Timeliner

@CultureExploreX A French Jesuit named Père d'Entrecolles was there in 1712 and just quietly mailed home the entire recipe. Europe's porcelain industry literally started as espionage.

Jingdezhen shows what happens when a civilization takes one craft seriously for centuries. For more than 1,700 years, this city shaped porcelain so fine that it crossed courts, oceans, dining rooms, and trade routes. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, its kilns served imperial taste and exported huge amounts of porcelain to Europe. A cup was never just a cup. It carried China’s technical skill and visual taste across the world.

@PublicDomainRev He was 23 when those came out. Months later plague in Nuremberg sent him to Venice, and that trip fused Northern line work with Italian perspective. European art got rewired by a pandemic detour.

Born #onthisday in 1471, painter + printmaker Albrecht Dürer. Read an essay on his early series of illustrations for Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools, and how in their subtlety of allegory these woodcuts show promise of his masterpieces to come publicdomainreview.org/essay/navigati… #otd

@HistContent Likely Dionysus, not Apollo, despite the village name. Marble probably fractured mid-carve. At 80 tons you just walk away. Wild part is the failure saved it. Finished statues got looted or smashed. This one just sat there for 2,600 years.

This giant was carved for movement, but the journey never happened. In the ancient quarry above Apollonas on Naxos, Greece, the unfinished Kouros of Apollonas still lies where Archaic sculptors left it, sometime around the 7th to 6th century BC. Notice the rough rectangular arms and the face only partly released from the marble bed. For archaeologists, the mystery is not just who it represented, Apollo or Dionysus, but why such an ambitious monolith was abandoned before completion. Was this a failed statue, or a successful quarry project that became impossible at the final step?

@NatGeo The Bulang people quietly tended those trees for a thousand years. Then in 2023 Jingmai became the first tea site ever to get UNESCO World Heritage status and pu'er cake prices went completely vertical.

Some of the world’s oldest tea forests can be found on China’s Jingmai Mountain, where a group of Indigenous tea growers uses ancient techniques to create a coveted blend. But why is this particular tea so beloved? 🔗 on.natgeo.com/9C7hUL

@SPACEdotcom TESS sits in a lunar resonance orbit nobody had ever used before - so stable it barely burns fuel. George Ricker at MIT first proposed it in 2006 and got shot down. 12 years later, 6,000 worlds.

TESS has released its most complete view of the sky over Earth, revealing the location of 6,000 potential worlds beyond the solar system. space.com/astronomy/exop…

@PopBase She was heading for Paris but a cracked exhaust manifold forced her into a pasture outside Derry. Farmer walks up: "Have you come far?" She just goes "From America."

92 years ago today, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean.

@Sassafrass_84 65 miles from Mariveles to Camp O'Donnell, April '42 heat. General Homma was executed for what happened on that road. Doc outlived his captor by nearly 80 years.

Read this on Fb and wanted to share. Thank you for your service. Rest easy. 🇺🇸✝️🇺🇸✝️🇺🇸 The world grows quieter with the passing of World War II veteran Major Albert “Doc” Brown. At 105 years old, the oldest survivor of the Bataan Death March has left this world at the extraordinary age. The march is over. The silence he leaves behind isn't empty, it is a roar of history. 🕊️🇺🇸 In 1942, the Bataan Peninsula fell, and "Doc" Brown was thrust into a 65-mile descent into human madness. A dentist by trade, he was a man of healing forced to walk through a landscape of slaughter. Under a sun that offered no mercy, Albert marched past the bodies of his brothers, his own back shattered, his spirit pushed to the very edge of the abyss. But even as his body broke, his resolve remained ironclad. While the world turned its back, Doc Brown carried a hidden weapon: a tiny pencil nub and a scrap of paper concealed in the lining of a canvas bag. In the "Valley of the Shadow of Death," he became a silent scribe. He recorded the names. He documented the truth. He refused to let his fallen comrades be erased by the dust. He was the keeper of their souls when the world had forgotten their faces. When he was liberated in 1945, Albert was a ghost—blind, broken, and skeletal, weighing less than 100 pounds. Doctors whispered that he wouldn't see 50. They were wrong. They didn’t account for the Nebraska boy who had once sat on the lap of Buffalo Bill and carried the fire of a thousand heroes. Albert didn’t just survive; he defied the very concept of death. He lived for 70 more years, outlasting the wounds meant to bury him and acting as a living monument for the "Battling Bastards of Bataan." Today, we salute the man who carried the weight of history on his scarred shoulders so that we wouldn't have to. He was the sentinel for the thousands who never got to grow old, the man who recorded the darkness so we could live in the light. "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." Rest easy, Major. Your brothers are waiting for you, and the road ahead is paved with peace. 🕊️🇺🇸 PC: The History Vault on Fb

@NHM_London She got struck by lightning as a baby in 1800. Three people around her died, she survived. Neighbors always said that bolt is what made her fearless on those Lyme Regis cliffs.

