filth to bake in the sun. The odour became unbearable.
“Gentility of speech is at an end – it stinks, and whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it,” read the London City Press.
Queen Victoria herself attempted a river cruise, hoping that the bouquet of flowers she held would be enough to mask the stench, only to give up after a few minutes and demand the boat be returned to shore.
Being next to the Thames became nearly impossible. At the time, it was believed that diseases spread through foul air, or miasma, so for Londoners to get a whiff of the Thames during the Great Stink was not only deeply unpleasant but a risk to life.
Cutting through the red tape
One group of people especially affected were politicians, since the newly built Palace of Westminster, home to the British parliament, sat on the riverbank. They ordered tons of lime to be poured into the Thames and for the curtains to be doused with chloride of lime to mask the smell, but to no effect. Committee rooms had to be abandoned and there were serious talks of moving Parliament to another city, such as Oxford.
It turned out that political action could be swift when the politicians were faced with the problem themselves. In just 18 days, MPs passed a bill authorising £3 million to deal with what the Chancellor of the Exchequer Benjamin Disraeli described as “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”.
Joseph Bazalgette, hero of the capital
The Metropolitan Board of Works was tasked with building a new sewer system for the city, led by chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette. He had been trying for years to implement his plans for improved sanitation; now, he was the mastermind behind an ambitious vision.
Bazalgette ripped up London to build a network of interconnecting sewers that led to the river, but joined major sewers running parallel with it. The waste would be diverted to pumping stations – some, like Crossness and Abbey Mills, were architectural marvels themselves – and away downstream.
The project changed the very look of the city, most notably with the addition of embankments. These concealed the sewers and narrowed the river, making it less likely that filth in the water could collect. Completed in 1875, it took more than 318 million bricks to realise Bazalgette’s vision.
The smell improved, the water became clearer and cases of disease dropped. There was another cholera epidemic, but only in the part of London not yet connected to Bazalgette’s network. Such was the success of the new sewer system that London still relies on it to this day.
]]> Emily Briffett <![CDATA[Ancient explosives and the philosopher's stone: a history of alchemy]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ancient-explosives-and-the-philosophers-stone-a-history-of-alchemy/ 2026-10-15T08:08:18.000Z 2026-10-06T10:29:23.000Z Think of alchemy, and you likely imagine bubbling vials of strange potions and molten metals. But how close is this popular perception to the truth? That’s the question behind historian and adventurer Kit Chapman’s latest book, The Age of Alchemy, which was recently announced as winner of the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.
In this episode, Kit guides Emily Briffett through a remarkable story of discovery that blurred the boundaries between science and mysticism – and explains how alchemists pursued dreams of fortune and immortality that laid the foundations for modern science.
Beyond the podcast
An unlikely mix of scientist, scholar, engineer and magician, the 'magus' was a figure that sat at the heart of the transformative Renaissance period. Don’t miss this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast charting the careers of these men, seen as genius scholars by some and charlatans by others.
]]> Kavita Puri <![CDATA[The Amazon rainforest is hiding an ancient secret – and scientists now know what it is]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-amazon-rainforest-is-hiding-an-ancient-secret-and-scientists-now-know-what-it-is/ 2026-10-02T14:31:04.000Z 2026-10-02T14:30:16.000Z Christopher Nolan’s box-office smash hit adaptation of The Odyssey has sparked much excitement about and interest in ancient Greece. Not only has it grossed hundreds of millions of pounds in the first few weeks of its release, but sales of Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic poem have also soared. There’s been a spike in visits to Greece, too, particularly to filming locations such as Voidokilia Beach and Nestor’s Cave in the Peloponnese.
Thanks to poems, other writings and buildings left by the ancient Greeks, we have a strong sense of that culture and its influence on wider civilisation. But other ancient peoples are only now being discovered or studied in detail through groundbreaking technology that has transformed our understanding of their worlds.
- Read more | Were the Amazons just a “male fantasy”? Here’s the truth behind the ancient world’s warrior women
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology involves firing millions of laser pulses from an aircraft down at the ground. Some beams bounce up and are detected by a sensor; computer algorithms then effectively ‘erase’ vegetation to create highly detailed topographic maps – almost like X-rays of landscapes. It’s so sensitive and precise that it can pick up small bumps, depressions and artificial structures cloaked by vegetation for centuries and often invisible to the naked eye – the flattened outline of a long-gone fortification, for example. LiDAR can map 50 square miles in one day. A team on the ground would need years to do something similar.
Using this technique, experts have made discoveries in remote and difficult-to-study places such as Cambodia’s jungle. There, LiDAR mapping of hundreds of square miles starting in 2012 revealed previously unknown infrastructure around the famed Angkor temple complex. The results suggest that Angkor wasn’t an isolated religious sanctuary but, at its peak in the 13th century, was the centrepiece of an extensive city, with numerous neighbourhoods and a sophisticated water-control system.
Three years ago, LiDAR revealed hitherto hidden cities in Mexico’s Campeche region. Featuring 15-metre-tall pyramid-like structures as well as residential areas bustling with inhabitants during the Late Classic Period of the Maya civilisation (AD 600–900), they’re forcing historians to revise population estimates for that culture.
The latest breakthroughs using LiDAR have been made in the Amazon. It was long believed that, in the pre-colonial era, the Amazonian forest – which spans parts of modern-day Peru, Brazil, Bolivia and six other countries – was a wilderness inhabited by only a small number of hunter-gatherers. But new findings revealed in a July 2026 issue of the journal Nature suggest that this area may have been occupied by millions of people.
The multicultural society that lived in the Amazon region from around 600 BC to AD 850 has been given the name Aquiry. LiDAR evidence shows that they built vast geometric earthworks, with shapes that may have represented deities; many of them appear to be connected by ancient roads. Authors of the paper also suggest that the Aquiry had a major impact on the rainforest, repeatedly burning bamboo patches to clear land for planting maize, squash and manioc, and felling forests for their earthworks and the roads leading to them.
- Read more | “A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history
LiDAR has been widely available for some three decades, but has recently become more accessible and affordable for use by researchers in places ranging from Stonehenge to Guatemala. The results are transforming how we think about ancient civilisations – how these people lived and organised themselves, and even how these great empires may have risen and fallen. LiDAR has already revealed that those that came before us were more numerous and sophisticated than we had believed. Ours has been called a ‘golden age of archaeological discovery’ – and, as these techniques are further developed and utilised, no doubt more hidden cities will be uncovered around the world.
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Robot wars in the classroom: why AI in education is nothing new]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/robot-wars-in-the-classroom-why-ai-in-education-is-nothing-new/ 2026-09-28T14:56:27.000Z 2026-09-28T14:56:27.000Z In 1929, the British magazine Teachers World identified ‘A Possible Menace to the Free Development of Education’. The putative culprit was BBC Radio, which had begun its schools broadcasting programme five years earlier, provoking fears that teachers would simply become ‘machine minders’. Such concerns pre-dated radios, though. The first ‘teaching machines’ were developed in the US in the 19th century; it was claimed that they could, for example, teach students to spell by getting them to turn a crank to arrange letters in the correct order.
Panic reached fever pitch by the 1960s, when new electronic ‘automatic teachers’ emerged, popularised by the American psychologist BF Skinner. More widely, commentators ranging from Canadian radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (in The Dialectic of Sex, 1970) to US businessman Alvin Toffler (Future Shock, 1970) predicted that humanoid robots would soon be indistinguishable from real people. Such an “inhuman, mechanical monster”, as one TV journalist put it in 1965 on encountering a teaching machine, was the face of the imagined future.
