Kat Eschner

 

Kat Eschner is a freelance science and culture journalist based in Toronto.

A Hybrid III model crash test dummy.

These Dummies Gave Us a Crash Course on Auto Safety

Many of your car's safety features owe a lot to these inanimate people

President Kennedy meets with Gen. Curtis LeMay and the pilots who discovered the Cuban missiles.

JFK Faked a Cold to Get Back to Washington During the Cuban Missile Crisis

The president was in Chicago when he got the news that he needed to make a decision

Reaching the summit of the Matterhorn made Annie Smith Peck well-known.

Three Things to Know About Pants-Wearing Mountaineer Annie Smith Peck

Peck wasn’t wealthy and her family, who did have money, didn’t approve of her globe-trotting, mountain-climbing, pants-wearing lifestyle

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John Z. DeLorean Thought He Was Designing the Car of the Future

Instead its almost-instantly out-of-date styling made it a legend

Whaling captured the popular imagination.

The Real-Life Whale That Gave Moby Dick His Name

Mocha Dick had encounters with around 100 ships before he was finally killed

Nicholas Culpeper fought against the medical establishment of the time by taking the radical action of writing in English, not Latin.

How Nicholas Culpeper Brought Medicine to the People

His 17th-century text is still in print today

Jemison aboard the space shuttle 'Endeavour' in the Spacelab Japan science module.

This Groundbreaking Astronaut and Star Trek Fan Is Now Working on Interstellar Travel

Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, wants us to look beyond Earth

Rita Hayworth in 'Gilda.'

How Margarita Cansino Became Rita Hayworth

Hayworth navigated identity, ethnicity and transformation throughout her career

The Cardiff Giant, posed with a branch tastefully obscuring his genitals.

The Cardiff Giant Was Just a Big Hoax

Even though it didn't really look much like a petrified person, spectacle-seekers flocked to view it

Mark Twain's love of cats pervaded his literature as well as his writing habits.

Mark Twain Liked Cats Better Than People

Who wouldn't?

Eight hundred pounds of dynamite exploding.

The Man Who Invented Nitroglycerin Was Horrified By Dynamite

Alfred Nobel–yes, that Nobel–commercialized it, but inventor Asciano Sobrero thought nitroglycerin was too destructive to be useful

A plantation kitchen in Georgia in 1880.

These Were the First Cookbooks Published By Black People in America

These cookbooks and domestic guides offer historians a window into the experiences and tastes of black Americans in the 1800s

The White House kitchen in the 1890s.

How Eleanor Roosevelt and Henrietta Nesbitt Transformed the White House Kitchen

The kitchen was new, but by all accounts it didn't help the cooking

H. J. Heinz started a condiment empire. His savvy marketing helped.

There Never Were 57 Varieties of Heinz Ketchup

The '57' doesn't actually refer to <I>anything</i>

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The Sweet Story of the Berlin Candy Bomber

Gail Halvorsen's efforts made children happy but they also provided the U.S. military with an opportunity

A mid-century Band-Aid tin.

Get Stuck on Band-Aid History

Small injuries are a commonplace problem, but before the Band-Aid, protecting papercuts and other such wounds was a huge hassle

The British Navy was a big deal in the 1700s.

Jane Squire and the Longitude Wars

The sixteenth-century debate over how to determine longitude had a lot of participants—and one woman

The remnant's of Kepler's supernova imaged with modern instruments.

How a 1604 Supernova Presented a Challenge to Astronomers

The supernova provided proof to Galileo, Kepler and others that the heavens were not fixed–although they were wrong about what caused the bright star

Mad cow disease, like other prion diseases, is still not fully understood.

More Than 30 Years Since Their Discovery, Prions Still Fascinate, Terrify and Mystify Us

Figuring out what they were was just the beginning of a field of research into prions and prion diseases that's still growing

Cartoonist Bil Keane in his studio in 1990.

‘Why ‘The Family Circus’ Was Always So Sentimental

Cartoonist Bil Keane landed on a formula that worked and he stuck to it

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