Britain first staked its claim to a slice of Antarctica back in 1908. But it was only during the Second World War, in 1943, that it established its first permanent bases there, at a time when other countries were starting to press similar claims. The top-secret mission, codenamed Operation Tabarin, after a Parisian nightclub, had two objectives: to deny safe anchorages to enemy vessels, and to gather weather data for Allied shipping in the South Atlantic.

Led by marine zoologist James Marr, 14 men worked in the inhospitable conditions during that first year, rising to 21 in the second. From July 1945, the operations were made permanent and renamed the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey. In 1961, the Antarctic Treaty came into force, which called for the demilitarisation of the region, and friendly scientific cooperation.

On 3 March the following year, the desolate territories administered from the Falkland Islands were reorganised as the British Antarctic Territory. Today it forms the largest of Britain's 14 overseas territories at 1,709,400 square kilometres. Meanwhile, that same year in 1962, the research work was rebranded the British Antarctic Survey.

Aside from the colonies of penguins and seals wallowing in the ice, the only inhabitants of the Territory are the 50 to 100 scientists carrying out environmental research, such as into global climate change, although the number of tourists have been steadily increasing.

The British Antarctic Territory funds itself via taxes paid by scientists, and the interest earned on its capital reserves. But it also drives a rather profitable trade in stamps, which are highly desirable among collectors. No wonder, then, that the Territory runs four post offices.

Economists these days are ten a penny. You can't open a web page, newspaper or turn on the TV or radio without one pontificating at you. Keynesians, Austrians, Marxists, Anarchists... there are as many different schools as there are days in the year.

In the 18th century, however, things were different. The dominant force was mercantilism. Trade was strictly controlled, with high tariffs and taxes. Wealth was measured in how big your pile of stuff was. The fiercest critic of this system was the man known as the “father of modern economics”, Adam Smith. And his hugely influential book, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published on this day in 1776.

In it, Smith argued that free trade and market competition were fundamental to economic prosperity; trade benefits the buyer just as much as the seller; and wealth isn't necessarily money, it is labour or the amount of it you can buy or command. (It’s not an easy read, however. It runs to 950 pages, and even the Adam Smith Institute admits it is “almost impenetrable” to the modern reader, written as it was in “flowery” language, and containing numerous lengthy digressions.)

It was revolutionary stuff. Once accepted, the idea of free trade drove massive economic expansion and growth in prosperity. Smith has been an influence on virtually every one of the world's economic systems ever since. Everyone finds something to build on. Even Karl Marx took Smith's idea that labour was wealth and ran with it, though perhaps a little too far for his and many other people's own good.

Government's job, said Smith, was to stay out of commerce, and provide the things a free market is unable to: defence, justice, public works – including infrastructure and education – and “supporting the dignity of the monarch”.

It is ironic, then, that just two years after publishing The Wealth of Nations, he was appointed as commissioner of customs in Scotland, upholding the very tariffs he argued so eloquently against.

Loosely defined, the historical Age of Exploration lasted for 200 years, from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the first attempt to chart Australia in 1644. In all that time, the explorer who arguably made the biggest impact was Hernan Cortes. He was born in 1485 to an impoverished noble family. He trained as a notary before sailing to Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic) as a colonist in 1504. After becoming the colony's notary, he played a key role in the conquest of Cuba in 1511.

In 1518, he embarked on an expedition to conquer the interior of Mexico. He arrived in 1519 with 500 soldiers. By July, he had removed himself from the Cuban governor's authority, scuttling his ships to prevent his army from retreating. He marched on Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire. Emperor Montezuma II, facing a huge force that had been swollen by tribes who were hostile to him, welcomed Cortes into the capital and showered him with gifts. This generosity merely confirmed Cortes's hopes that Mexico held a vast amount of gold.

On entering the capital, Cortes seized power and made Montezuma his puppet. A rebellion against his rule, during which Montezuma was killed, failed and Cortes formally subjugated the country on 13 August 1521, ending the Aztec Empire. King Charles I of Spain rewarded Cortes with titles, but the monarch also sent other officials to keep him under control.

As it was, the Aztec subjugation marked the highpoint of Cortes' career. Subsequent expeditions to Honduras and northern Mexico were financial disasters. Cortes died in Spain in 1547, heavily indebted, while awaiting a return voyage to Mexico. However, his conquest of Mexico laid the ground for Spanish control over Latin America, which continued until the beginning of the 19th century.

Queen Victoria's reign, we are led to believe, was a long and happy one. She ruled over a period of innovation and great prosperity (for some); of tight corsets, top hats, and clanking steam engines. With its empire at its height, Britain saw enormous changes, both technological and social.

But it wasn't all caviar and chocolates. Good Queen Vic, God bless 'er, wasn't universally loved. In fact, she was the subject of no fewer than seven assassination attempts. Most involved disturbed individuals taking potshots at her with pistols as she passed in her carriage. Far from terrifying Her Majesty, she seemed to rather enjoy the experience. "It is worth being shot at", she said, "to see how much one is loved". Every time someone had a go at her, her popularity increased.

The first attempt was when she was just 21 years old and pregnant, riding through London. On 10 June 1840, 18-year-old Edward Oxford, unemployed, fired on her. He was tried for high treason and found guilty, but was acquitted on the grounds of insanity. He spent the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum.

