quote [ On June 4, 1783, the Montgolfier brothers gave the first public demonstration of a hot-air balloon in southern France. The balloon, made of tightened sackcloth padded with paper, rose to nearly 2 kilometers and remained airborne for 10 minutes. ]

quote [ A roundup of unusual types of currency, many of which don?t properly fit into a world of dollars and cents. Would you like your change in tea bricks or stones? ]

quote [ No one knows what it says. ]

quote [ ?Lunar calendar? found in caves may predate equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years ]

quote [ In 1797, an extraordinary building went up in Shropshire that would change the skylines of our cities forever. Described as ?the grandfather of skyscrapers?, the Shrewsbury flax mill was the first building in the world to use an iron frame, which later developed into the modern steel frame structure used in modern buildings today. ]

quote [ How an early embrace of national advertising put Hallmark in the pole position of holiday memories. ]

quote [ When Jules Verne sent three men to the moon in his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, he did so in a projectile fired from a massive gun. ]

quote [ The monstrous menace known as Whatcheeria hints that our distant ancestors may have been more like us than we thought. ]

quote [ An abandoned railway depot at Fete?ti-Gar?, Romania. ]

quote [ The uninitiated artist asks: what can this machine do for me? Really, the question should be: what can I do with this machine? ]