On 14 January 1878, Queen Victoria welcomed a special guest and his newest invention to Osborne House, her private retreat on the Isle of Wight. In fact, the encounter was significant enough to warran

Such was George III’s passion for astronomy that he had an observatory built to observe the transit of Venus. Although his interest remains unrivalled, scientific curiosity gripped the Royal Family for centuries, as Matthew Dennison reveals

In autumn 1883, an unusual news story captured the imagination of the British public. It was a tale of deception, fraud – and telephones. On Friday 21 September, a young barrister’s clerk in Birmingha

The Germans possessed two monstrous M-Gerät howitzer guns nicknamed ‘Big Bertha’ – but they were barely finished and had undergone no testing when the First World War broke out. Even so, on 2 August 1

Q Is it true that Beethoven became deaf but still created music? A That is true, indeed. Famed composer Ludwig van Beethoven began to have hearing issues in his late twenties, and by his mid-forties i

How the visionary Apple cofounder introduced the world to life-changing technology