History

The latest in our series of early technologies from Michael Bennett-Levy’s collection looks at the world’s first commercial business computer, the LEO II/3. The LEO II (short for Lyons Electronic Office) was the successor to the LEO I, which was designed by Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson of J. Lyons and Co. – one of the UK’s leading catering and food manufacturing companies in the first half of the 20th century.  Read More

The sniper is without doubt the most feared combatant in any theater of war, the best of whom have an array of skills far beyond simply being able to hit human targets at unfeasibly long distances. As ironic as it might be in wars where satellites and autonomous airplanes are on the same team, snipers are the STILL the most cost effective way of killing the enemy. Individual snipers routinely account for more kills than entire battalions operating in the same place at the same time, hit the target almost every time, and each bullet costs around €2. An elite sniper's skills cannot be assessed with a single measurement, so the “longest confirmed kill” record stands as the pseudo world championship for military combat riflemen, and as of now there's a new outright champion - using an Accuracy International L115A3, British Corporal Craig Harrison killed two Taliban with consecutive shots at a distance of 2.47 kilometres (8120 ft) in Helmand Province, Afghanistan last November (2009). He then fired a third shot and hit the Taliban's PKM machinegun in the most prodigious feat of marksmanship in military history.  Read More

RM Auctions’ inaugural Sporting Classics of Monaco event held on Saturday leaves little doubt that fine automobiles can be a rapidly appreciating investment. The average price achieved by the 88 cars which crossed the block was in excess of US$500,000 while the highest price fetched was EUR2,800,000 (US$3,799,600) for a 1962 Ferrari 400 Superamerica Cabriolet Pininfarina SWB (pictured top right). Some remarkable cars were sold on the day, including (pictured clockwise from bottom right) one of the world’s most significant pre-war sports racing cars, the 1937 BMW 328 MM ‘Buegelfalte’ (undisclosed but believed to be in excess of US$6 million), a handmade Rolls Royce which was the most expensive car made in the world in 1933 (US$1,975,792) and a Maserati Tipo 61 ‘Birdcage’ (US$3,343,648). Full details, images and story inside.  Read More

The America’s Cup has been run and won, and will return to America where it has resided for the vast majority of its century and a half history. Larry Ellison’s Team BMW Oracle trimaran trounced the Swiss Alinghi team’s Catamaran as two of the most technologically advanced boats on water fought out a one-sided event.  Read More

Swimwear fashion has progressed steadily over the past 100 or so years (if you discount Borat’s mankini). Design has moved from neck-to-knees woolen garments that women were encouraged to bathe in at the beach, to men’s Speedos, to skimpy Brazilian thongs, to Daniel Craig’s James Bond swimmer boxer trunks, to full body racing ‘buoyancy’ suits for Olympians. Who could forget screen sirens Esther Williams, Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe posing in their swimsuits? To celebrate Australia’s contribution to the swimwear industry – in design and materials – a comprehensive exhibition titled "Exposed! The story of swimwear" is traversing that country, appearing at State museums.  Read More

By gathering volunteers' measurements of marble gravestones of different ages around the world, scientists hope to produce a map of the weathering rates of those gravestones and thereby better understand how the atmosphere has been changing. The study, called EarthTrek, is developed and managed by the Geological Society of America's (GSA) Education and Outreach group in partnership with organizations around the globe.  Read More

If you believe owning a sportscar is all about prestige, luxury and getting the chicks, then stay away from the newest Porsche Boxster. This is a pure driver's car, and everything that's not there for performance or light weight - like air-con and stereo systems, for example, has been treated as excess weight and thrown overboard. The 2010 Boxster Spyder is Porsche's vision of how its high-performance, low-weight road-race scalpels of the 1950s would look if reimagined using current day technology, and it deserves a lot of respect for its sheer purity of vision.  Read More

Although computers and the Internet have eaten away at the dominance of television, it remains the most popular form of entertainment and source of information in the world. And with the line between TV and computers blurring with the advent of Home Theater PCs (HTPCs) and devices like Apple TV it’s likely that television in one form or another will retain its crown for some time to come. Television is no longer limited to a big box sitting in the corner of the living room. It can be accessed on sexy, slim panels hung on a wall or on mobile phones while sitting on a train. In fact television is so pervasive today it can be hard to imagine life before it existed – but there was such a time, and it wasn’t even that long ago.  Read More

A logbook from the famous 1872-1876 journey of HMS Challenger, described at the time as "the greatest advance in the knowledge of our planet since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" will go under the hammer in a September auction of exploration, travel and topographical items. Conducted just 13 years after Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Challenger was tasked with constructing a fossil record that would test the new theory of evolution and became inextricably intertwined within the God vs. Science debate.  Read More