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The Victorians were facing a population crisis, until this ‘obscene’ invention turned out to be the solution
In the first half of the 19th century, England’s population doubled. With many families struggling to survive, the picture had to change – and the solution came in an innovative treatment of one material: rubber. But as the question of ‘respectable’ reproduction emerged, Ruth Goodman explains how the invention also widened an already broad class divide
The air in Victorian London was thick with smog. In the narrow streets of the rapidly industrialising city, where the city’s poorest families lived cheek by jowl, every child born stretched meagre resources thinner still. For those in the working class, wages were uncertain and the cost of living presented constant challenges. Yet, despite the hardship, children kept coming – one after another, year after year. With most families lacking access to contraception, there was no realistic alternative. Big families: the Victorian ideal? “One of the things that we all think we know about Victorian families was that they all had huge numbers of children”, explains historian Ruth Goodman in her HistoryExtra Academy series on Victorian Life. This is true: between 1800 and 1850, England’s population had doubled, and by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, families across the social spectrum were getting bigger. Victoria herself had nine children with her husband, Prince Albert, providing an example for others to follow. But outside of the royal family, this birth rate boom placed huge pressure on the resources of families who were scraping by on meagre livings amid the industrial revolution. But as the century progressed the image of the archetypal Victorian family – respectable, hardworking and moral – began to change. Now, smaller, controlled families were becoming the ideal. This had a noticeable effect on the population. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-464466975-aca8503-e1775055434278.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful Victorian pop‑up illustration opens to reveal Queen Victoria seated with a child while Prince Albert plays on the floor with two others in an ornate domestic interior." title="A c1845 depiction of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at home, playing with their children. The royal couple and their nine offspring were seen as the perfect example of a Victorian family (Image by Getty Images)" /> “From the 1880s, you can actually see the effects of contraception turning up in family size,” Goodman says. “In the census and the records, you can see that middle class families are getting smaller.” Read more | Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you Early Victorian contraception This was largely down to new discussions about family limitations. Shrouded in euphemism, the understanding of sex and how to prevent pregnancy was starting to be framed as a health concern. Goodman explains how it was often covered by the phrase: “Being kind to your wife”. Framing contraception in this way placed the onus on parents to prevent excessive numbers of children for their own good. The idea was that a respectable family wouldn’t have more children than they could feed, and a decent father would ensure his children had a mother to look after them. “Quiet discussions are had within certain groups of society about [not letting] your wife have too many children,” says Goodman. One argument was that “it’s not healthy for her, she should be around in good health to bring up the children you already have.” What contraception was available? In today’s world, there’s an array of accessible contraception. In the Victorian era, the options were more limited. However, there was one development that changed the game: the vulcanisation of rubber. Vulcanisation – the process of improving the durability and pliability – of rubber was patented by British inventor Thomas Hancock in November 1843 and became more widespread in the mid-to-late 19th century. The progress and innovation that characterised the Industrial Revolution helped accelerate its commercial success – and one of its most practical uses was for condoms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-90732016-2629d99-e1775055647469.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="A circular relief sculpture shows a man in formal 19th‑century clothing, with detailed facial features and visible surface cracks." title="A medallion portrait of Thomas Hancock, who obtained the first British patent for vulcanised rubber in 1843 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Condoms in some form had been available for centuries. They had variably been made from sheep guts, linen or other materials – intact condoms made from animal membrane dating to the 1640s were discovered at Dudley Castle – and were almost exclusively used for preventing the spread of venereal disease. The vulcanisation process made rubber “flexible and soft” says Goodman, “so then condoms became made of a softer, more cleanable material.” Read more | From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys The introduction of cleanable, reusable rubber condoms in 1855 was revolutionary – and people started to see the possibilities for using condoms in family planning too. Vulcanised rubber also led to the creation of the female cap – a forerunner to diaphragms and cervical caps – which, as Goodman states, “made it possible for a woman to begin to take control of her own fertility”. Due to the hierarchical ‘male breadwinner’ structure of Victorian families, the reality was that decisions regarding reproduction, or lack thereof, were still primarily made by men. However, this development in female contraception did allow women a little more autonomy over their bodies and futures. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-90763429-9b45b35-e1775056110601.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A small, rounded brown object resembling a bowler hat sits on a dark surface, with worn texture and the words “Racial Trade Mark” printed in white on the top." title="A cervical cap, c1920s. The introduction of this contraception gave women a degree of power over their own fertility (Image by Getty Images)" /> A mirror of the class divide Despite the incredible innovations, access to these new methods of contraception was far from equal. “Doctors found their way to manage their own families”, explains Goodman, “but they were not keen on passing that information on to the working classes.” While there was a widespread belief in the need to reduce family sizes, many of those in power tried to stop it. Attempts to make contraceptive advice more accessible through pamphlets were often unsuccessful as it was “decided that these were obscene publications”. Ideas of propriety and morality – as well as objections from the Catholic Church to any ‘unnatural’ birth control – prevented access to communication about sex in any straightforward terms, and in turn, limited people’s understanding of it. In 1877, The Fruits of Philosophy (an 1832 book that advocated for birth control) was the subject of a sensational obscenity trial in London. Activist Annie Besant stood in her own defence, dubbed a “filthy woman” for selling it. As Michael Meyer explained on a previous episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “[the jury decided it was a] dirty, filthy book, [but] absolved the defendants of any malicious intent in publishing it”. Regardless of intent, Besant and her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh were found guilty under the Obscene Publications Act 1857. Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all Later, their convictions were overturned, and both continued to campaign, with Besant publishing her own birth control pamphlet, The Law of Population. The problem with The Fruits of Philosophy wasn’t its contents – the information inside was nothing that Victorian medical professionals didn’t already know – but that it was being sold at a low enough price for the average person to buy it. The middle classes believed that the pressure of rising population numbers forced the working classes (who they presumed were naturally lethargic) to work harder. This prejudiced – and incorrect – assumption about the nature of working-class people led to deliberate limitations on their access to contraceptive information. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3089859-b6a0f97-e1775056364693.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white historical photo shows two women, a man, and three children standing outside a small shop with jars and baskets visible inside." title="Impoverished people gather in front of a rag shop, c1877. The working classes faced many hardships – some of which were exacerbated by their lack of access to contraception (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even with these rather aggressive attempts to prevent contraceptive advice from being disseminated, the knowledge did spread. Throughout the later years of the 19th century and into the 20th, medical pamphlets, marital guides and private consultations offered methods to regulate conception. For those who could afford discretion and access to physicians, family planning became a means of greater control over their future. For those who couldn’t afford it, though, nothing much changed. In Victorian England, birth control was a mirror of the class divide. It revealed who had enough money to dictate the size of their family, and who had no such luxury.
He was one of England's greatest astronomers – so why has no one heard of him?
Children's author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce chooses Jeremiah Horrocks (1618–41) as his history hero
When did you first hear about Jeremiah Horrocks? As a child, I saw him and his telescope on the stained-glass windows at St Michael’s Church in Much Hoole, Lancashire. The windows, depicting his groundbreaking observation of the transit of Venus in 1639, were such an unexpected sight that I never forgot them. What kind of man was he? Born into an ordinary Lancastrian family, he lived in a small, tight-knit Puritan community. He was later a sizar at Cambridge University, where he had to chop wood and wait on the other students. He was fascinated by astronomy and the question of time from an early age – partly because his father was a watchmaker – and it became his life’s passion. Read more | Star witness: how the Royal Observatory transformed our understanding of astronomy and time What made him a hero? Unlike most great astronomers in history – such as Kepler, who worked for the Holy Roman Emperor – Horrocks was of modest means. He bought a telescope for two shillings and sixpence, and just had a strong sense in his bones of the rhythm of the moon and the tides – perhaps because he’d lived alongside the Mersey, with its huge tidal range. He paid great attention to the natural world around him, partly due to a profound religious conviction: he thought there was purpose in looking at the stars. When Newton spoke about standing on the shoulders of giants, one of the people he was talking about was Horrocks. What was Horrocks’ finest hour? He didn’t have a finest hour – but he did have one of the finest 15 minutes in history. On the day of the transit of Venus, there was thick cloud. It was also a Sunday so, being a Puritan, he was busy. But he set up his telescope all the same. A little after three o’clock, the sky cleared for a short while and he watched Venus move across the face of the sun. He wrote an important treatise on the transit, Venus in sole visa. The airport in Liverpool, which is just around the corner from where he lived, is named after John Lennon – but it should be named after Jeremiah Horrocks. As a nation, we sadly undervalue scientists. Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about Horrocks? No. I think he’s wonderful – and the fact that he achieved so much despite dying so young only increases my admiration. Read more | Why the scientific revolution was far from just a European phenomenon Can you see any parallels between his life and your own? Only in the sense that we both had great passions in our lives – his was for astronomy and mine is for words. What would you ask him if you could meet him? I’d ask what inspired him to keep checking in on that telescope – even though he was busy, the Lancastrian sky was often cloudy, and there must have been people telling him: “You’ve got no chance, mate!” This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Ringing the changes: how the telephone transformed Victorian Britain
To celebrate 150 years since the first telephone call was made, Michael Kay and Coreen McGuire describe how the device reshaped social interactions in Britain – and the somewhat surprising ways it was first used