Anxieties about human teachers becoming redundant have so far proved unfounded, though worries have re-emerged periodically with the inception of computers, the internet and, most recently, generative AI in the form of large language models (LLMs). But the introduction of new technologies into the British classroom often sits alongside surprising continuities in the structure of schooling and the role of the teacher. Teachers have lost a significant amount of autonomy over the past 40 years as relationships with the central state have changed. But the power they hold over students in the classroom has been maintained or even intensified.
Mass education
The Elementary Education Act of 1870 introduced compulsory elementary education, originally until the age of 10, in England and Wales; similar legislation followed in Scotland in 1872. Local education authorities (LEAs), established in 1902, had the task of schooling large numbers of children, often in very poor conditions. So new technologies such as ‘readers’ – printed collections of extracts on different topics – or early projection equipment (‘magic lanterns’) could be very helpful.
Teachers continued to struggle with classes of up to 40 or even 50 children into the mid-20th century, especially in poorer rural areas, and school radio and television programmes offered means of engaging interest. On the other hand, the teachers and students who most needed these technologies were often those to whom they weren’t accessible. One secondary school in Ely was not atypical: in 1962, it still lacked wall maps, a projector and science apparatus, and had barely any books.
School inspectors sometimes addressed the impacts of limited funding from LEAs by bringing in needed items themselves – though these were often modest, such as “a large roll of kitchen paper and some tins of powder paint” given to an Oxfordshire junior school in 1959.
New classroom technologies often received a mixed reception among teachers, who might have felt as if their expertise was being undermined by ‘trendy’ ideas. In the 1980s, fears also intensified that technology could break down the distinction between childhood and adulthood. The American cultural critic Neil Postman argued in The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) that television challenged the authority of adults by giving children unfettered access to information. “Without secrets,” he wrote, “of course, there can be no such thing as childhood.”
Children themselves gave these ideas short shrift. “Childhood does not disappear because you watch TV,” 10-year-old Joseph told Postman in 1994. And teachers’ authority in the classroom remained basically unchallenged. Many British students did not feel respected by their teachers in schools, as responses to the Scottish School Leavers’ Survey from the 1980s show. “Some of the teachers were… power mad, big headed,” wrote one boy in 1983. Despite the efforts of child-led school student unions in the 1960s and 1970s to introduce innovations such as school councils and student representation on governing bodies, students still had little say in what they learned or how they learned it.
Learning by doing
Many technological innovations in postwar Britain were related to the rise of ‘child-centred education’ in primary and secondary schools, intended to suit students’ ‘natural interests’, a philosophy epitomised in the Plowden Report of 1967. One pedagogical idea promoted by child-centred educationalists was ‘learning by doing’, suggesting that children learned best when they actively found out things for themselves.
Building on earlier pieces of teaching apparatus, such as the Montessori sense-training materials of interwar kindergartens, educational innovators pushed technologies such as Cuisenaire rods. These were coloured sticks that could be used to teach basic mathematical operations. However, teachers were often sceptical of the value of these materials – and, indeed, of ‘learning by doing’ itself. “Is there nothing to maths but bits of wood?” complained a columnist in Teachers World in 1971.
Other technologies were more empowering for teachers because they built on their existing expertise. Before the 1980s, education in Britain was highly decentralised. This gave teachers significant control over what they taught, encouraged by initiatives such as the Mode 3 CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education), introduced in 1965, which allowed teachers to choose their own topics and set their own exams. Teachers used photocopiers and Bandas (a British brand name for a spirit duplicator) to make classroom resources, and employed overhead projectors to display this material easily to students. “My fingers are still stained purple,” recalled one enthusiast of the Banda machine.
A major constraint on the adoption of new technologies in the British classroom was funding. Central government did not provide dedicated funds for equipment in schools until the early 1980s, leaving them at the mercy of local authority budgets. And when funds were allocated, the focus was on electronic technologies – mainly computers, but also other innovations such as interactive whiteboards. This was not necessarily what teachers or students wanted; most continued to value older, under-funded technologies such as textbooks, though some embraced digital possibilities.
This pattern of spending began with the Conservative governments of Thatcher and Major, then accelerated under New Labour after 1997, with a 2009 Ofsted report estimating that £2bn had been spent on information and communications technology (ICT) over the previous decade. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency was set up in 1998 to promote ICT, which also became a compulsory part of the curriculum. Today, we see the same thing happening with generative AI – expensive pilot projects being funded to develop new GenAI education tools.
Teachers have expressed mixed opinions on new technologies. The Labour proposal earlier this year to develop ‘AI tutors’ to help disadvantaged students in Years 9 and 10 (13 to 15-year-olds) was strongly criticised by the National Education Union (NEU), with an NEU survey revealing that only 14 per cent of respondents supported the plan. However, teachers’ views on GenAI change when they are the ones using the technology: 76 per cent report using GenAI for day-to-day work.
Students, meanwhile, are not necessarily uniformly enthusiastic. Responding to a 2025 survey by the National Literacy Trust, 66.5 per cent of 13 to 18-year-olds reported using GenAI; however, many were aware of its potential pitfalls. One student did not want to use GenAI in written work because “It wouldn’t be actually what I truly think, it would be a vague interpretation of what I’ve told a robot to expand on, and it might not even make sense”.
Digital natives
Some digital technologies, such as the internet, initially promised students the ability to overtake teachers, with children and teenagers framed in the 1990s as a ‘net generation’ or ‘digital natives’. “For the first time ever, in one domain the students will be the teachers and the teachers will be the students,” argued the Canadian writer Don Tapscott in Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1997). But the internet, like television, has failed to truly disrupt power hierarchies between adults and children.
Teacher autonomy in the classroom has been less threatened by new technologies than by political decisions that have removed power from local authorities. These included the introduction of the first GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) in 1986, the National Curriculum of 1988, and the introduction of academies in 2000. Teachers have lost much of the control they once had over the curriculum and teaching methods. However, other power relationships within schools have persisted unchallenged. The idea of ‘student voice’ is often promoted but has failed to become a reality. A report on pupil participation in Welsh schools found in 2022 that only 23 per cent of students felt they had a say over school policies.
Though certain technologies, such as GenAI, are promoted in classrooms because they are seen to teach valuable work-related skills, others are framed as harmful. Smartphones have been banned in English schools this year, and the use of most social media platforms by under-16s is to be banned altogether across the UK in spring 2027.
At the same time, the government’s New Media Unit hires for jobs such as ‘Social Content Creator’ – with requirements including: “You are a true social media native who knows exactly how to capture an audience’s attention in the first three seconds across TikTok” – suggesting that these skills should be on employability agendas.
In How Children Fail (1964), the radical American educator and teacher John Holt argued that hierarchical, compulsory, competitive schooling discourages children from learning. That kind of education, Holt suggested, drove children to focus on getting the right answers on tests rather than being intrinsically motivated to seek knowledge for its own sake.
In the context of a school system that has changed little since the Second World War, at least in terms of relationships between teachers and children, misuse of technologies such as LLMs is a symptom of a bigger problem. It is unsurprising that students who feel they have little control over their own education might turn to GenAI to produce work that they did not choose to do in the first place.
In some ways, GenAI presents genuinely new challenges for schools, even when compared with the impact of older technologies such as the calculator, the television, the computer and the internet. In other ways, though, it shows how much schools have remained the same. As in past eras, hopes and fears about the potential of new technologies in the classroom should make us think about who chooses these technologies, who funds them, and who gets to control them.
Laura Tisdall is senior lecturer in modern British history at Newcastle University, and author of We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain (Yale University Press, 2026)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[D-Day could have ended in disaster – but one Scottish hero changed everything]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-a-weatherman-really-save-d-day-from-disaster-how-5-forecasts-changed-the-course-of-history/ 2026-09-28T11:13:53.000Z 2026-09-21T15:00:26.000Z 1. A national warning
A ruinous storm in 1859 gives rise to the Shipping Forecast
On 25–26 October 1859, the most severe storm to hit the Irish Sea in the 19th century raged. “The wind screamed like a living thing,” was how one witness described a night when winds reached hurricane force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The storm took 800 lives and 133 ships. As it progressed, twice as many people were lost at sea around the British Isles than in the whole of the previous year. Yet out of the devastation was born one of the most significant innovations in the history of meteorology.
