Every flat map of a round planet is wrong. The only question is which kind of wrong you are willing to accept, and Gerardus Mercator answered that question in 1569 in a way that has irritated people ever since and that nobody has been able to replace for the job…

Florence Nightingale is remembered as the lady with the lamp, walking the wards at night in a military hospital. She would have found that description irritating. The work she considered important was done at a desk in London after the war, with a pen, a stack of army returns and…

In 1881, at the International Medical Congress in London, Robert Koch watched Louis Pasteur demonstrate his anthrax vaccine and then published a review calling the work useless. Pasteur replied in person at the Geneva congress the following year. Koch answered in print with an attack on Pasteur’s competence, his methods…

In the Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s there were two maternity clinics, and women admitted to the hospital knew which one they wanted. Admission alternated by day of the week, and it was not unusual for a woman in labour to beg on her knees to be sent to…

On 14 May 1796 a country doctor in Gloucestershire took some fluid from a sore on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes, who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom. He made two small cuts in the arm of an eight year old boy, James Phipps, the…

Voyager 1 lifted off from Cape Canaveral on 5 September 1977 on a Titan IIIE rocket that could not send it where it was going. Nothing built then, and nothing built since, has been able to launch a probe of that mass directly onto a trajectory out of the solar…

In 1716 the Astronomer Royal of England bought up three hundred copies of his own book and burned them in a bonfire, which he described afterwards as a sacrifice to heavenly truth. The book had been printed without his consent, edited by a rival, and released while he was still…

Alexander Fleming was an untidy worker. He left cultures stacked on his bench for weeks, partly because he was interested in what grew on them by accident, and partly because he could not be bothered to clear up. In August 1928 he went on holiday to Suffolk with his family…

The fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane in the early hours of 2 September 1666 and burned for four days. When it stopped it had taken about thirteen thousand houses, eighty seven parish churches, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall and old St Paul’s Cathedral, and left roughly four…

On the morning of 1 September 1859, a gentleman astronomer named Richard Carrington was doing what he did every clear day: projecting an image of the Sun onto a screen in his private observatory at Redhill, south of London, and tracing the sunspots by hand. At around eleven o’clock two…