When a violent storm tore across Orkney in 1850 and stripped soil from a mound above the Bay of Skaill, villagers saw something that had been hidden for thousands of years.

In the early 1780s, James Price stood at the center of one of the most unusual scientific controversies in Britain.

When Zinaida Portnova left Leningrad in 1941 to stay with her grandmother in the Vitebsk region, she stepped into an area that would soon fall under German occupation.

When Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was captured by Prussian forces during the Seven Years’ War, he was forced to eat what the French called hog feed: potatoes.

From afar, Hashima Island looked like a battleship adrift in the East China Sea.

In the 1860s London engineers built a floating dry dock so large that its U shaped walls reminded later viewers of a gigantic half pipe.

On August 5 1948 readers of The Vidette Messenger in Indiana opened their newspaper and saw a photograph that drew national attention.

In 1959, Gehlaur was a village boxed in by steep quartzite hills. It sat near Gaya in Bihar with no direct road to a hospital.

On July 19 1962 drivers on the Autobahn near Friedberg in Germany saw a cyclist riding behind a specially prepared Mercedes 300 SL.

Visitors who enter the Pantheon pass through a set of immense bronze doors.