In 1842, she was targeted twice. First, in May, by John Francis; then in July by John Bean. Francis's death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. While Bean, who loaded his pistol with just paper, gravel and pieces of clay pipe, was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

In 1849, William Hamilton had a go. He received seven years' transportation for his trouble. On 27 June 1850, Robert Francis Pate changed tack. Instead of standing back and firing, he rushed towards her carriage, and bopped her on the forehead with his cane. He was exiled to Tasmania. In 1872, a "passionately Irish" 17-year-old, Arthur O'Connor, tried his hand. He was sentenced to one year's hard labour, and 20 strokes of the birch. He ended his days as an "imbecile" in Hanwell asylum.

And on this day in 1882, at Windsor station, Roderick Maclean became the last in a long line of would-be killers. As the Queen and Princess Beatrice got into their carriage, he fired on them. He was immediately set upon by two pupils from Eton School, who bashed himabout the headwith their umbrellas until he was arrested. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and confined to a lunatic asylum.

The International Monetary Fund, or IMF, was born out of the need to have a more open and better regulated financial world after the end of the Second World War. It was widely acknowledged that the economic rivalries and protectionism resulting from the Great Depression had not helped matters in the run-up to the outbreak of war.

With the Allies driving their way through Europe in the summer of 1944, 730 delegates from 44 countries gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss how best to go about achieving their aims. The following December, the IMF was born when 29 countries ratified its charter.

The IMF had three main goals: to be a forum for international economic cooperation; to promote sound economic policies among its members; and to provide financial support to members experiencing cash-flow problems, so that regular international trade could function.On 1 March 1947, the IMF got down to work.

The first shock to the Bretton Woods system came in the early 1970s when US president Richard Nixon ended the gold standard in America. Dollars could no longer be converted to gold, and that played havoc with the system of fixed international exchange rates. Countries were now at liberty to choose their own.

The Fund has also had to adapt to the flood of poorer members that wished to join its ranks, starting with the newly independent African nations in the 1950s, right up to former Soviet republics in the wake of the Cold War in the 1990s. That's not to say old members' haven't come knocking. In 1976, Britain embarrassingly applied for a $3.9bn loan in return for deep cuts in spending.

Ironically, for an organisation that was founded to foster global harmony, restructuring and sound economic policy, the IMF appeared to stoke the currency wars by its admission in October 2015 that, as The Daily Telegraph reported, "weaker currencies are still an effective tool for economies to grow their way out of trouble". It rather raises the question: is the IMF still relevant?

In Hergé's Prisoners of the Sun, Tintin, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus get themselves into a bit of a pickle in Peru, and find themselves about to be sacrificed by sun-worshipping Incans. But Tintin uses a snippet of astronomical information he found about an approaching eclipse, and claims to be able to command the sun to his will. As the sun is obliterated from the sky, the terrified locals set him free. (Unlike the Mayans, the Incans couldn't predict eclipses.)

Now, this is all very handy as a storyline; a convenient way of extricating your hero from a sticky situation. Mark Twain used the same plot device in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. But something similar really did happen on this day in 1504.

On his fourth and final trip to the Americas, Christopher Columbus's fleet suffered an infestation of shipworms, which forced him to take refuge in Jamaica. The local people took pity on them, and provided them with food and sustenance in exchange for trinkets and baubles.

After six months or so, the natives had collected enough trinkets, and had grown tired of supporting Columbus and his restless crew, who had begun entertaining themselves by raiding their villages. Enough is enough, said the natives. No more food for you naughty Spaniards.

As luck would have it, Columbus had a copy of Johannes Müller von Kønigsberg's almanac, which contained comprehensive astronomical tables. It predicted a total lunar eclipse on the night of the 29th (1504 was a leap year).

Columbus went to the locals and demanded that they carry on supplying his men. If not, he said, they would incur the wrath of the all-powerful Christian God, who would darken the moon, and turn it the colour of blood, an omen of terrible things to come.

Don't be daft, said the locals. Do you expect us to believe that? Go on then – do your worst.

Sure enough, as the moon rose, the sun's shadow began creeping across it. The natives,struck down with terror, agreed to carry on supplying Columbus, and begged him to reconsider. Columbus retreated to his cabin, ostensibly to have a chat with God, but in reality to time his reappearance with an hourglass for maximum effect.

At the height of the eclipse he emerged with the news that God had agreed to turn the moon back to its proper colour. And so Columbus was able to take advantage of their hospitality for another six months until he was finally rescued.

The Hawaiian Islands had enjoyed close ties with Britain since the 1790s. But in the five decades that followed, Britain's colonial focus was elsewhere, most notably on India. After all, trade with the islands only amounted to £40,000 a year hardly worth the bother. So the little Polynesian kingdom was allowed to quietly get on with things.

That's not to say foreigners left it alone. Quite the opposite. A bustling multinational community of merchants grew up in Hawaii, with British, French and American traders all eyeing each other with suspicion. But it was a falling out with the locals over land rights that united them.

Buying and leasing land was second nature to the Westerners. But the Hawaiians regarded the land as belonging to the people as a whole, to be administered by the chiefs. Angry land disputes followed.

Meanwhile, the Hawaiian king, Kamehameha III, sent diplomats, first to America, and then to Europe, with the aim of winning recognition of its independence, and courting foreign investment. Britain and France responded favourably.