The weather event was dubbed the Royal Charter Storm after a famous steam clipper. On the last leg of a journey from Melbourne to Liverpool, Royal Charter was driven ashore on the north coast of Anglesey with the loss of around 460 lives, including all the women and children aboard. In the era of the Australian gold rush, a cargo of gold insured for the equivalent of £35m in today’s money was also lost. There were only 40 survivors, most of whom owed their lives to the heroism of Maltese sailor Joseph Rogers, who managed to get ashore with a rope. The disaster remains the highest loss of life in any single shipwreck on the Welsh coast.
Unsurprisingly, given the death toll, public attention soon focused on the need to prevent a similar tragedy. Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy, founder of the Meteorological Office, which had been collecting observations from around the British coastline since 1854, believed his department could provide this service.
FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle on the circumnavigation that helped shape Charles Darwin’s thinking, was an experienced mariner who understood how to forecast changes in the weather based on observations of pressure, wind speed and direction. Analysing the Royal Charter gale and others, he proved that weather observations could be obtained using the new electric telegraph and undersea cables, creating the ability to forecast poor weather. Along with new weather forecasts, he proposed a national storm warning system.
A first warning was issued on 6 February 1861. It read: “Caution: Gale threatening from south-west and then northward. Show signal drum.” The warnings used a combination of canvas cone and drum shapes by day and lights by night, which were hoisted on a staff to warn ships of an approaching gale.
Yet not everyone took heed. On 9 February, a severe storm struck the north-east coast of England. Around 200 vessels, which had put to sea despite the warning, were lost. The Whitby lifeboat capsized with the loss of all but one of the crew during its sixth rescue.
However, further warnings were heeded and the number of lives lost around Britain fell by about a third. The reliability of FitzRoy’s methods was such that Queen Victoria requested weather forecasts before sailing to her retreat on the Isle of Wight. The warning system, believed to be the world’s oldest national forecast service, is now known as the Shipping Forecast.
2. Battlefield intelligence
Meteorologists power British advances at Passchendaele in 1917
The reply was unequivocal bordering on tetchy when the Meteorological Office offered its assistance to the military in 1914. “The Army does not go to war with umbrellas,” noted the War Office. But after disastrous losses in the air, artillery misfires and the introduction of gas warfare, attitudes changed. The Meteorological Field Service, universally known as Meteor RE, was established in 1915 and operated from the British Expeditionary Force General Headquarters at Montreuil, France.
Meteor initially provided frontline warnings when conditions were potentially suitable for the deployment of poison gas by either side, or when observations could be made from balloons to improve the accuracy of artillery. Later, aircraft of the Meteor Reconnaissance Flight improved the quality of these observations and provided forecasts for the fledgling Royal Flying Corps (RFC).
But forecasting really came to the fore towards the end of the battle of the Somme in 1916. Engaged in a conflict of static trench warfare in waterlogged terrain and with winter approaching, commanders realised that an understanding of expected weather conditions had to play a key part in military planning.
The earliest known operational military forecast provided by the Met Office was written by the British meteorologist Major Ernest Gold on 24 October 1916. Soon the forecasts included charts and a selection of observations. At first, the charts were hand-drawn, which limited their production and distribution. However, their value became so evident that ‘clay copiers’ were introduced, enabling them to be shared far more widely.
This enhanced technology truly came into its own during the battle of Passchendaele – the opening stages of which were fought in exceptionally wet weather. In Ypres across the 31 days of August 1917, 127mm of rain tumbled from the skies, around 60mm more than average. With trenches immediately filling with water and parts of the battlefield turned to swamp, combat operations were severely compromised.
When the weather finally improved in late September and October, the British were ready to strike, thanks, in part, to the Met Office’s forecasts. The drier weather of September hardened the ground and brought early morning mists, which gave cover to advancing British infantry. When the mists cleared during the morning, German counter-attack formations were revealed to air and ground reconnaissance.
Armed with this intelligence, the British were able to launch offensives at the Menin Road Ridge (20–25 September), Polygon Wood (26 September–3 October) and Broodseinde (4 October). Together, these engagements led to British possession of the strategically important ridge east of Ypres – before the rain returned in October.
Ernest Gold’s diary includes notes from meetings and telephone calls with General Plumer, commander of the Second Army, and his chief of staff, General Harrington, warning them of deteriorating weather. Perhaps the British Army could fight the war with umbrellas, after all.
- Read more | The First World War’s deadliest battle was stalling, but everything changed when Little Willie arrived
3. A storm before D-Day
The Met Office saves thousands of soldiers’ lives in 1944
After long months of preparation, the Allied invasion of western Europe was set for 5 June 1944. The only thing that could delay D-Day was bad weather.
Timing was crucial. The invasion had to coincide with the Soviet summer offensive in the east to ensure maximum pressure on German resources. But moon and tide conditions were favourable on only three days: 5, 6 and 7 June. The odds of even broadly acceptable weather were at least 13-1. The requirement for a full moon at the same time as the desired weather roughly trebled the odds.
Enter Dr James Stagg. He was the Met Office official charged with negotiating the meteorological minefield that confronted the Allies in the nerve-shredding countdown to D-Day. Stagg’s job was to bring together the differing perspectives of meteorologists from the US Air Force, UK Met Office and Admiralty in order to provide accurate forecasts to General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. It was, to put it mildly, a fiendishly difficult job brief.
In terms of data, the Allies had a significant advantage. By June 1944, German forces had not only been pushed back in the air and at sea, they had largely failed to crack Allied codes. This meant that German forecasters likely lacked critical weather observations from the Atlantic. The chief meteorologist of the German 3 Air Fleet advised of poor weather conditions on 6 June. German commanders decided not to trigger their warning system, which had been designed to alert troops defending Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Atlantic Wall to potential invasion. Reassured, Rommel himself returned to Germany for his wife’s birthday party.
Thanks to the work of the Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Allied forecasters had access to all of the German weather observations. But that didn’t mean they could agree on what the weather would bring. Initially, the American team strongly supported a favourable forecast for 5 June but the Met Office and Admiralty believed the weather would be bad. Following significant disagreements, Stagg briefed Eisenhower to expect poor conditions on the French coast – and so the invasion was postponed. The forecast was correct and thousands of lives were saved. Stagg was now under intense pressure to find a weather window on 6 or 7 June. In his diary, he wrote: “I am now getting rather stunned, it is all a nightmare.”
On 4 June, observations from the Atlantic had begun to indicate a brief window of better weather two days hence. Stagg’s diary again reflected the knife-edge nature of the decision when, responding to praise for his forecast from Admiral Creasy, he wrote: “I wonder. He should wait till he sees how things go.”
As it turned out, conditions were marginal. But finding that elusive weather window enabled Stagg and his forecasters to give the Allies the element of surprise. And as the greatest amphibious assault in history got under way, that element of surprise would prove crucial.
4. Forecasting by numbers
In 1965, meteorology enters the computer age
As a pacifist who drove ambulances during the First World War, Lewis Fry Richardson spent his breaks working out how to use mathematical equations in meteorology. Published in 1922, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process was years ahead of its time as it showed how to use mathematics and physics to predict the weather from a starting set of observations – and how this could be done for more than one location at the same time by splitting up an area into a chequerboard design to create gridded forecasts.
Richardson was the first to propose this form of forecasting, although his work was nearly lost when a draft of it was sent to the rear lines during the battle of Champagne and went missing, only to be unearthed months later under a heap of coal.