In autumn 1883, an unusual news story captured the imagination of the British public. It was a tale of deception, fraud – and telephones. On Friday 21 September, a young barrister’s clerk in Birmingham, Robert Danks, set in motion a plan to commit fraud. First he forged a message from a solicitor asking his boss, Jesse Herbert, to travel out of town. Next, he telephoned the office of Herbert’s friend, Alfred Young. Speaking to the clerk, Danks – impersonating Herbert – said he had been called away but had left his cheque book at home. Would Mr Young please lend him £5 (equivalent to more than £500 today – five times Danks’ weekly wage)? Deceived, the clerk agreed, and was told to expect Danks to collect the money – which he did, absconding with it the next day. The story was reported at length across the country – not least because of the novel and ingenious (for the time) method of Danks’ deceit. This was, one commentator noted, the first time the telephone had been used for such fraud – a landmark of sorts in the technology’s short history. Sound idea The first practical functioning telephone was developed by Scottish-born engineer and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who lived and worked in Canada and the US during the second half of the 19th century. He worked extensively on hearing and speech, experimenting with hearing-aid devices and then acoustic telegraphy – efforts that led to the development of the telephone. Bell was issued the US patent for his telephone on 7 March 1876 – 150 years ago this month. The Bell Telephone Company was established the following year, and within a decade tens of thousands of telephone sets were in use across the US. The first successful demonstration in Britain took place in 1877, and the first telephone exchanges opened in London two years later. By the time of Danks’ fraudulent call, small exchanges up and down the UK were being operated by different companies, invariably serving local business communities. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-464474699webready-add59a2-e1774011650108.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph two women sitting at a low table in front of a large wall with several thick wires across it. Each woman is dressed in a long Victorian dress, with their hair up" title="Wired for sound Telephonists at work for the General Post Office c1905. The GPO gradually replaced local exchanges across Britain at the turn of the 20th century. (Image by GettyImages)" /> But were people talking about telephones more than they were talking through them? When it was first introduced, everyone agreed that the telephone was a marvellous invention – though its purpose was far from clear. Was it a device for relaying the sounds of concerts and church sermons? Perhaps it was more useful in the mining industry, utilising the telephone microphone’s sensitivity to vibrations in order to monitor the quality and density of air, and so guard against the build-up of explosive gases? People did use the telephone to speak to each other, but a subscription to a telephone exchange was expensive – often £15 or £20 a year – so for the first several decades in Britain it remained very much a business tool. As well as barristers such as Herbert and Young, early exchange telephone subscribers included companies involved in large local industries – for example, wool in Yorkshire, cotton in Lancashire, jute in Dundee and steel in Sheffield. Also prominent in early telephone directories are professional firms such as solicitors, doctors and banks, as well as local councils and chambers of commerce. In those first decades, contemporaries observed how few telephone subscribers and devices the UK had compared with other countries. That’s in part because the communications context at that time was rich and diverse. Thanks to the success of the telegraph system, the effective penny post service and cheap messenger boys, the telephone had less immediate impact on communication in Britain than elsewhere. Read more | The radio revolution: how Britain found its frequency In addition, the usefulness of exchange telephony depended entirely on who else was also using it. This did not necessarily mean that being in a bigger network was better: many subscribers preferred smaller, more exclusive networks. Subscribers were also concerned about privacy: they didn’t want to be available to just anyone who could wander into a public call office and make demands on their time – nor to leave themselves open to fraudsters like Danks. In short, it suited many subscribers to keep the telephone network limited. And certainly, no one could imagine why the ‘working man’ might need a telephone. Regardless of subscribers’ preferences, exchange companies realised the importance of encouraging groups of subscribers to join at the same time. This often meant targeting professional communities such as lawyers or doctors, whose offices tended to cluster together in the same geographical area within a town. Many companies sold telephony by advertising that they connected their exchanges up to local police and fire stations, and sometimes also to doctors. In sickness and in health In August 1879, shortly before the first British telephone exchanges were established, Eva Lückes wrote a letter to the Telephone Company, which had been established to promote Bell’s patents in Britain. Lückes – the lady superintendent at the Hospital for Sick Children in Pendlebury, Manchester – wanted to thank the company for her telephones. These were used throughout the hospital, but had proved most valuable in the fever ward, where telephony enabled communication without the risk of infection. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-463911827webready-5706511-e1774011631346.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful illustration shows four men at dinner: three are sitting at the table while another stands up alongside them. To the right, another man in a suit, carrying a tray is talking into a large tube, sending a message to the room below" title="Upstairs, downstairs A waiter talks to kitchen staff in a restaurant. Before telephony, the speaking tube was a relatively common way to communicate. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Over the next few years, other medical professionals extolled the virtues of the telephone. “All of us must have felt the heartaching anxiety of longing to hear the voice of a dear friend when either ourselves lying on, or the friend being confined to, a bed of sickness,” noted the medical journal The Lancet. Unlike the speaking tubes that had been common for some time, but through which infection could be transmitted, telephones allowed contagious patients speak directly to family and friends while remaining safely isolated. Following an outbreak of scarlet fever in London in 1887, The Lancet was moved to recognise that this kind of remote contact had a curative power. The strength of this belief increased as the system proliferated, and special telephones for hospital patients were increasingly commonplace in the interwar years. In addition, the telephone achieved lasting clinical utility as an audiometer – a device to quantify individual levels of hearing loss in numerical terms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/HHG5ADwebready-cb80a99-e1774011609462.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Testing time An illustration shows a young man’s hearing being assessed using a Hughes audiometer, invented by David Edward Hughes c1879. (Image by Alamy)" title="Testing time An illustration shows a young man’s hearing being assessed using a Hughes audiometer, invented by David Edward Hughes c1879. (Image by Alamy)" /> Despite these benefits, many people feared that the telephone might pose risks, particularly to users’ mental health. In May 1879, The Times lamented that businessmen’s lives had become increasingly busy, unpredictable and reactive following the advent of telegraphy – a situation that would only get worse with the proliferation of telephones. Concerns about how telephony had increased the pace of modern life, and the associated stress that came with this, were commonplace in this period. In October 1882, the popular science writer Phoebe Lankester encountered a telephone in a private house, and wrote in her newspaper column that: “Extraordinary as this novel invention is, I am not sure that I quite like the idea of its intrusion into our domestic scenes at any moment of the day… [W]hen it comes to being at the beck and call of any intrusive person who may possess a telephonic wire… no man’s house can thenceforth be called his castle, unless he be brave enough to resist such innovations, and leave himself far behind the rest of the impetuous world – in peace.” Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain This combination of excitement and anxiety typified the Victorian response to the telephone in the business and domestic spheres. In public spaces, too, overhead telephone wires raised concerns, being viewed as unsightly at best, and even dangerous. Accidents involving falling telephone wires were rare but reported widely. In 1885, the council in Bath was reluctant to establish an exchange at all, citing concerns that overhead wires would disfigure the city, a picturesque and popular tourist destination. The GPO intervenes In most towns and cities, exchanges were established by large companies that were offshoots of the US Bell Telephone Company, operating using Bell’s patents. The largest of these was the National Telephone Company (NTC), which eventually absorbed the other companies operating in different regions around the UK. However, in late 1879, as the first British telephone companies began to establish exchanges, the General Post Office (GPO) successfully argued that the telephone came under its monopoly on telegraphic communications. This was based on its ownership of the telegraph network, which had been nationalised in 1870. As a result of this legal decision, telephone companies required GPO licences to operate. In addition, the GPO began to open its own exchanges around the country. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3315417webready-054117c-e1774011586519.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Historical photograph of a spacious telephone exchange filled with rows of operators working at manual switchboards. The high, vaulted ceiling and hanging lights frame dozens of workers plugging cables to connect calls" title="from low volume levels to overhearing private conversations between other people. (Image by GettyImages)" /> In towns such as Sheffield, Dundee, Swansea and Preston, local people also established their own exchanges. Despite patent disputes and fierce competition from the larger companies, these were able to operate for many years. Cleverly branding themselves as being run by and for local people, these companies charged lower subscriptions, enabling a broader range of businesses to sign up. They often inspired greater loyalty among their subscribers than the larger companies. Together, these factors meant that, by the late 1880s, towns such as Dundee and Sheffield had some of the most developed exchange telephone infrastructure anywhere in the country. For 30 years, therefore, provision was quite messy, with different companies and the GPO providing services in different areas. This situation ended only in 1912 when the NTC, the last remaining private telephone company, was nationalised. Wartime lifeline Although telephony seemed to be gaining ground in Britain, many in the military still viewed it with scepticism. Telephones proved suitable for point-to-point communication with surveillance balloons from the ground below, and were used as Morse receivers, but they seemed unlikely to replace messenger communications. How could you trust that a barely audible message relayed via this method was sufficiently secure during battle? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3243926webready-bca04cb-e1774011559272.