Then in early 1843, Captain Lord George Paulet, in command of HMS Carysfort, sailed into the Hawaiian capital, Honolulu. The British Consul, Richard Charlton, complained of unfair treatment of the British, and Paulet was ordered by Admiral Richard Thomas to investigate.

To Paulet, that meant issuing Kamehameha an ultimatum. On 25 February, he occupied Honolulu, and placed himself at the head of a provisional government. The Hawaiian flag was hauled down and the Union Jack run up in its place. Kamehameha was still the king, but in name only. Paulet's rule, however, was to be short-lived.

Less than six months later, Admiral Thomas arrived in the islands on HMS Dublin and upbraided Paulet for overstepping his authority. The Hawaiian kingdom was restored, and on 13 November, Britain and France issued a joint declaration recognising Hawaiian independence.

From the 12th century onwards, serfdom had been a key feature of Russian life. In contrast to European feudalism, where serfs only tithed a portion of their crops to their masters, they effectively worked full-time for their master.

Initially, serfs had the right to leave their master's property at certain times of the year, but this was stopped in 1597. Further changes in 1649 gave masters almost total control over their serfs, turning them into de facto slaves. They were even bought and sold between landowners.

Because serfs didn't own the land they worked, they had little incentive to improve it. Restrictions on mobility hampered the development of industry. At the same time, serfs, who accounted for a third of the population, grew increasingly angry, with 712 uprisings between 1826 and 1854.

There had been several previous attempts to reform serfdom. A 1797 law limited direct work for a master to three days a week, and an 1801 law banned the sale of individual serfs. However, these laws were generally ignored.

The tipping point finally came when the relatively liberal Alexander II became Tsar. After studying the issue for several years, on this day in 1861 he issued a declaration emancipating 23 million serfs on privately owned estates. Those on state-owned estates were freed in 1866.

While the serfs were now allowed to buy land from their former masters, the state loaned rather than gave them the money,. This left families with huge debts, which were only cancelled in 1907. At the same time, common land was given to the nobility. As a result, the nobility still controlled 50% of all land, while peasants only owned 20%, ensuring that Russia was still an unequal society, and laying the ground for the Russian Revolution.

"You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion" words reportedly uttered by L Ron Hubbard, the sci-fi writer who founded his own pseudo-religion, the Church of Scientology.

As Janet Reitman notes in Inside Scientology, there was really only one way in 1950s America to get your organisation taken seriously: "cloak it in religious garb". That would give you the moral authority, but also as a religious institution, you could claim tax exemption and "side-step the rules regarding certification for psychological counselling".

This last perk was especially important to Hubbard's fledgling movement. The post-war years witnessed a rise in popularity in self-help. In 1952, The Power of Positive Thinking was a runaway success, netting a fortune for its author, Norman Vincent Peale. Hubbard saw similarities with his own belief in "Dianetics", which remains a core tenet of Scientology.

Dianetics, as slightly mysteriously defined by scientologists, is a "technology" to overcome the "reactive mind", thus quelling "nightmares, unreasonable fears, upsets, insecurities and psychosomatic illness" to achieve a purified state of mind, known as "Clear".

On 18 February 1954, the Church of Scientology of California was incorporated in Los Angeles. To better spread his mantra, Hubbard set up churches around the world (likened to franchises by some), with Saint Hill Manor in Sussex among the most important.

Legions of critics have accused the organisation of preying on the finances of the vulnerable. In order to achieve a 'purity of mind', adherents must undergo a series of "auditing" sessions, which are usually paid for with donations. The organisation has also become notorious for attracting celebrity endorsements, with actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta among the most famous paid-up members.

And while Scientology generates millions in revenue – around $200m, according to Fortune – America's taxman, the IRS, had to give up its pursuit of what it claimed was unpaid tax following the organisation's legal identification as a religion in 1993. Here in Britain, Scientology gained some similar recognition in late 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled followers could get legally married in its chapel in London.

Since Hubbard's death from a stroke in 1986, the Church of Scientology now led by the "enigmatic high priest" David Miscavige has never succeeded in shrugging off controversy.

With the end of the Second World War, and the terrifying demonstration of the power of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world's great powers fell over themselves to ensure they wouldn't be left bringing up the rear in the nuclear arms race. The Soviet Union tested its first bomb in August of 1949. The UK came next in 1952. With the advent of the H-bomb later the same year, weapons were getting bigger and dirtier. The world was fast becoming a very dangerous place.

The Cold War was developing; the US and USSR were engaged in a game of macho posturing, each backed by a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying life on Earth many times over on the whim of a few overfed, pampered, Alpha-idiots. Understandably, people started to get nervous.

In January 1958, prompted by a letter to the New Statesman by the writer JB Priestly, calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament, the magazine's editor, Kingsley Martin, convened a meeting, where the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was conceived. And on this day in 1958, CND was publicly launched at Westminster's Central Hall. Although there had been little advance publicity, 5,000 people turned up to support the campaign.

That same month, graphic designer Gerald Holtom presented preliminary sketches of a symbol to represent the campaign a circle bearing a symbol formed from the semaphore signs for N and D. On Good Friday, CND held its first march on the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, proudly displaying the symbol that would be adopted by peaceniks and protesters around the world.

Membership boomed as more countries joined the arms race and the counterculture of peace and love encircled the word in the 1960s. The campaign faded away somewhat in the 1970s, but returned with a vengeance in the 1980s as the Cold War hotted up again. The US deployed cruise missiles to its bases in Europe; the UK government embarked on its farcical campaign of “Protect and Survive”, printing booklets exhorting citizens to paint the windows white and, effectively, hide under the bed to escape a horrible, lingering death from radiation poisoning (for more, see Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows).

