The vanishing inventor

As recent years attest, royal scandals have a habit of coming to light. But what if the mother of all royal scandals is still waiting to be revealed? Could it be that an heir to the British throne, Prince Albert Victor, lived a double life as a serial killer? Today on the History ...  Show more

Opium has been a painkiller, a vice and the fuel for at least two wars. But what makes it such a powerful global commodity? Benjamin Robert Siegel takes Isabel King through this complex history, exploring how opium shaped capitalism, medicine and global power from ancient poppy f ...  Show more

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England. In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector – a year before Thomas Edison announced that he had invented a motion picture camera – Le Prince stepped on a train in France ...

If you had to guess, I bet you’d say Thomas Edison was the inventor of motion picture cameras. But what if we told you…that’s wrong? Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first moving picture in 1888, years before Edison debuted his camera. But days before Le Prince was going to go pu ...  Show more

In today's episode, Tom and Dominic explore the origins of the motion-picture camera, a device invented by "gentle giant" Louis Le Prince, who's œuvre spanned from working with pots and pans to photographing Queen Victoria or Gladstone. This history features mysterious disappeara ...  Show more

Douglas Brunt, author of The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I, joins us to discuss the titular subject of his newest book, an often overlooked but seminal figure in American history who changed the course of history with his ...  Show more