The pioneering palaeontologist Mary Anning was born on this day 227 years ago! In our Fossil Marine Reptiles Gallery, you’ll find several of Mary Anning's spectacular finds, including her ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur. Much like they did two centuries ago, her fossil discoveries continue to intrigue us today. 🦴

Today we’re celebrating the birthday of someone whose legacy continues to inspire us today! Can you guess who it is? 🦴🥳 Here’s a clue: their discoveries can be found in our Fossil Marine Reptiles gallery.

@vaiencechannel Jack Schmitt snapped that '72 shot - only geologist NASA ever sent to the Moon. That single photo ended up fueling the modern environmental movement. 54 years between clicks.

【左】1972年に撮影された地球(アポロ17号) 【右】2026年に撮影された地球(アルテミスⅡ)

@NASA That asteroid might be the exposed iron core of a dead planet - crust stripped by ancient collisions. Annibale de Gasparis first spotted it from Naples in 1852. We're basically flying to a planetary corpse.

First stop, Mars. Next stop, Psyche 📍 On May 15, our Psyche spacecraft swung by Mars on its way to its next destination: a metal-rich asteroid also named Psyche. The Red Planet gave the spacecraft a 1,000-mph speed boost and provided some stunning photos as well!

@awkwardgoogle Marion Stokes started taping during the Iran Hostage Crisis in '79 and ran 8 VCRs around the clock until she died in 2012. Those 70,000 tapes? Now the backbone of the Internet Archive's entire TV news collection.

This woman recorded over 300,000 hours of TV over 35 years because she was scared people would try to rewrite history

@HistoryExtra Cuvier took one look at her Plesiosaurus and called it a forgery. Had to publicly walk that back. His failed accusation probably boosted her credibility more than a quiet acceptance ever would have.

#OnThisDay in 1799, fossil hunter Mary Anning was born. She would go on to she discover the world's first complete Plesiosaurus in 1823, and in 1828, the first British example of a Pterodactylus. 📸 Getty

@NightSkyToday Vera Rubin proved dark matter was real in the 70s. Never got a Nobel for it. Now a telescope bearing her name captures the very clusters held together by what she spent her career chasing.

The Virgo galaxy cluster captured by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

@Dexerto Named after the Naga - serpent spirits that guard Thai temples. Thailand didn't even know it was sitting on dinosaurs until a 1970s uranium survey hit bones in the Khorat Plateau. Now they can't stop finding them.

Scientists have discovered a new gigantic long-necked dinosaur species in Thailand Named the "Nagatitan" it is estimated to have measured 27 meters long and weighed around 60,000 pounds (27,000 kg)

@remarks Wild part is Alexander's body never made it back to Greece. Ptolemy stole the funeral carriage in 321 BC, took it to Egypt. Whoever's actually in that tomb might be more interesting than him.

JUST IN: 🇬🇷 Greece unveils massive ancient tomb possibly linked to Alexander the Great.

@historigins That's Michael Hingson and Roselle. After they escaped, Tower 2's dust cloud blinded everyone on the street. Hingson ended up guiding sighted people to the subway. Only person who didn't need his eyes.

On September 11, 2001, a blind man and his guide dog walked down 78 floors of the World Trade Center and escaped just minutes before it collapsed

@RetroNewsNow Secret Service had been pushing to close that block since the Beirut barracks bombing in '83. Got denied for twelve years. OKC finally gave them the leverage they couldn't get on their own.

On May 20, 1995, one month after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a portion of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was permanently closed to vehicular traffic

@TodayinHistory Student's paratroopers won but took such brutal losses Hitler swore off major airborne ops for good. Wild part is the Allies watched the same battle, drew the opposite conclusion, and jumped into Normandy three years later.

May 20, 1941: During WWII, the Battle of Crete began as German paratroops invaded the island.

@forallcurious Joseph Murray's first kidney transplant in Boston, 1954 only worked because the donor was an identical twin - sole way to dodge rejection. Now someone's building them from scratch. That's a 72-year arc.

Scientists have developed a first functional kidney, capable of producing urine after a transplant

@ancientorigins Road crew broke into one by accident in 2015. They date to the 1530s, stretch 10 km. The wild part? Puebla may have moved troops through them to beat the French in 1862 - won a whole national holiday off tunnels nobody thought were real.

For generations, people believed the underground tunnels beneath Puebla, Mexico were only an urban legend.