The Soviet Union redefined heavy bombers in 1930 with the introduction of the Tupolev TB-3, a four-engine behemoth so large that it could serve as a mothership to five little fighters, which could be released in flight and even hooked back onto the aircraft in order to refuel.

A TB-3 once did manage to take off with four fighters attached, then joined up with a fifth while circling the airfield, with a combined nine engines going. Then all five fighters were released at once. “The thing about events like that is, you always wonder how they entered the flight in their log books afterwards,” writes James Gilbert in The World’s Worst Aircraft. “I mean, if you were the pilot of one of the fighters, you could hardly log the take-off because you hadn’t made it, except as a passenger. But how can you log a landing with no prior take-off?”

The whole contraption, known as Vakhmistrov’s Circus, saw some early wartime service, but it was too complex and vulnerable to be adopted widely. Today it’s a historical curiosity.

The opening of England’s Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 took a direful turn when William Huskisson, a member of Parliament for Liverpool, approached the Duke of Wellington’s railway carriage. Huskisson became so engrossed in their conversation that he failed to notice an oncoming train, and when he realized his danger and tried to climb into Wellington’s carriage, the door swung outward and deposited him in its path. His leg was badly mangled.

“Immediately after the accident, he was placed on the ‘Northumbrian’ — another of Stephenson’s engines — and raced to Liverpool at the then unprecedented speed of 36 m.p.h., with Stephenson himself as driver,” writes Ernest Frank Carter in Unusual Locomotives. “It was the news of this accident, and the speed of the engine, which was one of the causes of the immediate adoption and rapid spread of railways over the world. Thus was the death of the first person to be involved in a railway accident turned to some good account.”

The Norman Conquest unfolded before the advent of modern heraldry, so warriors couldn’t be identified reliably by the designs on their shields, and their hoods and helmets tended to obscure their faces. As a result they were often unrecognizable. At the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror had to raise his helmet to show that he was not dead, as recorded on the Bayeux Tapestry (Eustace II, Count of Boulogne, points to him to rally the troops). Combatants began to carry armorial shields early in the 12th century.