Humphrey Woodspring was a British space-travel pioneer, who conducted the first rocket experiments of the Edwardian era. Woodspring was raised in Barnsley, and apprenticed as a carpenter in his father’s furniture manufacturer’s company, finally taking it over in 1903 at the age of thirty-one. That same year, Woodspring paid an enlightening visit to the cinema tent at the county fair which included a screening of the early French science-fiction film Un voyage en fusée pour visiter les dames grandes bosomed sur la surface de la lune (A trip by rocket ship to visit the well endowed ladies on the surface of the moon). Soon after he placed an advertisement in the Barnsley Echo which stated that Woodspring and Sons would henceforth dedicate itself to pursuing excellence in the twin fields of space exploration and home furnishings.

Seven years later, Woodspring was satisfied that he had finally constructed a rocket ship ...

One of the most well-known and much-loved units of length in the metric system, the centimetre was first proposed simultaneously in 1710 by Italian mathematican Luciano Carelli and Norwegian physicist Bernhard Boger. A bitter authorship debate ensued, with the central issue being the question of which physical phenomenon should be used as the basis of measurement. Carelli was adamant that a centimetre should be defined as "the width of the smallest finger on my leftmost hand, at the point directly between the finger nail and the upper knuckle", but Boger dismissed this idea as absurd, arguing that the width of Carelli’s fingers was liable to change if he were to put on excessive weight, or to die and slowly decay. He instead proposed that a much more reliable definition would be the size of the gap between his writing desk and the wall of his study, pointing out ...

The Odassa 12 experiment was an unorthodox scientific experiment carried out in the year 25670-12 by an extra-dimensional super-being and laboratory technician named Bl*wthr’k 25j. Bl*wthr’k was interested in exploring the properties of a pocket of space-time he had discovered under a discarded packet of radium in the laboratory car park, which he dubbed ‘the uuniv`rse’. Utilising ultra-microscopic equipment, he was able to precisely map out the complex arrangement of particles that constituted the uuniv`rse, and successfully identified an ultra-molecule of clay-like material that he believed would be fruitful for experimentation. On the night of Blensbury the unth, Bl*wthr’k conducted the following experiment, described in his journal:

Day 20-two. I have been observing the uuniv`rse for some time now, and have determined that it follows a regular cycle of steady expansion, followed by a sudden contraction to near-invisible level and then a violent explosion approximately every 16 hours. During ...