Cheques have been around for a long time. The Ancient Romans had them, and cheques survived in the Arab world for several hundred more years, saving traders (and camels) the bother of having to haul great loads of gold and silver across the hot desert sands.

The Venetians and Florentines, ever busy in that part of the world, cottoned on to the system, and brought cheques back to Europe sometime around the 12th century. But it wasn't until the 17th century that the humble cheque as we know it today crossed the Channel and arrived in England (true, bills of exchange had existed in England for longer at least since the 1300s, but they were used for international payments, so for our purposes, we're not going to count them).

The earliest modern British cheque that we know of was made payable to Mr Delboe for the grand sum of £400, or roughly £76,000 in today's money. It was dated "16th of February 1659" by merchant Nicholas Vanacker, to be drawn on City bankers Messrs Morris and Clayton.

As the Royal Bank of Scotland, in whose collection the cheque resides, points out, the cheque is actually a year younger than it appears to be. "In those days the year began on 25 March, so the actual date as we'd understand it is 16 February 1660."

What's even more surprising is that the first paper currency, which is similar to a cheque except that the amount is paid over to the "bearer", didn't enter English hands until some 30-odd years later when it was introduced in the English colony of Massachusetts in 1690.

Today, despite the arrival of credit cards and electronic methods of payment, the humble cheque has remained stubbornly popular, with over one billion cheques written in Britain as recently as 2010. However, usage is falling rapidly. By 2018, only 235 million cheques were processed by the Cheque and Credit Clearing Company. By 2019, that had slid to just 51 million.

For the average person in Britain today, our currency is something unremarkable. It's a bog-standard unit-divided-into-a-hundred-sub-units system of currency like pretty much every other currency in the world.

It's not always been that way, of course. The pound used to be divided into 20 shillings, each of which was made up of 12 pence, making 240 pence in the pound. Pennies were subdivided into ha'pennies and farthings. A tanner was sixpence, and 12 pence a bob. Two shillings made a florin, two and six was half a crown, and five shillings a crown.

It all made perfect sense, and was as English as jellied eels, black pudding and warm beer. Except it wasn't – it was imported from the continent. It was originally a Roman system, which fell out of use and was reintroduced by the Frankish king Charlemagne, and was imported to Mercia by King Offa. So, to be fair, it had been around for a while, and people had got used to it.

Its replacement on this day in 1971 – Decimal Day – was controversial. Some feared it would mark the end of everything civilised, lead to the “dumbing down” of the nation, as its youth grew up without the necessary mental agility to divide £4/3/6 by seven. Others claimed it was all an excuse for shopkeepers to increase their prices on the sly.

There was a huge publicity campaign leading up to the change to familiarise the population with the new currency. Two years before “D-Day”, two million booklets explaining the changes were sent out to two retailers, schools, businesses and libraries. Twelve months before the changeover, every household was sent a leaflet, and in the run up to the change, there was a comprehensive radio and TV campaign.

In the end, the transition was fairly smooth. Some of the old coins remained in use in parallel with the new – the shilling and florin became 5p and 10p bits, while the sixpence lived on as two-and-a-half-p, which would buy you a packet of crisps.

On 12 June 1964, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison for his activities in the African National Congress (ANC) opposing South Africa's apartheid system. He was sent to Robben Island, where he spent 18 of his 27 years in jail doing hard labour, literally breaking rocks, and allowed just one visit every six months.

But as the 20th century headed into its final decade, things were beginning to change in South Africa. In 1989, FW de Klerk was elected president. Apartheid was still in force, but de Klerk soon set about liberalising laws, and lifted the ban on some proscribed organisations, including the ANC, which had been banned for 30 years. He also ordered the release of Mandela.

And so, on this day in 1990, at 16:14, clutching the hand of his wife, Winnie, Mandela emerged from Victor Versa prison, having been unconditionally released (in 1985 president PW Botha offered to release Mandela on the condition that he renounce violence – Mandela refused.)

A huge crowd greeted him. Helicopters swarmed overhead, beaming the images live around the world. He got into a BMW and was driven to Cape Town. There, he addressed a crowd of 50,000 from the balcony of the town hall. "Our march to freedom is irreversible", he said. "Now is the time to intensify the struggle on all fronts. To relax our efforts now would be a mistake which generations to come will not be able to forgive."

He demanded the "immediate ending of the state of emergency and the freeing of all political prisoners", and appealed to the world at large, saying "to lift sanctions now would be to run the risk of aborting the process towards the complete eradication of apartheid".

Apartheid was finally abolished in a whites-only referendum in 1992. And in 1994, the country held its first multi-racial elections, with the ANC winning 63% of the vote. A "government of unity" was formed, with Mandela as its president.

As an island nation with a global maritime empire, it was vital that Britain had the best navy in the world. But it wasn't enough just to have the most ships. It also had to have the biggest. That was the thinking of Admiral Sir John Jacky' Fisher, who became the First Lord of the Sea in 1904.

Fisher could see the other great powers working hard to bolster their own navies. He suspected a fight wasn't far off. The Italians, in particular, had an eye on building bigger and better, and the United States was developing fast, as was Japan. But most alarming of all for Britain was the rise of Germany.