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a soldier kneeling outdoors, holding a field‑telephone receiver to the ear while speaking into it. The device is wired to a wooden pole fitted with multiple cables and a small switchboard‑like unit. The barren, muddy landscape suggests a wartime setting" title="in October 1918. The needs of the military drove innovations in telephony during the First World War. (Image by GettyImages)" /> The dark, isolated and stagnant conditions of mechanised conflict in the First World War changed everything. Suddenly, telephones became a lifeline – a crucial means of communicating between trenches and relaying news from the battlefront to headquarters. By 1920, the GPO had, at great cost, supplied 40,000 specially protected telephones to the army, meaning they were unable to invest in the development of telephone technology on the home front. Yet this expense was hidden from the public, who complained extensively about the failings of domestic telephony. Reliance on this technology in the context of war drove innovations in audibility and portability. Crucially, clearer transmission of speech was vital, and equipment needed to be light enough for repeated dismantling and movement. These aims were in tension, because improvements to audibility added weight. Improved audibility was also important for the generation of men who had fought in the war. Many of these servicemen suffered deafness or hearing loss from the bombardment of artillery and shells. In 1928, the National Benevolent Society recorded that “33,768 men were discharged from the army and navy on account of deafness”. Symptoms of deafness or deaf mutism also presented with shell shock. So hearing loss was regarded as a national problem in the interwar years. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3301550webready-8b9948e-e1774266801629.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a woman standing in country road, looking up some fallen telegraph lines. In the background, a small bus is driving towards the camera" title="A woman gazes in bemusement at storm-damaged telephone wires in south Wales, 1939. Overhead lines were initially viewed as unsightly or even dangerous. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Though valve technology had improved the telephone, individual voices remained hard to comprehend. Early telephone lines were noisy, open and messy, with background noise described in a Birmingham newspaper in 1888 as “a buzzing obbligato which gives a faint suggestion of bees, but has no precise resemblance to anything in nature”. In addition, problems of induction between overhead wires, with signals from one call leaking into another, often led to subscribers being able to overhear supposedly private conversations. This had obvious privacy implications for those engaged in business conversations, as did fears of exchange operators listening in on calls. In 1897, a Glasgow corn merchant, Anton Kufeke, described overhearing a conversation between his competitor and a customer, thereby learning that the competitor was selling more cheaply than he was. This was sensitive business information. In 1893, another Glasgow subscriber recounted a conversation he had overheard between a man and a woman: after a brief exchange, the man announced that he was going for a clean shave – and another listener on the line commented “Is that a clean shirt you’re going for? You need one badly”. The conversation finished with various listeners joining in a rendition of a popular song. Read More | How did Bletchley Park shape the success of D-Day? Agitations from exchange subscribers in Leeds and Glasgow in local newspapers in the late 1880s and early 1890s illustrate the great difficulties many faced in trying to use their telephones. One correspondent in Leeds wrote that: “I occupy more time in communicating through it than I should do if I went to the offices or places of business of nine out of ten of the persons with whom I wish to communicate.” A Glasgow subscriber said that one thing he had learned from using the telephone and overhearing his colleagues and neighbours was just how much they swore when frustrated. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-515579042webready-0db1e60-e1774267416605.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a telephone operator seated at a manual switchboard. She wears a cloth mask over her nose and mouth and speaks into a candlestick‑style telephone. Papers and notes lie on the desk beside the switchboard equipment" title="Wearing a gauze mask, a telephone operator works during the devastating flu pandemic that spread across the world from 1918 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Restricted information A broad range of people struggled with such issues, including some who had trouble following telephone conversations yet didn’t consider themselves to have hearing loss in other contexts. It was strange to have access to speech without visual information. Moreover, the frequency band of the telephone was restricted, so people making or receiving calls were receiving far less sonic information than when talking in person. These difficulties are clear from a 1923 advice sheet issued by the GPO. This gave instructions on what to say when picking up the receiver, and how to speak with maximum audibility and effectiveness. Users were counselled to speak “clearly”, and to roll the rhotic R when saying the number three, because the telephone would blur consonants and elide vowel sounds. “The telephone is no louder or clearer now than it was 40 years ago,” HA Garratt complained to The Times in 1934. Although he admitted that he was “just the least bit deaf”, he still could hear the wireless perfectly well, which led him to conclude that the telephone model he possessed was faulty. Faced with such criticisms, it became clear how the GPO could both recoup financial losses sustained in the war and move beyond issuing edicts to encourage clear speech: by repurposing technology used in the trenches to create amplified telephony. When the telephone was first introduced, the deaf community was excited about the possibility that the new device could be used as a hearing aid. Bell’s wife and mother were both deaf, and the telephone had in fact been initially designed as a type of hearing aid. Instead, it initially excluded the hard of hearing. Moreover, its development encouraged the measurement of levels of deafness in increasingly narrow and strict terms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/10720997webready-b2202ae-e1774266977716.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A small brown pouch with a long strap, alongside two small vials, one yellow, one black. The vials are attached to a small black box which has a pale wire with an earpiece attached to it" title="Hear this A body-worn Medresco portable hearing aid. Such analogue devices were supplied by the NHS from the late 1940s until the early 1980s" /> The first amplified telephone designed for people with limited hearing was advertised by the GPO in 1924 “for the use of ‘Deaf Subscribers’ who experience difficulty in the use of the standard telephone”. It featured a controlling key to adjust the volume; this was stored in a separate wooden box, along with the valve amplifier. Following numerous complaints from customers about the stigmatising box, an improved amplifier telephone was released in 1934. The new device was cheaper, with a freehand microtelephone – the volume control being embedded in the telephone itself rather than in a box – and more powerful valves to boost the signal and increase the volume. Previous models comprised a separate receiver, held to the ear, and a transmitter into which one spoke. Newly integrated receivers combined the two, creating the telephone familiar to us today. When using early devices, people with hearing loss had been able to press the receiver to their mastoid bone, behind the ear, receiving the sounds via bone conduction. As the GPO explained, such users “had been accustomed to holding the bell receiver to the bone at the back of the ear to obtain best reception for his [sic] particular deafness”. This was not possible with the integrated receiver, and the GPO received a flood of complaints. In the UK, categories of deafness were defined according to audiological tests that were themselves biased, being driven by the GPO’s development of Artificial Ear technology. This machine designated standards of normal hearing in narrow mechanical parameters. The standardisation of ‘normal’ hearing and the categorisation of the deaf was therefore created in line with the priorities of the Post Office’s telephone system. Those who did not fit within the GPO’s standards were categorised as customers in need of a “telephone service for the deaf”. So ‘deafness’ was constructed both socially and technologically at the behest of the GPO. Despite these obvious limitations and biases, the GPO was a repository of expertise in electroacoustics in Britain during the interwar years, and it engineered the first NHS hearing aid – the Medresco. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1498115609webready-e515da9-e1774267518636.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a person in a fuzzy striped sweater standing beside a wooden bookshelf, holding a cream‑coloured rotary telephone receiver to their ear. Books, a potted plant, and framed botanical prints appear in the background" title="By 1960, when this studio portrait of a model was taken, telephones were installed in many British homes (Image by Getty Images)" /> Change and change again Today, an irony often highlighted is that technologies designed to bring us together are actually having the effect of isolating us. Yet, as we have seen, communication and isolation have been in tension since telephony began. The telephone was always perceived as a threat to societal mental health, and there were always isolated portions of society unable to make and receive calls easily. In recent years, mobile phones have changed our behaviour. Domestic landlines are becoming rarer, for example, largely replaced by smartphones. For a time, landlines were important for the roll-out of the internet, with dial-up connections being the norm before broadband usurped that technology. Today, many young people dislike speaking on the phone, instead preferring to communicate through text. But as we embrace a more individualistic model of telephony, do we appreciate what has been lost with the decline of the home phone, with access to it shared by members of a family or friend group? Whatever your take on such a question, aspects of mobile-phone culture might well seem familiar to our forebears. In 1885, a London-based commentator wryly described a group “telephone party”: “There sat about 15 well-dressed persons, gazing straight in front, apparently deep in thought, and with a black tube held up to one ear. They heeded not the entry of anyone, and silence and inactivity reigned supreme.” The ever-evolving telephone has radically reshaped our lives – but concerns about its impact on mental health and wellbeing are nothing new. Michael Kay is a senior learning designer at King’s College, London. Coreen McGuire is a historian of interwar Britain, and assistant professor of history at Durham University This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
"Forget AI – never has the role of the historian been more urgent"
"Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events", writes Michael Wood
