Hope you’re hungry because today we’re opening a can of historical worms as we discover the origins of canned food. How did canned food go from something only explorers would consider eating to the centrepiece of kitchen cupboards? What does a competition run by Napoleon have to do with things? And is it true that the can opener wasn't invented until decades after the can was?Our guest today is Anna Zeide, author of Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry.Produced by Freddy Chick. Editing and sound design by Thomas Ntinas. Executive Producer is Charlotte Long.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code PATENTED for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store.

They were cigars the size of ocean liners that floated through the clouds. Cow intestines filled with hydrogen held them up. The world’s first flight attendant served champagne and caviar.Zeppelins seem almost too strange to have been real now. But they once carried paying passengers across the Atlantic in style. People foresaw a time when Zeppelins would dock at the top of the Empire State Building. For a moment they looked like the future.And then came that awful day in May 1937 when the greatest Zeppelin of them all, the Hindenburg, exploded.Who invented the Zeppelin? (The clue is in the name!)What was it like to fly in one?And why did the Hindenburg explode?Find out all this and more on today’s episode! Our guest is the wonderful Dan Grossman, aviation historian and the man behind airships.net, one of the great websites of our time (if you’re into airships).Produced and edited by Freddy Chick. Executive Producer is Charlotte Long.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code PATENTED for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store.

What was the first ever internet ad? When was the last time someone actually clicked on one? What happened to all the proper ads with catchy jingles?Today Dallas investigates one of the most infuriating aspects of modern life, online advertising. We discover how they started and the mind-boggling ways they work.Is it possible that online advertising is a bubble that will one day burst? A world without online ads might sound appealing until you consider all the free services they underwrite, from emails, to search engines, to this very podcast (please don’t skip the ads guys!).Our guest today is Tim Hwang author of the book Subprime Attention Crisis.Produced by Freddy Chick, edited by Aidan Lonergan. The Executive Producer is Charlotte Long.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code PATENTED for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Welcome to Patented-Gone-Paranormal!! Thomas Edison tried to make a telephone that called the spirit world. One of the pioneers of radio believed he could talk with his dead son through the 'Ether'.Technology might seem the antithesis of the spirit world. But just at that point in our history when technology began to dominate our way of life, it also sprouted supernatural arms and legs.Spiritualism emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. A new form of an old belief that it is possible to communicate with the dead.And from the beginning it was deeply meshed in the new technologies that were emerging in the Victorian era and changing the way people saw the world.Ghostly photographs, haunted typewriters, spirit voices from the radio, paranormal podcasts even?My guest today is Efram Sera-Shriar who studies how the occult intersects with science and is the author of a new book Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age.Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Executive Producer: Charlotte Long.With thanks to Denna Cartamkhoob and Tom ChickIf you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code PATENTED for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store.

For almost a century we’ve been trying to build a star on earth. Not easy with temperatures reaching 150,000,000℃.Today on Patented it’s the story of our efforts to make a nuclear fusion reactor with Arthur Turrell author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet.Find out what people used to believe the sun was made out of; just how powerful the world’s biggest laser is, and what Argentinian fake news has to do with all this.Produced by Freddy ChickExecutive Producer Charlotte LongIf you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code PATENTED for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Linoleum, or “lino”, once ruled the world (of flooring). It appeared everywhere from the Titanic to your gran’s kitchen. But where did it come from?We hear the story of the Victorian inventor, Frederick Walton, who came up with lino whilst trying to find an alternative to rubber.And we discover the Scottish town that was at the epicentre of world lino production during the golden years.Our guests to tell the story is Lily Barnes, curator of Flooring the World, a project to celebrate Fife’s history of linoleum. And Angus Fotheringhame, the General Manager at Forbo Flooring Systems UK.If you want to reach out to Lily with memories or questions about lino or anything else then you can email: lino@onfife.com Produced by Freddy ChickEdited by Anisha DevaExecutive Producer Charlotte LongIf you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code PATENTED for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store.

If a Victorian met Elon Musk they would completely get him. The world’s richest man, determined to use technology that doesn’t yet exist to colonise Mars. Classic Victorian thinking.The Victorians didn’t really take us to the moon. But what they did do was give us a way of thinking about the future that helped us to.Before the Victorians, people assumed the future would look a lot like the present.After the Victorians, we started assuming that great inventors would make the future wildly different from today. And we began to look to the Elon Musks of the world to shape the future for us.This is what today’s guest thinks anyway and it’s a convincing argument.Iwan Morus is the author of How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon and a historian at Aberystwyth University.Music from: www.motionarray.comProduced by Freddy ChickEdited by Thomas NtinasExecutive Producer Charlotte LongIf you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code PATENTED for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store.

George Washington Carver is well known to Americans as the Peanut Man. It’s been written of him that ‘peanuts were like paintbrushes: They were tools to express his imagination’.If that sounds a bit ridiculous, it’s because it is.George Washington Carver was far more radical and innovative than ‘the guy who did stuff with peanuts’.At a time when the scientific consensus was pushing farmers to use more and more chemicals and machinery on their lands, Carver urged them to learn how to farm in harmony with nature.He saw the direct link between the social injustice of the Jim Crow South and the ecological damage being wrought on the landscape.He was a pioneer of ecological farming, a warrior for environmental justice before there was such a thing.Our guest today is Mark Hersey, author of “My Work is that of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver” and a historian at Mississippi University.Produced by Freddy ChickEdited by Aidan LonerganExecutive Producer is Charlotte LongIf you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code PATENTED for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. To download, go to Android or Apple store.

The birth of DNA fingerprinting will forever be tied to Leicester, England. It was invented in a lab in the city’s university by Alec Jeffreys in 1984. And it was in the outskirts of the city that it was first used to catch a murderer – Colin Pitchfork who raped and killed the young girls Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth.It has gone on to revolutionise policing.Our guest to tell this story is Turi King who was taught by Alec Jeffreys and is now professor of public engagement at Leicester University and the inhouse geneticist on the BBC TV show ‘Family Secrets’.Since this is the final episode in our mini-series on forensics we thought it would be nice to round things out with a chat with a real forensic scientist. Niamh Nic Daeid is the head of Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science in Dundee. We talk about the realities of being a forensic scientist today and what the future might hold.Produced by Freddy ChickEdited by Thomas NtinasExecutive Producer was Charlotte Long

Have you ever heard the story of how punk began?“They are Dickensian-like urchins who with ragged clothes and pockmarked faces roam the streets of foggy gaslit London…Some of these ragamuffin gangs jump up on tables amidst the charred debris and with burning torches play rock and roll…One of these gangs call themselves the Sex Pistols.”Those are the words of Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols. Together with other artists & designers who worked with the band, Malcolm created the image of the Sex Pistols and in doing so created the image of punk. The Sex Pistols were a giant art project.That’s what today’s guests think at least.Paul Stolper and Andrew Wilson are collectors of Sex Pistols’ artwork. Their horde is the stuff of any punk fan’s dreams. A ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ poster that hung on Sid Vicious’s wall in the Chelsea Hotel; Johnny Rotten’s handwritten lyrics; Jamie Reid’s notebook with designs and so much more. Dallas went to see their amazing collection and hear the story of the birth of punk. Enjoy!The collection is going up for auction at Sotheby’s from October 10th until October 21st 2022. If you want to nab yourself some punk history then have a look: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/the-sex-pistols-the-stolper-wilson-collection*WARNING this episode contains explicit language*Produced by Freddy ChickExecutive Producer is Charlotte LongFor more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! You've been listening to a History Hit podcast. Please take a couple of minutes to fill out this survey with your feedback, we'd really appreciate it.