He calculated that to complete his forecasts in real-time he would require 64,000 “computors” (people carrying out calculations). Richardson imagined a “forecast factory” rather like a theatre in the round and full of boxes representing the grid squares. Computors in each box carried out calculations and passed on their results, all under the direction of a central conductor keeping everything moving on schedule. Conceptually, he was essentially describing the working of a supercomputer.
Experiments in the 1950s and 1960s built upon Richardson’s work to create a simple mathematical model of the atmosphere. The first operational computer forecast using numerical weather prediction (NWP) arrived on 2 November 1965. The technique enabled the Met Office to produce twice-daily forecasts at three levels in the atmosphere across the North Atlantic and western Europe. Even with today’s more sophisticated forecasts, Richardson’s basic equations are still present.
Using computers to produce weather forecasts dramatically enhanced forecasts to extend further into the future. It gave earlier warning of severe weather events, as well as allowing forecasting for different parts of the globe. Some of the earliest impacts were seen in aviation forecasting. As early as April 1966, NWP showed that deep low pressure would bring strong high-level winds in the mid-Atlantic and heavy snowfall to much of the UK, including London. Pilots and airlines were alerted to the risks associated with these conditions.
Models have constantly improved. When the Falklands War broke out in 1982, meteorologists took just 48 hours to extend their forecasting model into the South Atlantic. These days, the Met Office supercomputer is based in the cloud and can perform 60 quadrillion calculations per second. A far cry from Richardson’s original design, but nevertheless an evolution of his original idea.
5. Hurricane? What hurricane?
In 1987, a BBC forecaster issues an infamous denial
On 15 October 1987, BBC forecaster Michael Fish delivered Britain’s most infamous weather forecast. “Earlier on today,” he said, “a woman rang the BBC and said she’d heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t.” He was correct, but he was talking about a storm over the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean. He said it wouldn’t reach the UK and it didn’t. However, a rapidly deepening area of low pressure from the Bay of Biscay did.
Forecasters had flagged the risk of severe weather days in advance, but early models showed the worst of it staying just south of England. As things played out, though, a clash between unusually warm tropical air and cold polar air forced the warm air upward, creating a deep area of low pressure. The sharp temperature contrast produced a particularly intense weather system.
Several ingredients made the Great Storm so memorable, but its track was probably most significant. Hitting the south coast, it pushed north and east, reaching the Humber estuary at about 5.30am on 16 October. This path included densely populated areas.
Gusts exceeded 100mph, uprooting 15 million trees, tearing roofs from houses, flattening vehicles and severing power across much of southern England. One family in Kent recalled waking as “the house shook as though grabbed by a giant hand”. Roads were blocked, trains halted, entire counties were plunged into chaos and 18 people died. The highest gust recorded over the UK was 115mph at Shoreham in Sussex at 3.10am. A Guardian article, “Mayhem brings London to halt”, described how power supplies, telephone connections and transport infrastructure collapsed. It also reported that Woolworths had sold 25,000 brooms and 50,000 candles as people tried to cope in the aftermath.
The apparent mismatch between the forecasts and the storm’s severity sparked national debate. The Great Storm became a catalyst for investment and improvement in the science, technology and communication of forecasting, which has since transformed the way the UK understands and responds to severe weather.
After 1987, the Met Office created the National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS) to give government, industry, emergency responders and the public a clear, coordinated system for severe weather alerts. The warnings help people prepare. Back then, alerts were sent by fax and email to emergency services and media outlets for broadcast on TV and radio. Today, most people get forecasts and warnings through apps, social media and the web. Since 2015, storms have been named to provide a shared reference point.
The Great Storm stands as a reminder that accurate forecasting saves lives and that, when the worst weather hits, it enters national folklore. Just ask Michael Fish.
Catherine Ross is the library and archive manager at the Met Office
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[In 1944, Hitler threatened London with a new "wonder weapon". How did resistance fighters race to stop him?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1944-hitler-threatened-london-with-a-new-wonder-weapon-how-did-resistance-fighters-race-to-stop-him/ 2026-09-20T14:31:04.000Z 2026-09-20T14:30:46.000Z There are moments in historical research when the past suddenly ceases to feel distant. You can spend years reading documents in archives, following footnotes, studying maps and aerial photographs. Then one day you find yourself standing in the mud near a lake in eastern Europe, and realise that history happened right here.
During the Second World War, the lake in question was still a meadow, given the codename Motyl (‘Butterfly’). Eight decades later, the track I took to that spot in southern Poland was deeply rutted after recent rain, and I wondered whether my hire car was about to disappear into the mud altogether.
There were earthworks half-hidden by trees and, in the far distance, the Carpathian Mountains loomed under a grey sky. Nothing about the place obviously suggested that it had witnessed one of the most audacious secret missions of the conflict.
Yet it was from this remote spot that, in the summer of 1944, a RAF Dakota aircraft landed in darkness to pick up a cargo so important that Winston Churchill himself had taken a personal interest in the operation.
That cargo was a V-2 rocket.
The tale at the heart of my new book, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, is one of those extraordinary wartime episodes that sounds almost too cinematic to be true. It features secret laboratories, daring flights into occupied territory, coded messages, hidden airstrips, brilliant scientists, terrified villagers, and one of the greatest intelligence coups of the entire war. Yet despite its importance, it remains astonishingly little known outside Poland.
Most British adults know broadly what the V-2 was: Hitler’s terrifying ‘revenge weapon’, capable of travelling many times faster than the speed of sound before smashing into cities without warning. Unlike the V-1 flying bomb, the spluttering engine of which gave Londoners a few moments of dreadful anticipation, the V-2 struck before anybody heard it. The explosion came first; the sound followed afterwards. It was the world’s first ballistic missile.
The V-2 has always occupied a strange place in the history of the Second World War. It was both technologically astonishing and strategically futile. It represented a leap into the future while emerging from one of the darkest regimes in human history. It killed thousands in London and Antwerp, yet far more perished while building it in the tunnels of Mittelwerk, the underground factory in central Germany where concentration camp prisoners were worked to death under unimaginable conditions.
For years, however, one aspect of the story has fascinated me more than any other: how the Allies learned what the V-2 actually was – because the Germans guarded the secret obsessively.
Explosive revelations
During the early years of the war, British intelligence received fragmentary reports suggesting that something unusual was happening on the Baltic coast at Peenemünde. There were whispers of rockets. Strange test facilities had appeared. A handful of agents mentioned experimental weapons. But the information arriving in London was contradictory and confusing. Some believed that the Germans were developing long-range rockets. Others dismissed the idea as fantasy.
One of the most intriguing figures in this story is the scientist Reginald Victor Jones, a brilliant British intelligence officer who became convinced that Nazi Germany really was attempting to build a giant rocket. Jones was one of those wonderfully eccentric wartime minds: imaginative enough to grasp the possibility, rigorous enough to pursue the evidence. Yet even within the British establishment there was scepticism. Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, thought the rocket theory absurd. The arguments became fierce and deeply personal.
Meanwhile, the Germans pressed ahead.
The centre of development was indeed at Peenemünde, where aerospace engineer (and, after the war, Nasa pioneer) Wernher von Braun and Major-General Walter Dornberger oversaw the creation of what became the V-2. The scale of the enterprise was immense. Thousands of engineers and workers were involved. The technical challenges alone were staggering. This was to be not merely a bigger artillery shell but a machine capable of reaching the edge of space before descending on its target at supersonic speed.
When the RAF bombed Peenemünde in August 1943, the Germans dispersed parts of the programme east into occupied Poland. That decision would prove crucial. Because there the Germans faced one enemy unlike any other in Europe: the Polish underground state.
Resistance is fertile
The Polish resistance has often been remembered chiefly through the prism of the Warsaw Uprising, but by 1944 the Home Army had constructed an extraordinary clandestine network stretching across the country. It gathered intelligence, sabotaged infrastructure, printed underground newspapers, and infiltrated German operations on a remarkable scale.