Recently, I read a news item about the jobs most likely to disappear because of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). And first among them, along with translators, are historians! Now I’m biased of course, but in times like these, when the president of the United States himself can tell the world that Ukraine started the war with Russia, it seems to me we need historians more than ever. In the face of spreading authoritarian rule and growing rightwing populism, good history is a refuge and a beacon. Complicating matters further, it often seems as if the owners of the mass media, billionaires who wish to shape debates, don’t want historians any more than they want independent journalists. It seems that from their perspective, the less historically literate the people are, the better. But in an open democratic society, we need informed historical perspectives, the painstaking interrogation of sources, and public explanation and interpretation. History is not only entertainment. In an age of lies and disinformation, history acts as our reality check. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? And history, don’t forget, is not a fireside job. Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events, in the moment. Think of Thucydides writing as the Peloponnesian War raged, or Ibn Khaldun, lowered down a wall in a basket to parley with the monstrous Timur (Tamerlane) at the siege of Damascus. Or what about the heroic Emanuel Ringelblum? Samuel D Kassow’s account of Ringelblum’s efforts to record the experiences of those trapped in the Warsaw ghetto – Who Will Write Our History? – is surely one of the most staggering books about why we write. To be a true historian is to make a kind of pact with the living and the dead – and with future generations. We have a duty to tell the truth. A new book brings all this into sharp relief. Jean-Pierre Filiu is a distinguished French historian, the author of The Middle East: A Political History from 395 to the Present and Gaza: A History. He has made many visits to Gaza since 1980. But now, one of the big problems for our understanding of the Gazan catastrophe is the Israeli government’s refusal to allow independent journalists – even Israeli ones – into Gaza after war broke out in 2023. Since then, we have depended on the endeavours of incredibly brave Palestinian journalists to tell us what is happening – and Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. As a historian, Filiu decided he couldn’t write about the present crisis without being there and talking to the people on the ground. No naïve youngster, on the night of his 63rd birthday, he entered Gaza with a humanitarian group, Médecins Sans Frontières, and as a fluent Arabic speaker he was an active member of their team. He spent 33 days and 34 nights “to see and experience for myself, to retrieve not only the meaning of words in Gaza, but also the simple values of our shared humanity”. Read more | Nineteen Eighty-Four: to the future or to the past? His book is called A Historian in Gaza. It should be read by all who aspire to be historians. In its pages, we read of things we never hear in our news broadcasts. For example, it illuminates the complex conflicts within Gaza between feuding clan groups. These disputes have roots in the client system introduced by the Ottomans and continued by the British, a kind of divide-and-rule approach where competing groups were largely allowed to get on with running the territory on a day-to-day basis. Here we see the desperate Palestinian people suffering under multiple burdens: bombed and shelled by Israeli forces and pushed towards starvation, but also brutalised by competing Islamist groups and extorted by rival militias. Most of all, though, it provides the material for us to judge for ourselves the real meaning of the contested words and ideas we see on our TV screens: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. What does the historian do? At root, the craft is about judgment. What does this source say? Is it true? What is the writer’s bias? Can I prove it? Am I accepting an account because it conforms with how I see the world? More than a book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, A Historian in Gaza is about the nature of power in our time. Because of the hugely expanding reach of social media and its growing influence on the practice of democracy itself, George Orwell’s famous warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four is truer now than ever before. To control the past is to control the future; control the present and you control the past. Forget AI: never has the role of the historian been more urgent. This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
AI: good or bad for history? Our experts weigh in
As artificial intelligence penetrates almost every aspect of our lives, six historians debate whether the opportunities it offers to the discipline outweigh the threats
“We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanistic thinking still matters” Artificial intelligence isn’t inherently good or bad. Like the printing press or the written word itself, AI is a force – and whether it enhances or undermines historical practice will depend on who uses it, how, and why. AI’s most obvious advantage is that it can process vast amounts of data much faster than your regular historian, which turns it into an incredible asset. The trick here is to use it as it was originally meant to be used – not to replace human interpretation but to identify patterns that humans might not notice and, thus, to enable us to come up with better, more nuanced questions. But it goes beyond that. AI is forcing historians to rethink what constitutes evidence, authorship and interpretation. In doing so, it is not just supporting existing historical methods, it’s helping evolve them. Though I am not worried that historians will be replaced by AI any time soon, there is a risk that indiscriminate use might flatten out the practice. Good history requires doubt, contradiction, ambivalence, even uncertainty, but AI models are designed to produce smooth answers even when the data is messy or the past is unknowable. Moreover, history isn’t just knowledge – it’s a method of knowing. If AI shortcuts the method, it threatens the discipline’s integrity. There is little doubt that AI will be part of historical research, but it is crucial that historians shape its use to enhance rather than undermine our craft. We should resist the urge to scale for scale’s sake, and instead use AI to deepen, not dilute, historical understanding. If we do that, and embed AI within the discipline’s values – critical thinking, reflexivity, contextual awareness – then historians will become central in answering the question of whether AI is good or bad for history. We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanistic thinking still matters, even in an age of rapid computation. I am confident that the tables will turn, and we’ll soon talk about the ways in which history is good for AI. Delfi Nieto-Isabel is a lecturer in medieval and digital history, and co-director of the Digital Lives Programme at Queen Mary University of London “The best results come when humans work alongside machine-generated intuitions” In his classic Foundation series, sci-fi author Isaac Asimov explored the idea of statistically based ‘psycho-history’, by which the future could be predicted through the mathematical analysis of data on the past and present. With the rise of generative AI, it may feel as if a dystopian version of Asimov’s future is edging towards reality, but there are grounds to be a little more positive. A great deal of what historians do is attempting to understand past societies by observing patterns in the evidence they left behind. Machines are spectacularly good at this, and the large language models of contemporary AI take this to a new level. To take an example from my own area of work, texts inscribed on stone in a variety of ancient languages survive from the Roman world in their hundreds of thousands. These are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. To make sense of them, both individually and en masse, as evidence for ancient societies and languages, historians need to compare these texts with one another. But to do so requires familiarity with them all, and the ability to find and compare parallels or identify patterns. Large language models specially trained on this material can now offer suggestions for missing words, dates and origins of this material, precisely because they see patterns across the material that a solitary human might find only after days or weeks of library work – or not at all. Read more | Be wary of technology’s big promises, but roll with the changes The crucial point, however, is that these are suggestions – and the models can offer multiple suggestions, ranked by probability and exposing some of the underlying reasoning. The best results come when humans work alongside machine-generated intuitions. Correlation is not the same as causation, and history is a fundamentally human ‘science’. Nuance, context and, above all, humanity is fundamental to understanding our past, present and future. If that is surrendered to a machine then all of it is lost, and we are no longer writing our own history. Every generation writes its own history, it’s said. Powerful AI can stimulate that process – but it certainly cannot write it for us. Jonathan Prag is professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford, and a co-author of the Aeneas AI model for contextualising ancient inscriptions (predictingthepast.com) “Fake ‘historical’ images and texts are already circulating and, with ever-greater sophistication, they will become harder to spot” Historians have been using AI for many years as an important tool for exploring and analysing the vast digitised and born-digital materials that increasingly constitute our primary sources. For instance, using AI it becomes possible to extract the names of all members of parliament mentioned in historical Hansard, identify the themes and topics on which they have spoken, and trace changes of emphasis over time. Handwritten text recognition technologies enable the accurate transcription of manuscript collections at scale. There are many other examples. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/EMBCXW-e6484e8-e1765189009771.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A line of light blue book spines with gold words on them, each with a year and volume number on them" title="Hansard, the official record of British parliamentary debates compiled by reporters is another vast repository of information that AI can help interrogate (Image by Alamy)" /> This has been unhelpfully elided by the use of ‘AI’ as synonymous with generative AI. Machine learning, however, has not captured the public imagination in the same way as GenAI, with its easy-to-use chatbot interfaces. The speed with which GenAI has become near-ubiquitous, allowing no time to consider all of the ramifications, seems bewildering. Familiar software packages and media platforms are increasingly cluttered with invitations to ask an AI assistant for help. The AI-generated is entangled with the human-created in ways that undoubtedly pose real difficulties for the integrity of the historical record. Fake ‘historical’ images and texts are already circulating and, with ever-greater sophistication, they will become harder to spot. This is a huge challenge, but it is also an opportunity for historians to apply their knowledge and expertise to a problem that requires particular critical skills. A 2025 study sponsored by Microsoft sought to identify those occupations most at risk from GenAI. Historians came second, behind interpreters and translators. Dredge operators, last on the list, can apparently be more confident about their future role. But historians can help navigate this new knowledge landscape. Insightful source criticism, deep understanding of context, awareness of archival absence and loss, and a commitment to centring the human experience in the technological are key elements of historical research and practice. Arguably, they have never been more useful. Jane Winters is professor of digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London “Reading is thinking. Writing is thinking. These core skills cannot be outsourced without losing something fundamental” We seek to understand ourselves by exploring our pasts – and AI will not change this fundamental urge. The digital revolution has already transformed the historian’s work considerably, without fundamentally altering our purpose. Much change has been positive. Barriers of geography, cost and materiality have collapsed, broadening access to history as never before. Less profitably, instant access and keyword searching deprive us of context, and we are less likely to understand the systems that sort, sift and deliver our sources. Always, we shape and are shaped by our tools in a relationship that must be carefully negotiated. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? Utopians and naysayers are united in their confidence that AI will change everything. We must recognise such predictions as products of a moment of frenzied development and investment. Once the hype has died down, historians will adapt – just as we did to that other over-hyped but transformational technology, the internet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1081366104-f6643cf-e1765189043171.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The Maughan Library, King’s College London: “Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past,” says Chris Sparks (Image by Getty Images)" title="The Maughan Library, King’s College London: “Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past,” says Chris Sparks (Image by Getty Images)" /> We will use AI where it can help us – to automate repetitive tasks, to ‘distantly read’ sources identifying areas for closer inspection, or to hone our prose. But we will remain wary of its dangers – not least its tendency to hide its sources and make things up. Hopefully, new tools will become available that reduce our dependence on centrally controlled systems, allowing more thoughtful, bespoke and informed use. We must think carefully about how we use AI in the classroom, too. Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past. Reading is thinking. Writing is thinking. These core skills cannot be outsourced without losing something fundamental. They can be honed only with practice, and we must protect space for that in our teaching. Yet we cannot simply ignore AI, because we have begun to encounter its output routinely in our daily lives. History is a project, not a product. If AI ushers in an era of fast, cheap, mass-produced text, then the skills that history teaches will only become more valuable. Chris Sparks is a senior lecturer in digital history at Queen Mary University of London “AI offers the chance to explore archives at scale, ask new questions and uncover new patterns" There are plenty of anxieties about AI. This should not surprise us: in the past, new technologies such as the railway resulted in moral panics. Rather than a threat, AI can be used – just as other technologies have been. It is important to draw a distinction between functions sometimes described as ‘generative’ and ‘hermeneutic’. The former is what first comes to mind: it can be used to write text, including historical arguments. The latter is using AI to ‘distant read’ large bodies of texts, including archives. Much criticism levelled at AI tends to focus on generative AI – for example, teachers’ fears that students will ‘cheat’ on essays, simply entering the assigned title and word length as a prompt, then leaving AI to produce a passable composition within seconds. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-569178239-233888a-e1765189068133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A woman holds up an old passport in front of her face. On the left page there is a black and white photo of a young girl" title="A Jewish woman holds a copy of fake papers enabling her to flee the Netherlands after the Nazi invasion: AI helps researchers search huge archives of testimonies by Holocaust survivors (Image by Getty Images)" /> Where AI has greater value for historians is as a hermeneutic tool. It is helpful to remember a point that Todd Presner makes to scholars in his 2024 book Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory – that computers ‘read’ differently from humans, but neither better nor worse than us. The challenge facing historians is how to use this technology to ask new questions, particularly to interrogate vast archives that cannot be comprehensively searched through more traditional methods. One area in which I, and other interdisciplinary teams, have been experimenting is using digital methods to access stories of Holocaust survivors in oral history collections. These are typically too large for any one person to watch in their life. The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, for example, contains more than 55,000 interviews, each 2–3 hours long. Read more | "A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions": the future of history Rather than replacing close reading – or watching and listening – of these interviews, AI offers the chance to explore archives at scale, ask new questions and uncover new patterns that invite close reading. For example, what pronouns – I or we – do men and women use to tell what is variously a solo or shared story? Where and why do silences occur in oral history archives as the past becomes too hard to retell? Critical use offers opportunities to do history differently. Tim Cole is professor of social history at the University of Bristol “AI promises to make history faster, but also shallower” AI is often hailed as the next great tool for historians. It can scan entire archives in seconds, collate references across databases, and generate polished prose at the click of a button. On the surface, this seems like liberation from drudgery. But, in speeding up our work, AI also risks hollowing it out. History is not simply a matter of data extraction. The working historian does more than harvest facts: we interrogate silences in sources, wrestle with contradictions in established narratives, and read against the grain of the archive. AI machine tools excel at spotting patterns but fail at understanding nuance. They can tell you how often a phrase appears in a colonial newspaper, but not why irony mattered to the writer, nor how absence itself can be evidence. Outsourcing too much to algorithms risks confusing fluency with insight. The bigger danger, however, lies in how AI will shape the dissemination of history. Museums, publishers and even classrooms may come to rely on AI-generated summaries to teach the past. This could democratise access, but it could also flatten differences and sanitise conflict. History risks being repackaged into uniform, bite-sized ‘lessons’ optimised for clarity rather than complexity. That should alarm any historian who believes that the discipline’s value lies in argument and debate. AI will certainly change the rhythms of our work. It helps me, as a historian of modern subcontinental Buddhism, to map far-flung connections between texts in English, Hindi and Sinhalese. But if I do not remain critical, it is all too easy to mistake the machine’s quick outputs for deeper interpretation. And if the wider public comes to accept AI’s versions of the past as authoritative, the historian’s role as interpreter and critic could be diminished. The challenge for us is clear. AI will not replace historians, but it could deskill us if we let it. Indeed, it promises to make history faster, but also shallower. Our task is to ensure that the speed it offers does not come at the cost of depth – because history done fast is rarely history done well. Bhadrajee Hewage recently completed a DPhil in history from Trinity College Oxford, researching trends in subcontinental Buddhism during the late colonial and early postcolonial periods This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys
Our ancestors weren’t quite as prudish as we like to think they were. Hilary Mitchell looks at some of the tools past generations have used in the pursuit of sexual pleasure – from steam-powered vibrators to goat eyelids
This article contains explicit descriptions of sex and sexual practices throughout – please use discretion 1. The Hohle Fels phallus Around 28,000 years ago, an effigy of a human penis was left inside Hohle Fels cave, southwestern Germany. Made from fine-grained siltstone, the object was meticulously ground, polished and etched with grooves at both ends. Given its polished surface and true-to-life size, some researchers have suggested it may well have been an early masturbatory aid – or the first-ever dildo, to put it bluntly. However, that was not the artefact’s only possible purpose. When University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J Conard first announced the find in 2005, he suggested that it was also used for knapping flints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1D3GB1X-3e0e6f1-e1764240558215.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man holds a phallus-shaped object in his hands, while a woman points to it. In the background, a group of people are working on excavating the floor of a cave" title="Archaeologists Nicholas Conrad and Petra Kieselbach pose with the Hohle Fels phallus shortly after its discovery in 2005" /> 2. Bread Yes, that’s right. As well as being a staple food in ancient times, bread may also have been used for less salubrious purposes. A passage from the Babylonian Talmud, for instance, contains a description of what should be done to treat a man afflicted by a puncture in his penis. The suggested solution is that a piece of warm barley bread should be placed on the man’s anus to induce ejaculation, proving whether or not the perforation has properly healed. Notably, the ancient Greeks are also said to have used makeshift sex toys known as olisbokollikes: batons of stale bread that were inserted into the anus, using olive oil as lubrication. It may sound far-fetched (and could have just been a rude joke), but the practice is mentioned in the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, compiled in the fifth or sixth century AD. 3. Goat eyelids Texts from ancient China describe penis rings made from a rather unusual material: goat eyelids, often with the eyelashes left intact. These were reportedly used between the third and fifth centuries AD to enhance sexual pleasure and performance by trapping blood within the penis. The elasticity of the goat eyelid was presumably the major selling point, but leaving the eyelashes on suggested they played a part too, potentially providing extra stimulation for both parties. By the 1600s, some Chinese men had upgraded their penis ring technology. These more modern devices were made from materials like jade and ivory, and were ornately carved, often depicting dragons. The dragons’ tongues usually extended to form a protruding nub, which could be placed against the woman’s clitoris to enhance her pleasure during intercourse – a forerunner to today’s clitoral stimulators. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/4GettyImages-1052933946-4c20b47-e1764240604387.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Evidence from ancient China suggests that goats’ eyelids were used to heighten sexual pleasure for both men and women (Image by Getty Images)" title="Evidence from ancient China suggests that goats’ eyelids were used to heighten sexual pleasure for both men and women (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century 4. Apadravya (‘apparatus’) Even if you’re not remotely interested in the history of sex and sexuality, you’ll have likely heard of Vātsyāyana’s third-century AD tome, the Kama Sutra. As well as guidance about living a healthy sex life, the Sanskrit text also extols the virtues of using apadravya (‘apparatus’) to enhance one’s pleasure, describing the use of dildos, penis extenders and other sex aids made of wood, rubber, gold, silver, copper and ivory. Some of the devices are particularly unusual: one is shaped like a flower bud, while another resembles an elephant’s trunk. If that wasn’t enough, the Kama Sutra also contains instructions for creating artificial vaginas made of “hollowed-out pumpkins” and bamboo moistened with oil or ointment. Sounds a bit more effective than bread… 5. The Science Museum’s luxury ivory dildo One of the best-documented early modern sex toys is currently in the care of London’s Science Museum. Labelled “ivory dildo with a contrivance for simulating ejaculation”, the 18th-century device takes the form of an erect penis and includes a small pump and reservoir, seemingly intended to cause fluid to shoot out at an opportune moment. Curiously, the catalogue entry also states that the item was “found in the stuffed seat of a Louis XV armchair, which was in a convent on the banks of the Seine, near Paris”, but how it got there is a mystery sadly lost to the mists of time. 6. George Taylor’s steam-powered ‘Manipulator’ he ivory dildo might have been very novel in many ways, but one crucial thing that it didn’t do was vibrate. So where did the concept of the vibrator come from? The answer, it appears, lies in a steam-powered device from 1869 known as the ‘Manipulator’. Invented by American physician George Taylor, the Manipulator was not a theme park ride as its name suggests, but a large, padded table connected to vibrating ball, which would be positioned against the patient’s pelvic area as they lay on the device. The ball – which was powered by a coal-fired steam engine – provided continuous mechanical stimulation and was described as a “medical vibrating and kneading machine”. The Manipulator was an adaptation of a similar machine created by Swedish physical therapist Gustaf Zander; Taylor merely improved on Zander’s ideas by attaching his ‘Medical Rubbing Apparatus’ to what was, in effect, a stationary steam engine. However, Taylor warned physicians who bought the device that treatment of female pelvic complaints with the Manipulator should be supervised to prevent “overindulgence”. 