I Read the News Today

Weird and wonderful, it all happened in May

BEATING DEATH BY A NOSE

1936 RESURRECTED RIDER RACES ON

Spectators at a California racecourse were left shocked when jockey Ralph Neves was crushed by his own horse, Fannikins, after she tripped. The teenager was rushed to hospital but pronounced dead. There was even time to wheel him to the morgue and tag his toe. Neves then woke up. What’s more, he wanted to go back to the track and finish his day’s racing, a request denied by his stunned doctor. The San Francisco Examiner’s headline read, “Neves, called dead in fall, denies it”.

GUNNING FOR GLORY

1718 THE CHANGING SHAPE OF WEAPONRY

Well over a century before the Gatling gun, British lawyer James Puckle demonstrated his own proto-machine gun The Puckle Gun, a single-barreled flintlock with revolving cylinders, could fire nine shots a minute – the average soldier managed three. Its unreliability meant Puckle’s weapon was never mass produced, but it had another quirk that put off potential investors. Puckle designed two models, one to fire conventional round bullets and another built for square bullets to be used only against Muslim Turks. According to the patent, square bullets would teach them the “benefits of Christian civilisation”.