In the forests and fields around Blizna in southern Poland, the Germans began testing V-2 rockets. Inevitably, some failed. Many, however, launched successfully; when they crashed into the ground hundreds of kilometres north of the launch point, the Polish underground and German army both raced to collect telltale remnants of this secret and terrifying weapon.
In retrospect, the operation to find, remove and research one of the crashed rockets feels almost impossible, with individuals taking enormous risks at every stage. Farmers, priests, engineers, couriers, scientists, radio operators and partisans all became part of a vast improvised effort to understand Germany’s most advanced weapon.
Eventually, a V-2 that crashed into marshy ground at Sarnaki, near the River Bug about 80 miles east of Warsaw, failed to explode properly. Instead of being obliterated, much of the missile survived because it simply went ‘splat’.
The implications were enormous. For the first time, the Allies had the chance to examine substantial pieces of Germany’s secret weapon. Not vague intelligence reports, not guesses, but actual hardware. What followed was an extraordinary race against time.
The Germans knew that rocket parts were going missing after crashes. They launched investigations, with search teams combing impact sites, and the Gestapo became increasingly suspicious that information was leaking out of occupied Poland. Yet somehow the resistance repeatedly managed to stay one step ahead.
Silent witness
The landscape itself still carries traces of the story.
When I visited Sarnaki, the weather was bleak and cold. The Bug snaked through the countryside, broad and brown beneath the low sky. The landscape still feels remote enough that you can imagine the events unfolding there in secrecy.
I found myself thinking about the moment the rocket came down nearby. The silence today makes it difficult to imagine the violence of the event itself: the shockwave, the panic, the rush to secure the site before the Germans arrived. That silence also somehow preserves the atmosphere of secrecy that surrounded the operation.
The rural location of this story is striking. We tend to think of intelligence history in terms of London offices, codebreakers and diplomatic intrigue. But so much of the V-2 story happened in muddy villages, forests and isolated farmsteads.
Men cycled through darkness carrying messages between local Home Army commanders, scientists in clandestine laboratories in Warsaw, and radio operators transmitting intelligence to London. Farmers hid fragments of rocket components beneath haystacks or inside barns before resistance couriers spirited them away.
In Warsaw, two of Poland’s leading scientists, Professor Janusz Groszkowski, an expert in radio engineering, and the chemist Professor Marceli Struszyński, painstakingly examined the recovered parts. Their aim was not to reconstruct a working V-2, but to discover how it functioned: its guidance system, fuel tanks, engine and construction. They measured, photographed and sketched every component before preparing reports for Britain, giving Allied scientists their clearest picture yet of Germany’s revolutionary weapon. The stakes could hardly have been higher. If caught, those involved faced torture and execution.
Part of the tension in this story comes from the sheer fragility of the enterprise. At numerous points, the operation could have collapsed completely. A single informant, a chance patrol, a delayed message, or a mistimed movement might have destroyed everything. Yet the operation continued.
The tale is especially relevant today because it reveals something important about the nature of wartime alliances and intelligence cooperation. British histories of the Second World War have not always given sufficient credit to Polish contributions. Yet in this case the Polish underground provided intelligence that Britain simply could not have acquired independently. Without the Polish resistance, the Allies would have known far less about the V-2 for far longer.
That matters not only historically but emotionally, too. Travelling through these areas, speaking to locals, visiting museums and sites connected with the operation, I was repeatedly struck by how vividly the story survives in local memory while remaining relatively obscure in Britain.
At Blizna, where the Germans conducted many of the test launches, there is today a small museum containing remnants of rockets and wartime material recovered from the area. Walking around it on a cold November morning, looking at twisted fragments of metal and ceramic components, it was impossible not to think about the tense drama surrounding these objects in 1944. At the time, such scraps represented perhaps the most secret technology in the world.
The atmosphere at Motyl, the scene of the clandestine landing operation by the RAF, affected me even more strongly, perhaps because the place still feels so isolated. The mission itself carried huge dangers. The Dakota crew had to navigate their way across Europe at night, land on a rough, improvised strip, load precious cargo quickly, and escape again before German forces intervened.
Standing there even now, with the cold air rolling in from the east and the mountains faintly visible on the horizon, it became possible to imagine the fear and tension of that night.
International collaboration
There is also something deeply moving about the international nature of the story. British airmen, Polish resistance fighters, local villagers, scientists and intelligence officers all became linked through this desperate attempt to understand and counter one of Hitler’s deadliest weapons.
The rocket was a technological marvel – there is no point pretending otherwise. Its engineering was astonishing. But it emerged from a regime driven by fantasy, brutality and self-destruction. Hitler poured enormous resources into “wonder weapons” partly because he increasingly believed technology could reverse Germany’s collapsing military position.
It could not. By the time the V-2 entered service in significant numbers, Germany was already losing the war irretrievably. The rocket inflicted terror and suffering, but it could not alter the outcome.
Yet the legacy of the V-2 stretches far beyond the Third Reich. Modern ballistic missiles descend directly from that weapon. So does the space age. The engineers who built the V-2 later helped create both Soviet and American rocket programmes. The road to the moon runs, uncomfortably, through Peenemünde and Mittelwerk. That moral complexity is one reason the subject remains so compelling.
Writing the book also forced me to think about the strange relationship between landscapes and memory. So many wartime sites today appear utterly ordinary. The forests grow back. Roads are rebuilt. Lakes form. Villages continue quietly with daily life. Unless you know the story, you would never suspect what happened there.
And secrecy lies at the heart of this story.
Indeed, one challenge in writing the book was resisting the temptation to reveal too much too early. The operation unfolded in stages, each one more hazardous than the last. First came the painstaking gathering of intelligence from launch sites and crash locations, and then the race to recover intact components before German search parties could reach them. After that came the clandestine scientific examination of the rocket in occupied Warsaw, followed by the even greater challenge of convincing London that the priceless cargo could actually be smuggled out of occupied Europe. With every success, the risks multiplied. The closer the resistance came to unlocking the V-2’s secrets, the more perilous the operation became.
Eventually, the Allies faced a conundrum. If the rocket fragments and intelligence could somehow be transported out of occupied Poland, the value to British scientists and military planners would be immense. But accomplishing that would require an operation of extraordinary boldness.
Which brings us back to Motyl and that muddy strip beside the lake in the darkness of a Polish summer night in 1944; back to the waiting Dakota aircraft and the men risking their lives to load its mysterious cargo before hopefully vanishing once again into the sky. The mission itself was a remarkable feat of international cooperation. The RAF crew had flown from Italy under the cover of darkness, while Home Army soldiers secured the landing ground, guided the aircraft in and guarded the precious cargo. Among those waiting to board were key figures from the Polish underground, carrying not only crucial rocket components but also scientific reports compiled in occupied Warsaw.
Other ways of getting the material to Britain had been considered, including courier routes through occupied Europe, but they were judged too slow and too vulnerable to German interception. An airlift was enormously risky, yet it offered the only realistic chance of delivering both the evidence and the men who understood it. What happened next represents one of the most remarkable episodes of the war.
Guy Walters is a historian, journalist and author. His latest book is Stealing Hitler's Rocket: The Incredible Mission to Smuggle a V-2 Rocket Out of Nazi-Occupied Europe to Britain (Apollo, 2026)
]]> Jon Bauckham <![CDATA[The secrets of our DNA]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-secrets-of-our-dna-podcast/ 2026-09-09T11:45:03.000Z 2026-09-08T11:43:31.000Z What can DNA tell us about who we are and where we came from?
Professor Turi King – who previously appeared on the podcast to discuss her research into Adolf Hitler’s DNA – returns to explore modern genetics and its role in solving some of history’s biggest mysteries.
