Many scientific inventions came along before their time, only to be lost, vanishing into obscurity before being rediscovered, sometimes centuries later.  Take, for example, antibiotics; we tend to think that the antibiotic penicillin was first discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928, but 2,000 years before Fleming was born, the antibiotic…

On the Sunday evening of 10 May 1959, temperatures across the North West suddenly rose to 70 degrees, and a rare phenomenon known as ‘vapour lock’ took place; petrol in the fuel delivery systems of cars changed from liquid to gas and the vehicles stalled.  Hundreds of cars – including…

On the Friday afternoon of September 16 2016, 27-year-old Huytonian Ralph Winnington was already close to oblivion as he and his nine friends careered from bar to bar in the city centre of Liverpool.  The stag night hadn’t even started yet and they had plied Ralph with a myriad of…

I’ve had to change a few names in the following story for legal reasons but beyond that, the account is exactly as it was related to me.  In 1970, a 50-year-old Huyton bachelor named Noel Peake was getting rather fed up with his humdrum life.  For the past twenty years…