In 490 BC Pheidippides, a Greek soldier, ran 25 miles to Athens from the town of Marathon. He ran to announce a battleground victory over the Persians. This is considered to be the first Marathon. Marathon made its return at the modern Olympic Games in Greece in 1896. In that event, 17 runners ran 40 […]

The Chail Cricket Stadium in Himachal Pradesh, India, is the highest cricket ground in the world. Built in 1893 after levelling a hilltop, this cricket pitch is 2444 metres above the sea-level. It was built by Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, who developed Chail as his summer capital. The ground was used for playing friendly

The Tour de France is staged in France, Europe. It is the world’s longest cycle race that takes place over 23 days and covers over 2,200 miles. The first Tour de France race was held in 1903. The youngest rider ever to win the Tour de France was Henri Comet. The oldest person to win

Rungrado May Day Stadium is the world’s largest stadium. It is located in Pyongyang, North Korea. Its name comes from Rungrado Islet in the Taedong River, upon which it is situated. It is said to resemble a magnolia blossom. It has a total capacity of 150,000 spectators. This multi-purpose stadium was completed on May 1,

The first Olympic Games began in the year 776 BC at Olympia, near Greece. Originally, the games were part of a religious festival to honour Zeus, the god of the sky and the leader of the Greek gods. The games were held once every four years. The first modern Olympics were started by a French

The helicopter is the only aircraft that can move forward, backward, side-to-side and hover. The VS-300 was the world’s first practical helicopter that took flight at Stratford, Connecticut, on September 14, 1939. The first helicopter was designed by Igor Sikorsky and built by the Vought-Sikorsky Aircraft Division of the United Aircraft Corporation. It took 29

Karl Benz invented the world’s first practical internal-combustion engine automobile (car) in Germany. Karl Benz built three forms of his Motor Car in private by 1888. He became the first person to drive a car over a long distance. Model T was the missing link between cars and horse-drawn buggies. Later, Karl Benz patented the

The process of the Invention of the refrigerator started in the 18th century. In 1748, William Cullen of the University of Glasgow developed a process for creating an artificial cooling medium. An American inventor Oliver Evans designed the first refrigerator in 1804. In 1843, Jacob Perkins built the first refrigeration machine in Great Britain. In

The V-2 rocket was the first rocket launched into space. It was launched from Peenemünde, an island off Germany’s Baltic coast on 3 October, 1942. It became the first man-made object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944. The first rocket which

he first video game was invented in 1967 by Ralph H Baer at Loral Electronics in Bronx, New York. He created the first prototype of the Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first video game console. Ralph H Baer is often known as the ‘Father of Video Games’. He was the first person to create a system

In 1938, Chester Carlson, an American physicist and inventor, invented a dry printing process called ‘electro photography’. It is commonly called a ‘Xerox’. In 1953, the first high-speed printer was developed by Remington-Rand for use on the Univac computer. In 1969, the original laser printer, called EARS, was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research

John Logie Baird invented television. He experimented in an attic room in London for years until he succeeded in changing an old, moving, black-and-white image into a coloured one on a screen in 1925. He called it ‘The Televisor’. By 1930, Baird developed a system to broadcast simultaneous sound with the images. By 1940, he

The telescope was invented in 1609, by a scientist named Galileo Galilei in Italy. He made a small homemade telescope to gaze at the stars. The first telescopes were refracting telescopes. This means that one looks through the telescope from one lens to the other through to the image. Later, a well-known telescope was made

The Internet began life in 1969, when scientists working for the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now known as DARPA) connected computer networks at the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute. It was then known as ARPANET. By 1973, there were 40 individual networks connected to ARPANET. The first connection across the

The first mobile phone was invented in 1973 by an American engineer, Martin ‘Marty’ Cooper in Schaumburg, Illinois. He was former Motorola inventor in midtown Manhattan and he placed a call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey. The first mobile phone went on sale in the United States at a price of