Speaking to Jon Bauckham, Turi discusses the surprising origins of DNA fingerprinting, common misconceptions surrounding testing, and her role in the groundbreaking discovery of King Richard III.
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[This Russian hero was a global superstar – but fame came at a heavy cost]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/cold-war/yuri-gagarin-return-international-tour/ 2026-08-29T10:31:04.000Z 2026-08-29T10:30:18.000Z On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin climbed into a tiny spacecraft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan and was launched beyond the sky. His flight came less than four years after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, in 1957. That earlier success had already shocked the United States and transformed the Cold War into a technological contest as much as a military and ideological one.
Gagarin returned to Earth having travelled into space, and orbited the planet. Upon setting his feet back onto soil, the 27 year old was now among the most famous people in the world.
For the Soviet Union, this was an extraordinary propaganda opportunity. Gagarin embodied one of the USSR's greatest Cold War victories: incontrovertible evidence that the communist superpower had overtaken the United States in the race into space. And it helped that Gagarin was so gregarious.
"He was extremely personable, affable, charming," says historian of spaceflight Asif Siddiqi, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. "He was funny. He got along with everybody."
Those qualities soon carried Gagarin far beyond the Soviet Union. In the months after his flight, he was dispatched around the world as the smiling face of Soviet technological achievement, meeting workers, politicians, presidents – and, in Britain, Queen Elizabeth II. So how did a Soviet military pilot become the world’s first space-age superstar – and what did he make of the kings, queens and political dignitaries suddenly clamouring to meet him?
How did Yuri Gagarin become a cosmonaut?
Born in 1934, Gagarin grew up in the Soviet Union during an era in which pilots enjoyed an extraordinary cultural status.
"The larger context of Soviet Russia here is important to understand his interest and obsession with flying," he says. "A generation of Soviet kids, especially those who had been born in the 1930s, after the war saw flying as both literally and metaphorically a kind of escape from their particular context of life."
Siddiqi describes the fame enjoyed by these aviators as “analogous to Hollywood stars in the West. Gagarin grew up in this environment. He worshipped many of these aviators, and I think he wanted to emulate them."
Gagarin pursued aviation himself, training as a pilot and entering the Soviet Air Force. Then came an opportunity that would have gone beyond any expectations. At the end of the 1950s, the Soviet Union began selecting military pilots for a secret programme intended to put a human being into space. The project was highly classified. Soviet officials were competing directly with the American Project Mercury programme, but neither side knew precisely how close the other was to launching a person.
Why was Gagarin chosen to be the first man in space?
Gagarin wasn’t just plucked from obscurity because Soviet officials thought he would look good in photographs (though, his photogenic nature served in his favour). Siddiqi describes him as "one of the best pilots of that initial cohort", and he performed exceptionally well during the cosmonaut selection. "He was very intelligent. In all their engineering classes, he's coming out at the top."
But still, there were several highly capable candidates. "I would say probably there's about five or six of them that were absolutely top-notch, and he was one of those," Siddiqi explains. "Now, at that point, the criteria become much more subjective, and I think that's where his personality stepped in."
Gagarin was naturally good with people. He was smart, approachable and humorous rather than stiff or aloof. Those qualities would prove extremely useful in the quest to turn him into a lovable public figure, following any successful launch.
On 12 April 1961, the decision was vindicated spectacularly when Gagarin's Vostok 1 spacecraft carried him into orbit. Gagarin actually had relatively little direct control over the spacecraft; much of the flight was automated because Soviet engineers were uncertain how a human being might function in weightlessness.
- Read more | Did the Cold War ever really end?
But regardless of his role within the spacecraft, the Soviet Union had beaten the United States. The timing was especially painful for Moscow’s Cold War rival. American astronaut Alan Shepard would become the first American in space less than a month later, on 5 May 1961, but his flight was suborbital rather than a complete orbit of Earth. Gagarin's achievement therefore appeared considerably more advanced. It helped persuade President John F Kennedy that the United States needed an even more ambitious objective: landing a human on the Moon.
The Soviet Union’s next step was to turn Gagarin into an incontrovertible world hero.
How did Gagarin become the world's first space-age celebrity?
Capitalising on the immensity of its achievements, the Soviet state sent its new hero around the world. Countries would receive Gagarin for "two days to four days", Siddiqi says, before he moved on again. The result was a succession of receptions, speeches, dinners, ceremonies and encounters with political leaders.
These journeys formed part of Soviet "soft power": an attempt to win admiration and influence abroad not through military pressure but through culture, technology and personal diplomacy. This would be particularly influential in newly independent countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, where both superpowers were competing for political influence.
But for Gagarin himself, it could be exhausting.
"There were so many functions, one after another," says Siddiqi. "So I think it was a combination of fatigue because there were so many places, so many things, a kind of blizzard of things, if you will."
Nevertheless, among the staged diplomatic engagements were also, Siddiqi argues, "moments of genuine connection".
What happened when Yuri Gagarin met Queen Elizabeth II?
Gagarin arrived in Britain in July 1961, three months after his space odyssey. Here was the Soviet Union's glorious hero, being welcomed into a western constitutional monarchy, at a time when Britain was firmly allied with the United States against the communist bloc. Crowds gathered to see Gagarin despite these political differences, and despite heavy rain.
Gagarin's itinerary also brought him into contact with Britain's establishment, including the royal family.
"It was a very charming trip," says Siddiqi. "He met with Queen Elizabeth II and other members of the royal family who wanted to meet him. Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Princess Margaret."
For all the ideological hostility dividing Britain and the USSR, the first human being to travel into space possessed a status that transcended political boundaries. Inevitably though, his British visit nevertheless retained a strongly political character. Gagarin made a point of visiting Highgate Cemetery in north London, where Karl Marx, the German philosopher whose writings had profoundly influenced communist ideology, had been buried in 1883.
In terms of symbolism, Siddiqi says that this was “the history of communism being brought together with the future of communism: Gagarin.” Marx represented the intellectual ancestry of the Soviet state; Gagarin represented its dazzling and boundless technological future in action.
Why did Gagarin want to visit Manchester?
But rather than simply moving between palaces and official receptions, Gagarin also wanted to meet British workers, and in particular, he wanted to go to Manchester.
The industrial city was intimately connected to the development of 19th-century capitalism and, consequently, to the history of communist thought. Friedrich Engels, Marx's co-author of The Communist Manifesto, had lived and worked in Manchester and studied the conditions experienced by its industrial working class.
"He wanted to go and visit the factories in Manchester because they had this sort of mythic view of the Industrial Revolution, where Marx and Engels had written about the factories in Manchester," says Siddiqi.
There was ideological symbolism here too. The Soviet Union claimed to be a workers' state, and photographs of the first cosmonaut meeting industrial workers in capitalist Britain carried an obvious political resonance.
But Siddiqi says Gagarin's enthusiasm was also personal. "One of the interesting things about Gagarin was that he was very bored with meeting the high dignitaries, the politicians," he says. "He just didn't find it very interesting meeting the prime minister of here, the president of that, and so forth. He really wanted to meet regular people."
- Read more | What if the Soviets had beaten the Americans to the moon? An alternate space race history
In Eastern Europe, Siddiqi says, there are descriptions of Gagarin breaking away from formal processions to approach spectators. "There are accounts where he would step out of a procession or something and walk over to some regular people on the side and chat with them," he says.
"There are many sweet accounts like that, where he would just say, 'How are you doing?' And he would try to have a conversation with regular people."
But Gagarin's celebrity drew ever large crowds, which rapidly became a barrier between him and the ordinary people he wanted to encounter.
The surviving records also reveal just how relentless the demands placed upon him became. General Nikolai Kamanin, a senior Soviet military figure closely involved with the cosmonaut programme, recorded the tours in his diaries, and Siddiqi says that in these diaries, “there are accounts of Gagarin being exhausted and being bored by elaborate ceremonies."
