Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

Saturday, 26 September 2015

A Lesson for Rolls Royce


Indian Maharajas are popular around the world for their filthy rich lifestyles. Now a dying breed, during the pre-independence era, Maharajas were people not to be messed with. And Rolls Royce, needless to say one of the world’s finest automobile companies, learned this the hard way.

 This is Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar. Indian Maharaja Bought 7 Rolls Royce Cars And Used Them For Garbage Collection

 Back in 1920, the Maharaja, on a vacation to England casually walked into a Rolls Royce showroom. Since he was dressed very casually and didn’t have his escorts around, the salesman took him to be an Indian commoner and ignored his requests for a test drive. Indian Maharaja Bought 7 Rolls Royce Cars And Used Them For Garbage Collection Extremely furious with the treatment he was met with, he decided to teach Rolls Royce a lesson of a lifetime. As soon as he returned to his hotel, he asked for a revisit to the same showroom. His demand then, of course, was met with a red carpet welcome. The Maharaja then ordered a fleet of 7 different Rolls Royce cars to be shipped to his palace in India. Soon after the order, came the blow that went down in the history of Rolls Royce. 

Indian Maharaja Bought 7 Rolls Royce Cars And Used Them For Garbage Collection Along with the cars, he requested the same salesman who ignored him to accompany him to India. The same was done. Upon reaching his palace, right in front of the salesman, Maharaja ordered his men to use the super-expensive cars to be used for garbage collection. The cars then were used to collect garbage in Alwar for a one long month. The badass happening became worldwide news and Rolls Royce, apprehensive about getting its reputation tarnished, apologized to the maharaja in written.
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Friday, 25 September 2015

Assassination attempt on George H. W. Bush



  • April 13, 1993: Fourteen men believed to be working for Saddam Hussein smuggled bombs into Kuwait to assassinate former President Bush by a car bomb during his visit to Kuwait University three months after he had left office. The plot was foiled when Kuwaiti officials found the bomb and arrested the suspected assassins. Two of the suspects, Wali Abdelhadi Ghazali and Raad Abdel-Amir al-Assadi, retracted their confessions at the trial, claiming that they were coerced. Bush had left office in January 1993. The Iraqi Intelligence Service, particularly Directorate 14, was proved to be behind the plot.

  •   May 10, 2005: While President George W. Bush was giving a speech in the Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia, Vladimir Arutyunian threw a live Soviet-made RGD-5 hand grenade toward the podium. The grenade was live and had its pin pulled, but did not explode because a red tartan handkerchief was wrapped tightly around it and delayed the firing pin. After escaping that day, Arutyunian was arrested in July 2005. During his arrest he killed an Interior Ministry agent. Convicted in January 2006, he was given a life sentence.
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Wednesday, 23 September 2015

Key that could have saved the titanic's sink.


                   It looks for all the world like an ordinary key but this unremarkable piece of metal could have saved the Titanic from disaster.
                   It is thought to have fitted the locker that contained the crow's nest binoculars, vital in detecting threats to the liner lurking in the sea in the pre-sonar days of 1912. Catastrophically for the Titanic and the 1,522 lives lost with her, the key's owner, Second Officer David Blair, was removed from the crew at the last minute and in his haste forgot to hand it to his replacement. Without access to the glasses, the lookouts in the crow's nest were forced to rely on their eyes and only saw the iceberg when it was too late to take action.
                   One, Fred Fleet, who survived the disaster, later told the official inquiry into the tragedy that if they had had binoculars they would have seen the obstacle sooner. When asked by a US senator chairing the inquiry how much sooner, Mr Fleet replied: "Enough to get out of the way."
                   Mr Blair, 37, from Broughty Ferry, Forfarshire, sailed on the Titanic from Belfast to Southampton on April 3, 1912.He had been due to be the second officer for the Titanic's voyage to New York on April 10. But the White Star Line, the ship's owners, removed Mr Blair and drafted in Henry Wilde, a senior officer from sister ship, the Olympic, because of his experience of such large liners.He wrote of his disappointment in a postcard he sent to his sister-in-law days before the Titanic left Southampton. In the card, which is also up for auction, he wrote: "Am afraid I shall have to step out to make room for chief officer of the Olympic.This is a magnificent ship, I feel very disappointed I am not to make her first voyage." The 46,000-ton Titanic struck the iceberg in the north Atlantic at 11.45pm on April 14 and sank at 2.20am on April 15. Mr Wilde was among those who perished.
                    Mr Blair, who was later awarded the King's Gallantry medal for jumping into the Atlantic to rescue a crewman, eventually passed the key on to his daughter Nancy. She gave it to the British and International Seamans Society in the 1980s.



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Thursday, 17 September 2015

The First Summit Of Everest

Were Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay the first people to reach the peak of Everest?  Maybe, but evidence is mounting that George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine may have reached the peak in 1924. In fact, the pair were last spotted just few hundred yards away from the peak.



                                                                                                                                                                     In 1999,  Mallory's body was found 8,150 meters (26,760 ft) up the mountain. The picture of his wife which he had planned to drop at the top of Everest was not in his pockets. His goggles were in his pockets, which suggests he was descending the mountain in bad light when he died. For this reasons, it is often assumed that he reached the top of the mountain but died before making it back down. Irvine's body was never found, which is intriguing since he was carrying the camera. If found, the pictures could be processed to reveal if the pair actually got to the top. 

Always a gentleman, Sir Edmund Hillary never felt the need to dismiss Mallory and Irvine. When asked about it, he would only say that he didn't know who had reached the summit first, but he was sure he and Tenzing were the first to make it back again.
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