So Fisher lost no time in making every other navy in the world redundant. Just two years later,HMS Dreadnought was launched at Portsmouth on 10 February 1906. It had cost £1,783,883 to build. But what a ship it was.

What made HMS Dreadnought so terrifying was its array of ten 12-inch guns, together with 24 three-inch quick firing guns, five Maxim machine guns and four torpedo tubes.

At 21 knots, HMS Dreadnought was also at least three knots faster than its nearest rival, thanks to its revolutionary steam turbine system. And even if you did manage to catch up with it, you had almost a foot of belt armour to contend with. HMS Dreadnought was built to shake off two torpedo hits.

So impressive was Britain's newest toy that it gave its name to a whole class of battleships. Either you were a dreadnought or you weren't. And if you weren't, you were a slightly embarrassing pre-dreadnought'.

The public was delighted. Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, boasted "The Admiralty had demanded six ships, the economists offered four, and we finally compromised on eight".

But what Britain had, everybody else wanted too. It wasn't long before the other major powers were building their own dreadnoughts. By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, HMS Dreadnought was already showing its age. The once-mighty warship did sink one German submarine in 1915 but not with any of its powerful weapons. It rammed it.

Officially, astronaut Dr Michael Foale was flying as an American for Nasa when he performed his first spacewalk on 9 February 1995. But if there was ever any doubt that the Lincolnshire man, who was raised in Cambridge, was also very much British, it was soon dispelled by his first words relayed to his British father and American mother watching in a TV studio in London.

Peering down at the bright blue orb 240 miles below, Foale is reported to have said in true British understatement, "Gosh, it's high, isn't it?"

At the time, the British government didn't sponsor human spaceflight. So that meant aspiring British astronauts had to hitch a ride with another country. For example, in 1991, Briton Helen Sharman joined the Russians on the Mir space station.

In June 1987, Michael Foale had been selected to fly with Nasa, and it was during the American Space Shuttle mission STS-63 in 1995 that Foale first stepped out into space – the first time a Briton had done so. He was joined by Bernard Harris, who, incidentally, became the first African-American to perform the same feat.

The job Nasa had lined up for the two astronauts wasn't exactly glamorous. The purpose of the spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA) in the jargon, was to test some modifications that had been made to their space suits. That meant making Foale and Harris as cold as possible by moving the Space Shuttle, Discovery,away from the sun. The temperature inside Foale's gloves fell to -6c.

If that wasn't bad enough, Foale also had to perform an endurance test in passing a piece of equipment weighing over a tonne to Harris. With both astronauts complaining of being "unacceptably cold", Nasa cut the spacewalk short. Foale and Harris had spent four hours and 39 minutes outside with the stars.

As recently as last month, official British astronaut Tim Peake followed in Foale's cosmic footsteps. And as an astronaut with the European Space Agency, he proudly wore the Union Jack on his sleeve.

England's Crusader king, Richard I, was proud and arrogant, and had a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way. His support of King Tancred of Sicily angered the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, who rather fancied the Mediterranean island for himself.And in Germany, Richard's nephews were getting a little too close to the Dutch and the Danish for the Emperor's liking.

So it shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise that while making his way home through Europe following a jaunt in the Middle East in 1192, Richard the Lionheart become Richard the Imprisoned. His captor was Leopold V, Duke of Austria.

The Holy Roman Emperor leapt at the chance to get his hands on Richard. If Leopold would hand over his worthy prize, Henry would give Leopold a share of the ransom money that he would demand for Richard's release. Leopold accepted the deal and delivered Richard to Henry in February 1193.

Henry had Richard squirming on the end of his hook. In order to extract the biggestransom possible, hedangled Richard before the greedy eyes of the French king, Philip II.Philip had his own score to settle with Richard. Just a few months before, the English king had reneged on his agreement to marry Philip's sister, Alys.

But this was an age of chivalry and there were rules. Pope Celestine III took a dim view of Leopold and Henry's imprisonment of a Crusader king, and both were excommunicated, which you might have thought would be slightly embarrassing for a Holy Roman Emperor.

But business is business, after all, and in June 1193 at Worms, the ransom was set at 150,000 silver marks, which was up to three times the annual income for the English Crown.

Back in England, Richard's dutiful mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, began to scrape together the money. The clergy and laymen were taxed to the value of a quarter of their properties; church gold and silver was seized, and additional taxes were raised on knights (scutage) and land (carucage). The King of France offered Henry 80,000 marks to keepRichard, but Henry turned down the request.

The money raised, Richard was released from captivity in Mainz in Germany on 4 February 1194. Henry used the windfall to launch his longed-for invasion of Sicily.

To some people, paper money isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It simply isn't money in any real sense. But to everyone else, a wad of folding stuff is what they desire.

It first made an appearance, as far as we know, during the Tang Dynasty in China in the 7th century. It lasted in one form or another for 650 years or so, but was abandoned around the middle of the 15th century, after the inevitable inflationary booms and busts got too tiresome to deal with.

Over two centuries after China abandoned paper money, the West began experimenting with it.

In 1689, Massachusetts was still an English colony, and used the pound as currency. Back home in England, the Glorious Revolution had recently taken place. England was a protestant nation once again, and business carried on as usual. Business as usual, of course, meant war with the French.

The Nine Years' War had spread out of Europe and in to the American colonies. One of the many troubles with war, of course, is that it is an expensive undertaking, and often requires novel financial solutions. Paying for war with France is responsible for the creation of the Bank of England and the imposition of income tax, for example.