7. ‘Rubber women’ Rubber, in its natural form, has been known and used for thousands of years, but modern rubber as we know it today was developed much later. In 1839, American inventor Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanisation, a process that made rubber strong, elastic and weather-resistant, paving the way for a wide range of industrial and consumer applications – some of which were later exploited for erotic purposes. Selected accounts suggest that, by the 1850s, manufacturers were producing rubber items that could be interpreted as early forms of sex dolls. These items have been described as ‘rubber women’ or femmes en caoutchouc in French, though they were not explicitly advertised as sex toys. The first mention of manufactured sex dolls in academic literature appears in Iwan Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time (1908), where he claims they were marketed primarily to sailors. However, modern scholarship suggests that Bloch relied heavily on fictional sources and exaggerated advertising, calling into question the book’s accuracy. Given the modern popularity of sex dolls, however, it seems plausible that variations on the theme may have existed in the early 20th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/7.Femme-en-Caoutchouc-c16ea73-e1764241535367.png" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration shows a man holding a rubber woman in his arms" title="A 19th-century French song, La Femme en Caoutchouc (‘The Rubber Woman’), tells the story of a sailor’s ‘relationship’ with a sex doll. The affair does not end well, as indicated by the illustrations adorning this edition of the sheet music" /> Read more | Rich men, reckless affairs and ruined reputations: the scandalous lives of London's 18th-century courtesans 8. Granville’s ‘Percuteur’ Large, steam-powered vibrators like George Taylor’s ‘Manipulator’ were far too bulky and costly for most physicians, so British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville decided to invent a smaller, spring-driven electromechanical vibrator known as the ‘Percuteur’. After patenting his device in the early 1880s, Granville was adamant that it should only be intended for therapeutic use on men, stating: “I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid, the treatment of women by percussion… simply because I do not want to be hoodwinked… by the vagaries of the hysterical state.” It’s not clear whether fellow doctors heeded Granville’s advice, but it’s important to note that vibrators at the time were viewed primarily as medical instruments rather than sexual devices. Indeed, Dr Carol Queen – curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum in San Francisco – has cautioned against calling these early vibrators ‘sex toys’, saying: “The vibrators were not marketed and sold for this purpose. They were healthcare devices that just happened to cause orgasm if you knew where to apply the vibration… there is no evidence that people who owned or used them knew this… though there’s also no evidence that they didn’t.” 9. Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators Modern butt plugs did not originate as sex toys, but as treatments for a range of ‘rectal ailments’, including constipation and ‘nervousness’. They were first patented in 1892 and marketed as ‘Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators’ from 1893 to 1940. They were sold in sets of four, in increasing sizes, and advertisements and surviving sets show that each dilator had an olive or bullet-shaped tip and a flanged base to prevent full insertion – a shape strikingly similar to today’s butt plugs. The devices were made of rubber, and the instructions suggested they be used with either Dr Young’s Piloment lubricant or Vaseline. Like early vibrators, they were marketed as ‘healthcare devices’, but back then – as now – the human anus contained a great deal of nerve endings, meaning inserting the dilators into the rectum will have caused many ‘patients’ to experience sexual pleasure. To paraphrase Dr Carol Queen, there’s no evidence to suggest that people did use these dilators during sex – but, equally, there’s nothing to say they didn’t. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/9Credit-CreepyCuteTreasuresEtsyDr-Youngs-Rectal-Dilators-7f08bac-e1764241593117.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A set of Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators. The box’s instructions suggest that the user should keep their chosen dilator inserted for “half an hour” to achieve the best results (Image by CreepyCuteTreasures/Etsy)" title="A set of Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators. The box’s instructions suggest that the user should keep their chosen dilator inserted for “half an hour” to achieve the best results (Image by CreepyCuteTreasures/Etsy)" /> 10. Louis B Hawley’s Patented Penis Stiffener In 1907, US inventor Louis B Hawley sprang into action to quite literally support men with erection problems. Hawley’s patented ‘surgical appliance’ took the form of an external splint to keep the penis erect, with a covering to help hold it in place. Unfortunately, there are no first-hand accounts of how comfortable the device would have been for both parties, though given later patent writers’ critiques about its design being bulky and awkward, it’s probably fair to speculate that the answer may well have been “not very”. However, this early prototype did pave the way for more modern penis ‘stiffeners’, most notably Dr F Brantley Scott’s inflatable device, which was first sold in the 1970s and made up of two inflatable silicone cylinders with a reservoir and pump. That, in turn, led to the advent of surgically implanted and inflatable prostheses, which are still helping people enjoy robust and vigorous sex lives today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/10GettyImages-837400890-547dfa0-e1764241628703.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Physicians have long sought new ways to treat erectile dysfunction – including the creation of inflatable prostheses (Image by Getty Images)" title="Physicians have long sought new ways to treat erectile dysfunction – including the creation of inflatable prostheses (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | Queen Victoria’s voracious appetite for food and sex 11. Hand-cranked ‘massagers’ The earlier question of “but did people really use these things to masturbate?” raises its head again as we look at hand-cranked vibrators like Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator, which was sold throughout the early 1900s and could deliver 6,000 vibrations per minute. At this time, masturbation was widely viewed as shameful, and ‘obscene’ content was illegal in the US under the 1873 Comstock Act. This meant that vibrators could not be openly advertised as sexual products. However, according to sex toy historian Hallie Lieberman, “it’s impossible to deny that sexual uses for vibrators weren’t known”. The makers of the Bebout Vibrator, for example, made their target market very clear in a 1908 advert, describing their device as “gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing [and] invented by a woman who knows a woman's needs”. Interestingly, many of these hand-cranked devices came with dildo-like attachments – though these were ‘officially’ intended to treat uterine complaints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/11-2RX45AW-0c62c65-e1764241663308.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator could deliver 6,000 vibrations a minute – but it was never explicitly marketed as a sex toy (Image by Alamy)" title="Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator could deliver 6,000 vibrations a minute – but it was never explicitly marketed as a sex toy (Image by Alamy)" /> 12. The Oster Stim-U-Lax This scalp massage device, marketed to barbers, promised to deliver “several thousand rotating-patting Swedish-type massage movements per minute” via the operator’s fingers. But it wasn’t only used on scalps. A frank first-hand account by US sex educator Betty Dodgson (1929–2020) describes using an Oster Stim-U-Lax with her lover in 1966, explaining: “One day he was getting a haircut when his barber ended with a scalp massage using a vibrating machine that was strapped onto the back of his hand. Grant got the bright idea that it would be great for sex. On our next date, Grant brought out his new toy for us to try. Although I wasn't all that crazy about getting off on a mechanical device, my motto is to always try everything at least once.” It was, according to Dodgson’s account, extremely effective, and led her to become a keen advocate for vibrators from that point onwards. Dodgson is even credited with helping to bring such sex toys into the mainstream, promoting devices such as the now-ubiquitous Hitachi Magic Wand, first marketed in 1968.
Star witness: how the Royal Observatory transformed our understanding of astronomy and time
From the moment it was founded 350 years ago, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich drove our understanding of astronomy, navigation and time. Louise Devoy explores eight milestones in the history of this pioneering scientific institution
The big bang moment 1675: Charles II sparks a star-gazing revolution In the 17th century, the great maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britain, Charles II took a major step to ensure his realm’s position at the head of the pack. On 4 March 1675, the king signed a royal warrant appointing John Flamsteed as the first “astronomical observator”, tasked with “perfecting the art of navigation”. Flamsteed’s specific objective was to devise a method by which sailors could establish their longitude (east–west position) at sea – which involved measuring the positions of celestial bodies – and of knowing the time at a ship’s local position. And Flamsteed would get to carry out this vital research from the surroundings of the country’s first state-funded, purpose-built scientific institution: the Royal Observatory. It was urgent work, because England’s great rival, France, had stolen a march: Louis XIV had established an observatory in Paris nearly a decade earlier. Flamsteed was, in effect, playing catch-up. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/T809MT-CMYKWeb-Ready-7606aa3.jpg" width="2663" height="1775" alt="an illustration showing a large crowd looking at several artefacts including a globe, a map, and a satellite dish" title="King Louis XIV visits the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1671. The creation of an observatory in the French capital had left England playing catch-up (Image by Alamy)" /> The size of the task facing the astronomer clearly wasn’t lost on Charles II, for the king appointed none other than the celebrated architect Christopher Wren to design the observatory. Wren’s chosen site was the hilltop ruins of Greenwich Castle – and it was here that the foundation stone was laid on 10 August 1675. With its lofty windows, royal portraits and accurate pendulum clocks, the octagonal ‘star chamber’, completed in 1676, was grand in appearance. Unfortunately, it was also unsuitable for mapping the stars, as it was 13.5° askew from the meridian, an imaginary north-south line connecting the poles. So Wren designed another building nearby. This one would last for the remainder of Flamsteed’s tenure, before being demolished, rebuilt and extended as the Meridian Observatory. As for Flamsteed, he went on to conceive Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), by which he produced an average (‘mean’) 24-hour day that could be tracked using a mechanical clock year round. And that would have ramifications across the planet. Read more | A brief history of astronomy Dressed for success 1767: How a man in a padded suit transformed the art of navigation No one could accuse Nevil Maskelyne of not being dedicated to his job. In the dead of night across the mid-1760s, the fifth Astronomer Royal could be found staring up at the sky for hour upon hour, while straining his ears to hear the beats of a nearby clock. Dressed in an extravagant padded suit made from wool, silk and linen, Maskelyne was prepared for all that a British winter could throw at him. Not even perishing temperatures could stand in the way of the task in hand: to devise a ‘lunar distance method’ to calculate longitude at sea. This technique required mariners to measure the angular distance between the moon and a specific star, then compare it to Greenwich time. And they all used data gleaned from Maskelyne’s meticulous study of the movement of the stars. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1767-L4962-001-CMYKWeb-Ready-30917ec.jpg" width="1709" height="1139" alt="Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne wore this wool, silk and linen suit to ward off the perishing cold while studying the stars (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" title="Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne wore this wool, silk and linen suit to ward off the perishing cold while studying the stars (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" /> This was, however, far from a one-man endeavour. Maskelyne was joined on his freezing vigils by his assistant, David Kinnebrook, and enlisted a network of mathematicians – dubbed ‘computers’ – to work remotely on calculating the predicted position of the moon over the year ahead. The Astronomer Royal even had a team of ‘comparers’ check the computers’ work (which paid off when two of them were found to be copying one another’s work). All this enabled Maskelyne to produce the Nautical Almanac, the first edition of which was made available on 6 January 1767. It quickly became an essential tool in navigation, reducing the time taken to make longitude calculations from hours to minutes. Updated annually, the Almanac became a required element of navigators’ training, and set the trend for mariners to calculate their position relative to Greenwich. High standards 1833: A curious metal sphere regulates clocks It can be seen from miles around – and with good reason. Sitting atop the Royal Observatory is a large red, metal ball that rises to the top of a mast at the same time every day, and drops a few minutes later. For those who haven’t set eyes on it before, it makes for a strange sight. But what is it there for? To answer that question, we need to rewind to 1764 when John Harrison, the celebrated English clockmaker, sent his fourth marine timekeeper, later known as ‘H4’, on a trial voyage to Barbados. The clock performed exceptionally well, losing a mere 39.2 seconds over 47 days at sea. To Harrison’s delight, it proved that such devices could provide mariners accurate reference times for calculating longitude. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/dreamstimexxl73355384-CMYKWeb-Ready-1ba1cb2.jpg" width="6567" height="4378" alt="A photograph of a large red brick building, with a domed roof on the right. There is a tower with a red ball on the top. Behind the building there is a purple and orange cloudy sunset" title="The time ball was installed on the turret of Flamsteed House at the Royal Observatory in 1833. It dropped at 1pm each day, enabling mariners to check their on-board chronometers (Image by Dreamstime)" /> Other clockmakers developed Harrison’s innovative ideas into a standard design that was cheaper and easier to reproduce. By the 1820s, the ‘marine chronometer’ was being used on both commercial and Royal Navy ships. But these chronometers only worked if they were telling the correct time when ships left port. That’s where the Greenwich ‘time ball’ came in. A time ball is a large spherical device that drops at a predetermined time of day, enabling mariners to set their clocks by it. The first modern example of this technology was erected in Portsmouth in 1829. Greenwich’s, however, would be the most famous. It was installed in 1833 on Flamsteed House, at the heart of the Observatory, providing maximum visibility from the Thames. Ever since, it has risen halfway up the mast at 12.55pm, climbed to the top at 12.58pm and then dropped at precisely 1pm GMT. Soon time balls were appearing at harbours and observatories around the globe, meaning that mariners could check their chronometers against accurate clocks, even during the longest of voyages. Timetable drama 1852: Greenwich rides to the railways' rescue Take a stroll down Corn Street in the heart of Bristol and you’ll come across a clock mounted to the wall of the city’s old corn exchange. There’s nothing unusual about that, you may think. But take a closer look and you’ll notice that this elegant 1820s timepiece has two hands for minutes: a red one for GMT and a black one for local Bristol time. The clock is a curious snapshot of a bygone age, and also a marker of a technological conundrum that the Royal Observatory played a central role in solving. The mid-19th century was very much the age of the railways – by the 1840s tracks were snaking across the country. This was all well and good. But when, in 1847, the railway companies decided to coordinate their timetables across Britain using GMT, they ran into a problem. Back then, Britain’s cities relied on local times set by sundials, varying by as much as 30 minutes between west and east. So how could the railway companies ensure that these times were perfectly aligned? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-170477153-CMYKWeb-Ready-b814769.jpg" width="2589" height="1726" alt="With its three hands, the clock on Bristol’s Corn Exchange offers a snapshot of an age when Britain’s cities relied on a variety of local times (Image by Getty Images)" title="With its three hands, the clock on Bristol’s Corn Exchange offers a snapshot of an age when Britain’s cities relied on a variety of local times (Image by Getty Images)" /> Enter George Biddell Airy, the seventh Astronomer Royal. Airy reasoned that a new technology – that of sending impulses via telegraph wires to a series of synchronised dials – could provide a solution. And so he ordered a new timepiece – the Shepherd Motor Clock – to be installed at the Royal Observatory. From 1852, the clock began sending daily time signals to railway stations across London and Kent, along with hourly signals to the Electric Telegraph Company on London’s Strand for national distribution. Train travel would never be the same again and, by 1880, GMT had been embraced as Britain’s legal Civil Time. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period A moment in the sun 1874: Greenwich leads the race to record the transit of Venus For astronomers everywhere, 9 December 1874 was like Christmas come early. Star gazers counted down the days to this landmark date, while George Biddell Airy ordered expeditions to Egypt, New Zealand and the Indian Ocean to observe the amazing event unfolding overhead. That event was a transit of Venus, a rare astronomical phenomenon in which the planet appears to cross the Sun as a slow-moving black dot. This was the first time that the transit had occurred since 1769, and the first such event since the invention of photography in the 1820s. Little wonder astronomers were excited. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/T4323-001-CMYKWeb-Ready-44133fe.jpg" width="5686" height="3790" alt="An observation hut is set up in Greenwich ahead of the transit of Venus in 1874. This astronomical phenomenon enabled star-gazers to accurately calculate the Sun-Earth distance (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" title="An observation hut is set up in Greenwich ahead of the transit of Venus in 1874. This astronomical phenomenon enabled star-gazers to accurately calculate the Sun-Earth distance (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" /> And their excitement was justified. By timing the transit’s key moments as seen from different locations on Earth, star gazers can measure the Sun–Earth distance, known as the ‘astronomical unit’. This yardstick (just under 93 million miles) is still used by scientists today. Ahead of the 1874 transit, Airy ordered special telescopes known as photoheliographs to project the Sun’s disc onto glass plates. However, his teams struggled with the kit, and the photoheliographs failed to capture the transit with any great accuracy. Despite those issues, the transit of Venus inspired a renewed interest in sun studies. Greenwich assistant EW Maunder started to compile a daily record of sunspot observations. In 1904, Maunder and his wife, Annie, assembled 30 years of sunspot data into the ‘butterfly diagram’ that still underpins our understanding of the Sun’s 11-year magnetic cycle. A degree of certainty 1884: The world aligns itself to Greenwich John Flamsteed had been dead for more than a century. Yet, on 13 October 1884, his great brainchild, Greenwich Mean Time, truly went global. On that day, delegates at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC voted in favour of making Greenwich the world’s prime meridian, or 0° longitude. The decision was influenced by a combination of technological supremacy and pragmatism. Greenwich was one of only four observatories with a suitably accurate telescope – the Airy Transit Circle Telescope – to define a meridian. And more than 70 per cent of shipping companies by tonnage already relied on the Greenwich meridian. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2YXWWWX-CMYKWeb-Ready-602ff19.jpg" width="3242" height="2161" alt="Delegates at the 1884 International Meridian Conference agreed to use the Greenwich meridian as 0° longitude (Image by Alamy)" title="Delegates at the 1884 International Meridian Conference agreed to use the Greenwich meridian as 0° longitude (Image by Alamy)" /> The delegates also agreed that the Universal Day – a 24-hour period to be used as a common reference to record events around the world – should begin at midnight GMT on the Greenwich meridian. This would hardly have come as a surprise: a year earlier, railroads in the US had already agreed to use standard time zones based on hourly meridians from Greenwich. The delegates assembled in the American capital that October day voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Universal Day, and countries started to define their own standard time zones as hourly intervals before or after Greenwich. The result was the familiar time-zone system we use today. Seeing double 1893: The Royal Observatory makes its biggest statement yet Was Greenwich under threat? The International Meridian Conference of 1884 might have confirmed the Royal Observatory’s primacy in the world of astronomy. But, within a year, the eighth Astronomer Royal, William Christie, was voicing his concerns that the principal telescope at Greenwich was being overtaken by newer, better instruments at rival observatories across Europe and North America. Determined to keep Greenwich out in front of the chasing pack, Christie persuaded the Admiralty to fund a new instrument, and that 28-inch diameter lens telescope – still the largest of its type in Britain – came into use in 1893. Most other telescopes at Greenwich were designed to be fixed into position to ensure the accurate measurement of the stars for timekeeping and navigation. The Great Equatorial Telescope – named after its mount, which kept the instrument moving parallel to the Earth’s equator – was part of a new generation designed for astrophotography. With a clockwork drive that kept the instrument moving in sync with the stars from east to west, it could be used to take photos with very long exposures stretching to several hours, capturing impressive views of faint gas clouds (nebulae). However, astronomers struggled to configure the heavy glass lens for photography, and so the telescope was reassigned to the study of double stars. By measuring the changing angle between an orbiting pair of stars, the astronomers could now calculate the mass of these distant suns. All that came to an end in 1971 when the Great Equatorial Telescope was finally retired. However, you can still see this extraordinary instrument – housed in its distinctive onion-shaped dome – at Greenwich today. Read more | A brief history of daylight saving time Pip pip hooray 1924: GMT is piped into homes across Britain If we want to know the time in 2025, all we have to do is check the phone in our pocket, or glance at the digital watch on our wrists. Across most of the 20th century, of course, that wasn’t an option. If Britons sought an accurate time-check that they could, quite literally, set their clocks and watches by, then they had to turn on their radios and listen out for the familiar strains of the ‘six pips’. The six pips first entered the public consciousness on 5 February 1924, when the ninth Astronomer Royal, Frank Dyson (below), announced a collaboration with the BBC. The Royal Observatory would start sending electrical impulses down a telephone wire to the newly created broadcaster. These would then be converted into a series of six audio alerts – or ‘pips’ – that would go out on the radio on the hour, every hour. But while some technologies were underscoring Greenwich’s enduring relevance, others were undermining it. In the 1930s, scientists developed clocks based on the natural vibration of quartz crystals; then, a decade later, the first atomic timekeepers began to appear. Both offered reliability and accuracy that the system of measuring time by the stars couldn’t match. This wasn’t the only threat to the Royal Observatory’s pre-eminence in the 20th century. As the march of industry impacted visibility across London’s skies, so Greenwich’s suitability for the practice of astrophysics declined. Soon it became clear that the Observatory would have to move. And it did so twice – first to East Sussex in 1957; then to Cambridge in 1990. Eight years later, it shut altogether. Time had finally caught up with the great old scientific institution. But its huge contribution to the fields of astronomy, timekeeping and navigation cannot be doubted – as the many thousands of people who visit the Royal Observatory museum that now occupies the famous Greenwich complex will no doubt testify. John Flamsteed would surely be proud. Dr Louise Devoy is senior curator at the Royal Observatory and author of Royal Observatory Greenwich: A History in Objects (October, 2025) This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery
Geneticist Turi King and historian Alex J Kay are in the spotlight after their research into Hitler’s DNA was featured in a new Channel 4 series. Shortly after the first episode aired, Matt Elton spoke to them about the complex ethical dimensions of this work and some of the stunning revelations that have emerged from it
