10th August

One of the world's most important gadgets was patented today in 1889 in Barnsley, not a place usually associated with cutting edge technology. It was the screw-top bottle. So how come it took wine snobs 120+ years to become aware of it?

In other news ...
Today in 1949 John George Haigh, the 'acid bath' murderer, was executed at Wandsworth Prison. He was a petty con man who turned to murder for profit but completely misunderstood the meaning of corpus delicti. He presumed that if no body was found, a charge of murder would not stick. WRONG! And anyway, they found enough of Olive Durand-Deacon's false teeth to convict him anyway, because his chemistry was pretty rubbish as well.