So to pay for its troops, Massachusetts decided it would print paper notes to give to the soldiers in lieu of pay, which could be redeemed later. And on this day in 1690, they went into circulation.

Initially, a note of six Massachusetts shillings would buy you one Spanish dollar. But it didn't take long for inflation to get a grip. By 1737 so much money was floating around it was virtually worthless. To buy a Spanish dollar by then, you would need 22 shillings and sixpence.

Nevertheless, other colonies, such as Pennsylvania, followed suit. But it would be another 107 years before the Bank of England printed its first pound note (again, to finance war with France).

When you consider how phenomenally successful the simple eight-stud Lego brick has been since it first went on sale in Denmark in 1949, it's amazing to think it took Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, whose father founded Lego, nine years to patent it. But it was only at lunchtime on 28 January 1958, at two minutes to two, that the Dane filed his patent.

The clever bit behind the "automatic binding brick" were the tiny tubes inside. They gave each eight-stud brick, known as a 2x4, better grip when placed on top of each other. That not only made structures stronger, but it also made it easy for a child to pull them apart again. They have been made to the same measurements ever since.

According to Lego (the name comes from the Danish leg godt, meaning "play well"), you would need 40 billion bricks to reach the moon. So it's just as well that in 2012, Lego made 45.7 billion bricks at a rate of 5.2 million per hour. But if just stacking them sounds a bit boring, six eight-stud Lego bricks can be combined in 915,103,765 different ways.

Lego entered a rough patch from 1998 when the company posted its first ever loss. But since then, it has proved to be the king of turnarounds, thanks to film tie-ins with Star Wars, for example, and computer games. In the first half of 2015, Lego enjoyed sales growth of 18%. Forbes rates the brand as being worth $6.2bn.

Frederick Wells, manager of the Premier mine in South Africa, couldn't believe his luck when on 26 January 1905 (some sources put it a day earlier), he stumbled upon the largest diamond ever discovered a huge 0.6kg gem, weighing 3,106.75 carats. It was compared to an oversized lump of light-coloured barley sugar, and was presented to the mine's owner Sir Thomas Cullinan.

No buyer could be found, however, so two years later the regional Transvaal government decided to buy the diamond for £150,000 and present it to King Edward VII for his birthday. Transporting such a precious rock attracted rather a lot of unwanted attention, so it was smuggled onto a steamship and kept under guard.

But that was an elaborate ruse. The diamond on the steamship, drawing all the attention from the press, was a fake. The real Cullinan diamond travelled by recorded post with a mere three-shilling postage stamp affixed to its unsuspecting parcel.

After being presented to the King in November 1907, the diamond was sent to Joseph Asscher in Amsterdam, widely considered one of the best diamond cutters in the world. For several months, he studied the impurities of the gem to know exactly where to make his cuts. Incidentally, a large flat surface on the diamond led some to believe that it had been broken at some point, and that a piece almost as big remained somewhere. If so, it's never been found.

Asscher's first attempt to cut the diamond, according to legend, resulted in his chisel sheering in half. When he did manage to break it, he fainted in his studio. After eight months, the Cullinan had been cut into nine principal stones', the largest of which is the Great Star of Africa, which remains the largest polished white diamond in the world.

Today, it sits in the Queen's sceptre along with the next biggest fragment, the Cullinan II, which is nestled in the Imperial State Crown, both forming part of the Crown Jewels.

Ramsay MacDonald was born in 1866 and moved from Lossiemouth in Scotland to London at the age of 20. In 1900 he became one of the founder members of the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour party. He was elected Labour leader after the 1906 general election, but his opposition to World War I cost him the leadership, membership of the local golf club and eventually his seat (in the 1918 election).

MacDonald returned to parliament in 1922. The Tories lost their majority in the election of 1923 and relinquished Downing Street to a Labour-Liberal coalition headed by MacDonald on this day in 1924. This proved to be short-lived. One of the first acts of the government was the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. A letter purporting to be from Zinoviev, a senior Soviet official, to the Communist Party of Great Britain, suggested the Soviets saw this as the first step to revolutionary change in Britain.

The Conservatives regained power on the back of the scandal that engulfed MacDonald when the letter was published in the Daily Mail (the letter is now known to have been a forgery). Labour lost the resulting election in 1924. Five years later MacDonald was returned to high office, this time as head of the largest party, but was soon overwhelmed by the crisis of the Great Depression. Huge public spending cuts were needed to preserve the Gold Standard, and the issue split the party.

He invited the Conservatives to form a National Government, for which he was expelled from Labour, and he ended up as the figurehead of a de facto Conservative government in 1931. He lost his seat in the 1935 election, and died two years later.

Here at MoneyWeek we're big fans of London's Shard. We used to have a fine view of it from our office window, and watching it slowly rise above London Bridge station from the comfort of MoneyWeek Towers was very satisfying. The view from (near) the top is incredible, too, for those that have £25+ to spare. Its owners, and pretty much everybody else, claim it is Britain's tallest building, topping out at 309.7m (1,016 feet to old people, stubborn people, and Americans), with a viewing platform at 244m.