"Whenever he went to a country, everybody wanted to meet him," Siddiqi explains. "So it would be ten o'clock at night, and they would say, 'Well, the minister's wife wants to meet you. Can she just come by for ten minutes?'"
"He would willingly do all of that," says Siddiqi. "So I think it was kind of an exhausting tour, and it lasted several months."
Asif Siddiqi was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[The ancient Mesopotamians were freakishly ahead of their time – and here are 8 reasons why]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-ancient-mesopotamians-were-freakishly-ahead-of-their-time-and-here-are-8-reasons-why/ 2026-09-28T10:15:46.000Z 2026-08-21T15:00:31.000Z 1. Writing
They gave us the means to pen novels – and official records
The ancient peoples of the so-called ‘cradle of civilisation’ – the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – grew up fast. In the five or so millennia BC, four major civilisations emerged in the region known as Mesopotamia – and the advances they made would leave an indelible imprint on history.
From around 4000 BC, Sumerians built the first city-states in the region’s south. The next great power was the Akkadian empire, founded about 2334 BC. In the early 19th century BC, the Babylonians became the dominant force in southern Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, to the north, from the 21st century BC, the Assyrians conquered much of west Asia.
Mesopotamia was a place of rich soils and access to plentiful water for irrigating crops. Unsurprisingly, it’s believed to be where settled farming emerged. Its inhabitants grew rich, with elites enjoying time to think and to develop ways of preserving their best ideas – most notably writing.
Around 3500 BC, Sumerian accountants in the city of Uruk devised a method for keeping track of the rations they gave to their workers – and developed the most advanced bureaucracy the world had yet seen. Writing started here as a system of pictures, known today as proto-cuneiform, which could record any commodity going in or out. Delivered three jars of oil to the temple? Just draw a jar of oil three times.
Proper writing, which can record abstract ideas and the sounds of speech, evolved by about 3100 BC. At this point, pictures were used to spell out the sounds of the objects for which they stood; to provide an analogy in English, drawing a bee and a leaf might spell the word ‘belief’. This writing system, known as cuneiform (from the Latin for ‘wedge’), involved pressing a reed stylus into soft clay tablets, combining multiple wedge-shaped marks to create pictures. Over time, these became more abstract and less like things they originally depicted. So by the first millennium BC, you’d never guess that the sign ‘ni’ was originally supposed to be a jar of oil.
Cuneiform was still being written on clay tablets in the Middle East in the first century AD, some 3,100 years after the system was first devised – a period spanning well over half of recorded human history.
Such tablets don’t decay in the ground, and they’re not destroyed by fire, so around half a million of them survive today, with more surfacing in excavations all the time. As a result, Mesopotamia is one of the best-documented parts of the ancient world, helping us learn about its extraordinary innovations.
2. Banking
They invented spreadsheets, credit and interest payments
Alongside those early accounting systems, the Mesopotamians developed the world’s first spreadsheets, as well as sophisticated banking systems. They also invented the concept of credit – and, with it, interest-bearing loans.
As early as the third millennium BC, grid-like tablets recorded loans of grain from the palace to the temple, enabling lenders to keep tabs on how much was repaid and what was still owed. A series of surviving tablets detail how the royal granaries of Lagash – a city-state sited between the sites of modern Baghdad and Basra – supplied the White Temple, which failed to repay the full amount of grain the following year, necessitating the recording of a deficit on the loan.
Temples functioned as banks, lending silver and barley at discounted rates in times of need. They also financed commercial ventures, charging annual interest at 33 per cent on barley.
The private sector took off in the early second millennium BC, with fully fledged private enterprises in which people could invest. Assyrian merchants organised trading partnerships to finance their trips to Anatolia, where they sold textiles made by their wives at home. Traders were keen to invest their profits and not let their silver lie idle. Precious metals sitting in the money bag rather than being put to work increasing their value were described as ‘getting hungry’.
The Babylonian word for interest, which translates as ‘increase’, originally referred to herds of animals. Just as the flocks would reproduce and multiply over time, money and debt could also burgeon. Given the huge interest rates levied by lenders, profits could grow quickly. But so could debts – and ordinary people who found themselves unable to repay their creditors were sometimes enslaved. In the second millennium BC, Babylonian kings frequently had to proclaim debt amnesties to provide relief.
National deficits also caused problems. The first documented war in history, between the Sumerian cities of Lagash and Umma, a little to the north-west, flared up over a refusal to repay a loan. The conflict, which dragged on for 150 years (c2500–2350 BC), was a convoluted tale of claim, counterclaim, and battles won and lost – all over a dispute over a loan agreement based on a rich strip of fertile territory, the Gu’edena or ‘edge of the plain’.
So you can thank the Mesopotamians for your credit card – and also be grateful that interest rates have, by and large, fallen in the past 4,000 years.
- Read more | He tried to conquer knowledge itself – instead this ancient Mesopotamian king resorted to rule with terror
3. Pubs
They adored beer, and created venues to drink it
People have probably been quaffing beer for at least 12,000 years, but the earliest-known written evidence for brewing comes from Mesopotamia. Indeed, some of the very first surviving examples of writing were made by temple accountants working out how much grain they needed to make enough beer for festivals.
The Sumerians adored beer. One list, albeit compiled later as a lexical teaching aid, records 38 different types including dark, light, red and “triple beer”, plus beer with and without foam – and the enigmatic “beer in the middle of the sea”. That’s enough varieties to make any modern craft brewery proud.
Drinking beer was a highly social activity. People gathered around a communal vat and sipped through reed straws. Such a scene is depicted on cylinder seals belonging to Queen Puabi of Ur in the 26th century BC, who was later buried with a gold and lapis lazuli drinking straw. Straws were perhaps used to penetrate a floating layer of residue, or simply to enhance the fun of sharing a drink with others.
Mesopotamians built the first pubs, too. One tavern in Lagash, established c2700 BC, had a kitchen, an outdoor seating area and 150 serving dishes as well as the all-important beer.
It’s often assumed that early beer was low in alcohol, mainly because it was given to children. But there is plenty of evidence that Sumerian beer was highly intoxicating. One myth tells of Inanna, goddess of war, love and sex, getting the god Enki (or Ea) drunk so that she can steal from him the powers of civilisation.
Later medical recipes contain cures for hangovers and even alcoholism. And one of the texts that gives us our most detailed information about brewing – the Sumerian hymn to the goddess Ninkasi – might have been taught to school children in the second millennium BC, along with a drinking song that has become famous via YouTube: As I spin around the lake of beer, while feeling wonderful, feeling wonderful, while drinking beer, in a blissful mood, while drinking alcohol and feeling exhilarated, with joy in the heart and a contented liver – my heart is a heart filled with joy!
4. Maths
They had plenty of time for numbers and calculations
Whenever you check a clock to tell the time, you are using a Mesopotamian system of counting – sexagesimal. Our modern decimal system uses the number 10 as the base, but the Mesopotamians used base 60 – which is why we have 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. It was also the Mesopotamians who decided that a circle should be divided into 360°; that’s neatly divisible by 60, and explains why it makes sense for clocks to have circular faces (though ancient Mesopotamians used water clocks).
Unlike us, they counted lots of other things in 60s, a fact reflected in the Mesopotamian system of writing numbers. One vertical wedge could stand for 1, 60 or even 360 (6x60). You can tell which number is indicated only from the context which does make Mesopotamian maths a bit of a headache.
And these people were extremely good at maths. Babylonian schoolchildren were learning a version of Pythagoras’ theorem more than 1,000 years before the Greek polymath triangulated his thinking in the sixth century BC. As early as the 18th century BC, they also knew the square root of two, needed to find the diagonal of a square.
