Tag: flags

Happy Canada Day! The flag you’ll see at events across the country today has quite an origin story: one guy, one red pen and a lot of potential roadblocks.

This week we’re replaying some of our favorite episodes about flags and those who fly them.

At the 1936 Summer Games, Liechtenstein and Haiti showed up flying identical blue and red striped flags. Fortunately they found a solution.

Today in 1940, the birthday of the world’s number one flag expert: Whitney Smith, who not only studied flags his entire life, he invented the word for studying flags.

Domino's Japan once tried to send its pizzas out by reindeer, but they had to backtrack after a week because, well, you can probably figure out why.

It's Flag Day here in the US, and a good time to tell the story of the American flag that led to the writing of what is now our national anthem. 

Today in 1752, the birthday of the woman known today as Betsy Ross. The legend goes that after meeting with General George Washington, Mrs. Ross put together the very first version of what would become the flag of the United States. Historians are pretty sure that’s just a legend, but there are reasons why the story came to be.

Today in 1892, an engineering team working on Chicago’s Columbian Exposition approved a design for a giant metal wheel that could give rides to passengers. Here's the story of the Ferris wheel and how it was partly intended to one-up a certain iconic structure from the previous World's Fair.

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology took stem cells and treated them with high-frequency sound waves, which was enough to convert them into bone cells.

Today in 1942 was the birthday of Bob Heft, who designed a 50-star US flag for a high school class project as Alaska and Hawaii were on their way to statehood.

In America we can do anything. Even catch a falling cat with our flag.

The original Olympic flag flew over the Games for the first time in 1920, in Antwerp, Belgium, but before it could be passed to the next host city, the “Antwerp flag” disappeared - for over seven decades.