HistoryHistorical narrative
One Small Step
In July 1969, three men rode a giant rocket towards the Moon. With alarms sounding and fuel running low, two of them flew a fragile craft down to its grey surface, while the world held its breath.
Famous LivesBiography
The Lady with the Lamp
Florence Nightingale was expected to marry well and live a quiet, comfortable life. Instead she walked the wards of a filthy army hospital at night, and then used numbers to change how the world cares for the sick.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Milkmaid and the Cure
Country people in England said that milkmaids never caught smallpox. In 1796, a village doctor decided to find out whether they were right, and began the story of vaccines.
Famous LivesBiography
The Patent Clerk
In 1905, a 26-year-old clerk in a Swiss patent office, with no university job and no laboratory, wrote four papers in his spare time. Together they changed how we understand light, atoms, space and time.
Famous LivesBiography
The Newspaper Boy from Rameswaram
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam delivered newspapers as a boy on a small island town in South India. He grew up to lead India's space and missile programmes, and became its most loved President.
MotivationTrue story
The Night Edison's Factory Burned
In December 1914, a fire tore through Thomas Edison's laboratory and factories. He was 67, and much of his life's work was in flames. What he did next is the story.
Famous LivesBiography
The Light in the Shed
Marie Curie studied in secret as a girl in Warsaw, worked in a leaky Paris shed and discovered two new elements. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Press That Changed the World
Around 1450, in the German city of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg found a way to print books quickly. Within fifty years, Europe was transformed.
MotivationTrue story
Twelve Seconds at Kitty Hawk
Two brothers who ran a bicycle shop failed again and again to fly. So they went back to the beginning, built their own wind tunnel and checked everything for themselves.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Mould That Saved Millions
In 1928, Alexander Fleming came back from holiday to find mould growing on a dish of bacteria. It took another twelve years, and a team in Oxford, to turn his discovery into a medicine.
Famous LivesBiography
The Girl from Karnal Who Touched the Stars
As a girl in a small town in Haryana, Kalpana Chawla watched planes and drew spaceships. She became the first woman born in India to go to space.
True StoriesTrue story
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
On Christmas Eve 1971, a plane broke apart over the Amazon rainforest. Seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke fell three kilometres, still strapped to her seat, and survived.
For KidsOriginal story
Mira and the Experiment That Failed
Mira's seeds were supposed to grow faster with music. When nothing happened, she thought she had failed, until her grandfather showed her what a real scientist does next.
Famous LivesBiography
The Clerk Who Wrote to Cambridge
Srinivasa Ramanujan failed his college exams and worked as a clerk, yet his notebooks were full of mathematics nobody had seen before. One letter changed everything.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Mission That Came Home
In April 1970, an explosion left three astronauts nearly 200,000 miles from Earth in a damaged spacecraft. What followed was one of the greatest problem-solving efforts in history.