Where Buzz Aldrin has god-like status!
Bobby Leach was the second person to go over Niagara Falls in a Barrel. Born in Cornwall, England in 1858, Leach went over the falls in a specially designed “barrel” that he made himself. Although he survived the fall, Leach sustained two broken kneecaps, a broken jaw, and other injuries.
After recovering in hospital, Leach spent the next years of his life touring and giving lectures about his feat, often times posing with his barrel. While in New Zealand in 1926 on a lecture tour, Leach slipped on an orange peel and cut his leg. The wound became infected and required amputation. After doctors removed Leach’s leg, Leach was too weakened to recover and he died on April 26 of that year.
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With such great raw material to work from, you’d think it’d be easy to make a great series from it. Apparently it wasn’t. The BBC1 series Rogue Heroes based on the Robert MacIntyre book of the same name is an altogether silly comic-book effort to tell the incredible story of the formation of the elite British Special Air Service during…read more
The United Kingdom on December 8, 2020 became the first nation to begin widespread distribution of a working Covid-19 vaccine. At the University Hospital in Coventry, in what hopes to be the beginning of the end for the pandemic that effectively shut down the world for most of 2020, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world outside…read more
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When it comes to polar exploration, history is the mother of all excursion. To close out 2018, Louis Rudd became the second person to complete a solo crossing of the continent of Antarctica. In what seems a repeat of the Shackleton/Amundsen race to the pole (that was a race to the pole and not a traversal of the continent), the…read more