But in Yorkshire, they take a different view. As they would. To them, Britain's tallest building stands up on a hill near Huddersfield. The mighty and very elegant, in a brutalist concrete way, Emley Moor Mast. At 330.5m (1,084 feet) high, it is indeed a fair bit taller than the Shard. It has a viewing platform, too, 275m up – but it is a technical control room, and not a place the public routinely has access to. It is undoubtedly the tallest “freestanding structure” in the UK – but a building? Perhaps; perhaps not.

There has been a broadcast transmitter on the site since 1956. Originally, it was a 135m lattice tower built by the Independent Television Authority. That was replaced in 1966 by a guyed mast that was actually taller than the current tower, at 385m. But in March 1969, a winter storm brought it down. Later that year, work began on the construction of the current concrete tower, which opened on this day in 1971, broadcasting TV and radio over a 10,000km2 area.

Today the mast is officially known (though not by very many people) as the Arqiva Tower. And in 2002, English Heritage granted it Grade II Listed status

Mediterranean islands don't come cheap – that's as true today as it was in the 13th century. And King Henry III wasn't after just any island for his younger son, Edmund. He wanted the biggest of them all: Sicily. Sicily was ruled by the son of the late Holy Roman Emperor, who had fallen out with the Pope. If Henry would lend a hand in turfing out the troublesome Germans, said the Pope, the island was his. Just so long as Henry didn't mind covering the Papal expenses incurred in the quarrel.

Henry summoned his barons, and told them to come up with the £90,000 to buy Sicily. It was a colossal sum, and the barons baulked. They were getting a little fed up with the king and his expensive projects.So, in 1258, they got Henry to agree to a council of 15 barons who would appoint the king's ministers an agreement known as the Provisions of Oxford. Appealing to the Pope in 1261 and Louis IX of France in 1263, Henry had the agreement annulled. But one of the barons refused to let matters lie. His name was Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester.

Years of brutal civil war ensued. Then, at the Battle of Lewes in 1264, Henry was bested. He could keep his crown. But from now on, it was de Montfort who called the shots. But de Montfort lacked legitimacy. So, on20 January 1265, he held a parliament in Westminster to drum up some popular support. The usual suspects were invited: the barons and the bishops. A handful of knights and lay magnates were in attendance, as were representatives from the Cinque Ports, which supplied the realm with the semblance of a navy.

De Montfort's master stroke was to also send invitations to the "citizens of York, Lincoln and other boroughs of England that they should send two of their most prudent, law-worthy and honest fellow citizens or burgesses". For the first time, de Montfort could at least claim that his government drew support from a cross section of England. It wasn't enough. The fighting continued, and in August, de Montfort was hacked to bits at the Battle of Evesham. Yet, when Edward I came to the thrown in 1272, he decided to invite back the burgesses to his parliaments. The seed of what would one day grow into the House of Commons had survived after all.

On 15 October 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral bound for Saturn, with the aim of studying the planet's rings and its moons. The seven-year journey sent the 5.7-tonne craft swinging round the sun, passing Venus twice and Earth once, then shooting off into the outer solar system, passing Jupiter in December 2000, entering orbit around Saturn in July 2004.

After another seven months' orbit, Huygens detached from Cassini on Christmas Day, 2014, and made a 21-day journey towards Titan. On this day in 2005, it came into contact with Titan's atmosphere, and began its descent through the moon's atmosphere. All the way down, Huygens was sending data back about its composition, the pressure, and any electromagnetic activity.

After the two and a half hour descent, Huygens landed successfully on Titan's frozen surface, making it the first object from Earth to land on a planet in the outer solar system. Once there, it transmitted data for 72 minutes before contact was lost. The data it sent back surprised scientists. The atmosphere was made up of nitrogen and methane, and it was discovered that large quantities of methane lay beneath the surface which seemed to be composed of a soft, dry, sand-like substance. It also found river-like drainage networks similar to those on earth, and large dry lake beds.

The mission was a joint venture between America's Nasa, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) with Nasa providing the orbiter Cassini, and the ESA providing the lander, Huygens. Its total cost was $3.3bn, of which the US stumped up $2.6bn, the ESA $500m and the Italian Space Agency $160m.

The original Cassini mission was supposed to last just four years, but the orbiter twice had its mission extended. It ended in 2017 in a blaze of glory as it entered Saturn's atmosphere and was destroyed.

The French were more than a little sniffy of American claims to have pioneered aviation. France had led the world in manned flight since the first crossing of the English Channel by hot-air balloon in 1785. It was only logical that the French would be the first to fly aeroplanes. In 1898, the Aero-Club was set up with that aim in mind.

But in December 1903, the Wright Brothers ruined it all, when the wheels of the Wright Flyer left the ground at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in the first controlled flight in an aeroplane. Or so the American brothers had boasted.

The French press was having none of it. The Wright Brothers were either "flyers or liars", read one editorial in 1906. Everything was still very much to play for as far as the Aero-Club was concerned.

Two of its founders, Ernest Archdeacon, a lawyer of Irish descent with money to burn, and Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, the so-called “oil king of Europe”, established the Grand Prix d'Aviation to spur on French aviation.

The Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize, as it became known, of 50,000 francs would be awarded to whoever could fly one kilometre in a circular course. And if it was so easy for the Wright Brothers, then surely they would travel to France and perform the feat without any problem.

But the Wright Brothers responded with open ridicule, preferring instead to concentrate on their business interests. Wilbur Wright referred to Archdeacon as "an ass". As it happened, the brothers had achieved such a feat in 1904, and had flown 39km a year later. But the Aero-Club wasn't convinced and the prize still stood to be won.