Babylonian students were taught methods of calculating areas of land so that they could be taxed efficiently. However – and seemingly just for the fun of it – teachers used some huge numbers when setting exercises. Later, the Babylonians came up with sophisticated maths that was key to the development of data science.
- Read more | Long before the Bible, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation predicted one of its most famous stories
5. Poetry
They gave us gloomy introverts who ponder life
It wasn’t all admin in Mesopotamia. The region produced the world’s first literature, too, in all sorts of genres. The earliest named author in Mesopotamia – and, therefore, the first known writer in history – was Enheduanna, a priestess of the moon god in the city of Ur, who lived around 2300 BC.
Known as “the Sumerian Shakespeare”, Enheduanna wrote wonderful poems about a turbulent world governed by capricious gods – classics that were still being studied in schools five centuries after she died.
A snippet from Exaltation of Inanna gives a flavour of her verse:
I approached the light but it burned me
I approached the shade but was covered by a storm
My honeyed mouth turned to spittle
My talent for lifting spirits has turned to dust
The Mesopotamians were also great storytellers. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh – dating back to at least the 18th century BC – charts the fate of a king on a quest for eternal life. It’s the earliest known example of the ‘hero’s journey’ that underpins so many of today’s Hollywood films. Babylonian stories about struggles between gods and heroes influenced the Homeric epics, Greek mythology and even the Bible: does a flood wiping out humanity and an ark that boards animals two by two sound familiar?
But it wasn’t all serious. The Sumerians wrote the first rap battles – debate poems between entities such as Summer and Winter, Bird and Fish, and Date Palm and Tamarisk, arguing over who deserves the crown.
Similar slanging matches also took place between people. A recently discovered text from c1740 BC describes a cat fight between two women from the city of Nippur. They accuse each other of being bad at baking and of buying ready-made food, hurling insults – “Your butt sticks out” – and accusations: “You can’t even operate a spindle.”
Poems about the goddess Inanna describe the first instance of teenage rebellion, recounting how she sneaked out to meet her boyfriend without telling her parents. And some of the earliest jokes are written in Sumerian. One starts: “A dog walks into a bar and says ‘I can’t see a thing – I’ll open this one’!” The punchline, we can only assume, has been lost in translation.
6. Astrology
They read the stars and created zodiacal archetypes
Whether you’re a feisty Leo or a cool-headed Capricorn – indeed, whatever your star sign – you can thank the Babylonians for inventing it. Astrology was practised in Mesopotamia by at least the third millennium BC, when the stars and planets were thought to carry messages from the gods to the king. An eclipse usually meant that a king would soon die, whereas the rising and setting of Venus could portend a good harvest, reconciliation of kings, or even war.
None of these outcomes was inevitable, though. Rituals could be performed to ask the gods to change their minds, or for help interpreting these astral signs: if a king will die, which king will it be? One surviving prayer to the moon god worries over “the evil of a lunar eclipse” and “portents and omens, unpleasant and unfavourable” as it pleads for intercession and the hope of a more “favourable” path.
In the fifth century BC, Babylonian priests divided the sky into 12 equal chunks that we now call the zodiac. The Persians who ruled Babylon at that time had no interest in taking advice from the Babylonian gods, so astrologers started taking private clients – and invented horoscopes. These forecast the future based on a person’s date of birth and the exact positions of the planets, making predictions such as: “His days will be long” and “He will have sons”.
The names of most modern star signs are direct translations into Latin of the Babylon constellations: Libra is a pair of scales, Cancer is a crab and Taurus is the Babylonian bull of heaven who, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes down from the sky to trample the land. Others took their classical names from Babylonian images – Aquarius the water carrier is depicted in the same way as the water god Ea (or Enki), often shown with water pouring from his shoulders. Meanwhile, Virgo the maiden was named after a Babylonian picture of a woman holding an ear of wheat (this constellation was ‘the Furrow’ in Babylonian).
- Read more | Behold his nightmarish nether regions: this ancient Mesopotamian demon was secretly a divine hero
7. Data science
They laid the foundations for modern machine learning
Without the Babylonians, we would have no artificial intelligence – because they invented the algorithm. The roots of data science lie in astrology: the original purpose of the zodiac was to measure the sky more accurately. Babylonian astronomers measured the position of a star or planet by holding up hands to the sky: 12 fingers corresponded to an angle of 1°. They studied the heavens each night, recording observations in diaries maintained for at least 600 years – arguably the longest scientific project in history.
With such a huge amount of data, they quickly spotted patterns. For instance, Venus moves in an eight-year cycle, so they could work out that planet’s position on a future date by simply checking their records to see where it had been recorded eight years before then. Eventually, astronomers developed mathematical formulae to calculate the positions of celestial bodies without having to consult past records – and the algorithm was born.
The Greeks picked up these data and calculations along with the zodiac, and they became part of Greek science. The Greek astronomer Ptolemy used Babylonian eclipse records dating back to 747 BC. Modern mathematical astronomy, directly descended from that Greek work, exists only because of astrology – ancient scholars carefully observing the sky for messages from the angry gods. So the algorithm, along with the idea that trends can be extrapolated from data, comes from a core principle of Mesopotamian religion – the idea that the gods write messages in the heavens for humans to interpret.
8. Medicine
They performed surgery and introduced the system of striking off dodgy doctors
The Egyptians usually get the credit for producing the earliest known medical texts – but the Mesopotamians were first. The oldest medical recipe, for making a salve to heal a bite wound, dates from the third millennium BC in Ebla, Syria.
The code of Hammurabi, which covered 282 legal scenarios – including disputes – attests that the Babylonians were performing eye surgery in the 18th century BC. These laws, which survive on a stele topped with a relief image of Hammurabi with Shamash – who worked double time as the sun god and the god of justice – mandated harsh penalties for medical malpractice. If an operation went wrong and the patient was blinded, the physician’s hand should be cut off – a hand for an eye, as it were. It was also stated that doctors should charge rates on a sliding scale based on the social class of the patient. Ordinary people paid half as much as the wealthy.
Mesopotamian medicine was fundamentally holistic. A physician would give you drugs to treat symptoms, but an exorcist would also be called to fix the root problem, understood to have involved angering the gods. Incantations at the bedside would reassure a patient that the gods would soon calm down, while omens could tell the exorcist whether the patient would live or die even before that spirit-expeller arrived at the sufferer’s house. If, for example, he saw a potsherd standing up in the street, a patient was clearly too dangerously ill to go near.
In the seventh century BC, Assyrian king Ashurbanipal commissioned an encyclopaedia to collect and standardise the vast numbers of medical texts and traditions that were circulating by then. These included treatments for everything from minor ailments, such as headaches and digestive problems, to serious problems such as mental illness and epilepsy – known to the Babylonians as ‘fallen from the sky’.
To treat a headache, you should mix a selection of seeds then “boil down [the mixture] in vinegar, sprinkle parched grain flour [and] emmer flour on it, and smear [the mixture] onto a piece of leather. Shave his head [and] put it on as a bandage; he will get better.”
Hippocrates is usually credited with inventing the concept of diagnosis based on observation, but the Mesopotamians pioneered this approach hundreds of years earlier, considering five grades of temperature variation, among many other factors. Their knowledge was then incorporated into Hippocratic writings, Roman treatises on eye disease and, later, Arabic medicine.
Mesopotamian advances travelled widely thanks to the cosmopolitan nature of the ancient world. To the east, Sumerians had been trading goods and ideas with the Indus Valley and Afghanistan as early as the third millennium BC, while in the other direction Alexander the Great united lands from Babylon to Greece under one rule. Whether via commerce or conquest, people moved – and took their cultures with them. And Mesopotamian expertise survived and spread because successive cultures found it to be practical, useful and effective.
Selena Wisnom is lecturer in the heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester. She is the author of The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History (Allen Lane, 2025)
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
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