And won it was on 13 January 1908. The 50,000 francs were awarded to Anglo-French pilot Henri Farman, who flew his Voisin aeroplane over the one-kilometre course in one minute 28 seconds. Feted as a hero, Henri went into business with his brother, Maurice, later founding Lignes Aeriennes Farman. In 1933, the airline merged with others to become the French national flag carrier, Air France.

When Britain entered the Second World War in 1939 it relied on the rest of the world for a large proportion of its food – 20 million tons of food a year was imported. With almost a fifth of our meat, a quarter of our butter and half our cheese imports coming from New Zealand, for instance, there was clearly great potential for the enemy to cut Britain's food lines and starve the country into submission.

To make sure there was enough food to go round and to prevent hoarding, the Ministry of Food introduced rationing. Initially, just bacon, butter and sugar were restricted. But rationing was soon extended to cover many staples, including meat, in March 1940, and cheese, milk and eggs. Every household in the country was issued with a ration book containing coupons, which had to be handed over to or signed by shopkeepers when buying food. Adults received different rations to children, and pregnant women and nursing mothers received additional rations, including a full pint of milk a day and double the normal ration of one egg a week.

Fruit and vegetables, however, were never rationed. Instead, the government's "Dig for Victory" campaign urged citizens to turn over their gardens and allotments to growing food, while many public parks were also planted with fruit and veg. Fish was also not rationed, but given the perils of catching it, it nonetheless remained in short supply. Vegetarians had their meat allowance substituted with extra cheese and eggs, while those who didn't eat ham or pork for religious reasons could also receive substitutes. It wasn't just at home that the menu was limited. Meals in restaurants were restricted to a maximum of three courses, only one of which could contain meat, fish or poultry. The maximum cost of a meal out was set at five shillings.

Once the war ended, rationing continued well into peacetime. Indeed, in 1946, bread, which had come off ration during the war, was re-rationed because of a poor harvest. And the long, hard winter of 1946-1947 resulted in potatoes being rationed too. Six years after the end of the war, the issue of rationing was central to the 1950 general election. The Labour government wanted to extend it, while the Conservatives ran an "anti-austerity" campaign. Labour won, but only by a narrow margin, and its majority fell from 180 seats to just 35. In the election of 1951, the Conservatives were returned to power (despite gaining a smaller proportion of the popular vote).

The USA's split from Great Britain was a fairly long drawn out and bloody affair. It was also an expensive one. The Continental Congress had experimented with issuing paper money to finance the revolution, but these efforts soon collapsed. So it turned to Richard Morris, a wealthy Liverpool-born Philadelphia merchant.

Morris had interests in shipping and real estate, plus some more nefarious activities, including slave trading, piracy and gun running. He was elected by Congress as superintendent of finance in 1781, to manage the economy of the fledgling nation. He immediately proposed to found a national bank – the Bank of North America – to fund the war. On 31 December 1781, Congress passed the act that gave the bank a charter, and it became the first bank to be incorporated by the federal government. There was some doubt over whether the federal government had this power, however, so the bank was also given a charter by the state of Pennsylvania.

In America's first initial public offering, 1,000 shares were offered for sale at $400 each. Subscribers included some of the founding fathers of the USA, including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and James Monroe. Morris acquired a loan from France, and used this to buy 633 of the shares on behalf of the government.

On this day in 1782, the bank opened for business. Morris persuaded his business acquaintances to invest additional funds, and to transact with the bank, thus instilling confidence in it. Morris also persuaded states and the federal government to accept the bank's notes as payment of taxes. As well as issuing its own currency, the bank also issued "Morris notes", which were backed by Morris's own personal fortune. After a few years in operation, the bank reverted to being a purely commercial enterprise, and was succeeded as central bank by the First Bank of the United States. It was liquidated in 1908 after a loss of confidence led to a run on its finances.

King James I of England found smoking tobacco repugnant. It was "a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs". But when it came to the tax revenues it raised, well, that was different.

In 1607, John Rolfe and his band of colonists had been dispatched to the Americas to find and send back gold. They didn't find it. But they did discover that tobacco plants flourished in the surroundings of the colony they established in Virginia, and it turned out to be the next best thing. Smoking became all the rage back home. The king granted English merchants a monopoly on the supply, which was subject to duty upon being unloaded in London. To keep prices (and the tax-take) high, growing tobacco in your back garden was banned (although many did it anyway).

In Virginia, tobacco became so valuable that it replaced coins (which were in short supply) as the main medium of exchange. Everything from debts, wages and taxes were paid for in tobacco, while warehouses stuffed with the leaves became de facto reserve banks. Even the governor's salary was calculated on the price of tobacco.

The colonists became fixated with growing the crop so much so that farmers had to be forced to grow food. Immigration rose and slaves were brought in from Africa, swelling the exportation of tobacco to Europe from ten tons in 1619 to 750 tons by 1639. In that time, the price plummeted from 27 pence per pound to just three.

The colonial authorities panicked. Yield restrictions were imposed, and the leaves were subject to quality controls. Yet, the price of tobacco plunged so far that it became no longer economical to grow it. In January 1639, half of the tobacco crop was ordered to be destroyed. But it was to no avail. To the north, Maryland had since sprung up as a competitor, and with its more diversified economy, it was better able to weather the storm. Virginia was condemned to suffer years of economic depression.