Matt Elton, HistoryExtra: How did you get involved in this project and did you have any concerns? Alex J Kay: I got involved in the project in March 2023. I was contacted by Dan Chambers from Blink Films, who had already been working on this project for quite some time. I knew that Turi was already involved and they were looking for a lead historian for the programme. My big concern – because there’s so much out there about Hitler, so many documentaries, so many studies, so many books – was that this was going to be done in a serious way. Not sensationally, but really following the science, and very much based on research and evidence. Everybody who was involved with the project was clearly following science and really wanted to do a good job, and make sure it was as ironclad as possible in terms of the research and the evidence, so that reassured me. Turi King: I was brought on almost exactly four years ago. My first question was around not wanting to be involved if this was going to be done in a sensationalist way. And I did agonise [over doing it] because of who it is. But then, as an ancient DNA specialist, there have been thousands of individuals, archaeological and historical specimens, who have had their whole genome sequenced – including Beethoven. And I was thinking: “Well, why should Hitler be seen as this kind of mystical figure whom we could never do this DNA analysis on? And who is it who makes those kinds of decisions?” As Alex has said, Hitler has been the subject of so many books and articles and television programmes and so on, but this would add a new layer of information that hasn’t been available before. The other thing was that, because the swatch [a small sample of material] was being made available for DNA analysis, somebody was going to do this at some point, so let’s make sure it’s done in an absolutely rigorous way. My first question was: “Is this actually Hitler’s DNA?” My first role in this was to go through the entire process around authenticating the DNA. So let’s talk about the swatch you mentioned there. Alex, can you talk about the final days of Hitler’s life and how they enabled the specific set of circumstances that allowed this research to happen? AJK: Hitler spent the last weeks of his life in his Berlin bunker virtually the entire time, only occasionally going up into the garden of the Reich Chancellery building. By [April] the Soviets were attacking the city. The Red Army had already entered Berlin and was fighting its way to the city centre, where the government headquarters were and where Nazi power was based – and of course Hitler’s bunker as well. At some point, Hitler realised the war was definitively lost and the Soviets would reach him within a matter of days. He took the decision to take his own life, which we know from eyewitness accounts he did by shooting himself, in his study on the now notorious sofa. It’s from this sofa that the piece of fabric was taken with the blood sample. Who took the sample from the sofa? And why? TK: So this was Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, who was a public information officer for Eisenhower during the war. The Red Army was in charge and apparently very few people were allowed to go into the bunker, but he was one of them. This was where Hitler had killed himself – so they got into the bunker and essentially started taking souvenirs. Rosengren cut a sample out of the sofa and took a swatch away – which, rather crucially, had blood on it from where Hitler killed himself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/15-COL.-ROSWELL-P.-ROSENGREN-Credit-Erik-Rosengren--cdabc52.jpeg" width="4688" height="5800" alt="Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, who entered the Führerbunker after Hitler’s death, and cut out the sofa sample that would go on to be used to test his DNA (Image by Erik Rosengren)" title="Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, who entered the Führerbunker after Hitler’s death, and cut out the sofa sample that would go on to be used to test his DNA (Image by Erik Rosengren)" /> Did he have any idea that it was likely to be Hitler’s blood? TK: You would have to ask his family, but my understanding is that yes [he did]. The swatch was then brought back to the US and kept in the family for several decades. It was then passed down to his son, whom I had the pleasure of talking to, and who knew the entire story about how it had been brought into the family. Then, [in 2014] it was sold to the Gettysburg Museum of History. It was the museum that had been offering it for DNA analysis. Why has all this happened now given that that sample was in this museum all this time? TK: I think part of it [is a result of] genetic technology and what’s become available over the past 10–20 years. We are now able to do more and more in terms of sequencing. The field of ancient and historical DNA has really taken off, and we now have the ability to do this sort of work, which is why everything’s come together to make this happen. Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp” There were multiple objections from European institutions because they were uncomfortable with testing Hitler’s DNA. Did that cause you any concerns? TK: Certain labs would have a think about it. They might go to their boards and they would say, “No, we don’t feel comfortable with doing this.” I’m Canadian and I have a lot of colleagues in the US, and I think for us the shadow of Hitler doesn’t feel as close as it must do to people here. That’s to do with geographical distance. In the end, the two labs that did the sequencing – because you want the sequencing done in two separate labs to make sure you’re getting the same results in both labs – are both in the US, where the sample is. AJK: I wasn’t entirely surprised when I was told that a number of European labs had decided not to get involved. I’m based in Germany, and there is a lot of awareness of the long shadow that Hitler still casts here, even 80 years after his death. There’s a great reluctance to get involved with anything that could be used for sensationalist purposes or where somebody could distort the facts. TK: One of the things that’s been really difficult about this project is trying to work to get an academic paper and the documentary to go out at the same time. It’s something over which I have no control, but there is an academic paper that I’m hoping will be able to come out in the next few weeks. That was one of the other things that I said when I first got involved: that there had to be an academic paper as well, it couldn’t just be a documentary. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/12-Taking-of-Sample-Credit-Blink-Films--08cb285.jpg" width="1915" height="815" alt="A pair of hands in purple gloves hold two small tools and work on a ripped cloth sample on a table" title="The sofa sample is tested in a lab. Alex J Kay and Turi King were both keen that this investigation was rigorous and not sensationalist. “There had to be an academic paper as well, it couldn’t just be a documentary”, says Turi (Image by Blink Films)" /> How did you determine whether the sample that was taken stood up to scrutiny? TK: This is where I always say it’s incredibly important that you don’t just use genetic data on its own, you link it with the historical information. My first question was, “What’s the provenance of this sample?” And actually, if you have a look at the photos of the sofa from the time period and then you look at the swatch, there’s a very distinctive pattern and those match. So that’s another tick we could put into the box. The other thing we could then do is genetic analysis. But there were no very close relatives that you could use for doing DNA testing and comparing against, such as you would do in a forensic case – a parent or a sibling or a child. They don’t exist because Hitler didn’t have any children. There are no close relatives who are alive today. This is where I got interested in a piece of DNA known as the Y chromosome, a segment of DNA that’s just passed down through the male line. So if there’s a male-line relative of Hitler, then you can look at the Y chromosome that’s coming back from the DNA, from the blood, and see if that matches a male-line relative. There was a study that had been done by Jean-Paul Mulders and Marc Vermeeren. They had tracked down quite distant members of the Hitler family, male-line members, including one who had given a DNA sample. The data from that was made available. We could then do an analysis of the Y chromosome and there was a perfect match between them. The next thing you have to ask as a geneticist is, “Okay, but how common is this Y chromosome type?” And, actually, it’s incredibly rare, not found in the Y chromosome forensic database. Even then, because we were being careful as we went, we wanted to know how common it is in Europe, let alone worldwide. There were no hits, so we could therefore say: “Yes, it’s a rare Y chromosome type.” And then we had to ask: “What is the likelihood that a close male-line relative of Hitler would have managed to get himself into the bunker, over to that sofa and bleed on it?” This is where Alex is great because I can turn to him and ask: “So what do we know about close male line relatives?” Once we can rule out all of these possibilities, it becomes vanishingly unlikely that this is not Hitler’s DNA. AJK: Hitler had very few close male-line relatives. He had no surviving brothers, for example, and lost four of his five siblings during his childhood. The only other surviving child was his sister, Paula. He did have a half-brother from his father’s previous marriage. However, I was able to determine that his half-brother at the end of the war was in Hamburg, not Berlin, so that ruled him out. This half-brother had two sons. One of those sons, however, had been killed in combat during the Second World War. So he was no longer alive in 1945, and the other son had actually emigrated and wasn’t even in the country. So we were able to rule out in this way that any other close male relative of Hitler’s could have been anywhere near the bunker in April 1945. Read more | “We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers Once you had started to become convinced that this might actually be Hitler’s DNA, what did that feel like? TK: That was a bit of a moment because you can go: “Okay, great, we can be confident that we’ve got Hitler’s DNA.” The next stage then is to do the whole genome sequencing. But the thing about that was we genuinely had no idea what we would find. As a geneticist, you think: “Well, possibly he has a very boring genome where he has a slight genetic predisposition towards something like coronary heart disease.” We didn’t know at all what we were going to find. Just before we get into what you found, what happened to Hitler’s body? AJK: Hitler’s body was burnt. He gave very explicit instructions to some of his members of staff who were still in the bunker for his body to be doused in petrol and burnt so that no remains were left. Hitler was very concerned that he would fall into the hands of the Soviets, dead or alive. Stories had been told to him about Mussolini’s death. Mussolini had been killed by Italian partisans and his corpse had then been strung up in a city square and abused by people – spat on and hit. Hitler wanted to avoid this demeaning fate, so he gave his members of staff in the bunker explicit instructions to get rid of his body, to destroy it completely. This didn’t happen: there were attempts made and the body was partially burnt, but not completely. Some bones did survive and the Soviets had access to those, but there was no body to speak of. How big a factor is the degradation that happens to a sample such as this over time, and does it affect the validity of the results in any way? TK: That’s a good question. One of the things I was actually looking [into] as part of the authentication processes was whether the DNA looks like it’s degraded. If it was a hoax, first of all, you wouldn’t get a DNA match but, secondly, the DNA would look quite different. While we’re alive we actually have really lovely long strands of DNA. And we do have things that come along and ‘nick’ it, but our body has mechanisms for fixing those DNA strands back together again. After death, that doesn’t happen. The DNA ends up in shorter and shorter strands, until there’s nothing left to sequence and the DNA is quite damaged. People often have this idea that there is a time factor in terms of how long it would be that we are able to obtain DNA. It’s actually time, but also the conditions under which the sample has been kept. Cold and dry is best for preserving DNA, which is why you can have some samples that are only a few years old but, if they’ve been kept in warm and damp conditions, you can’t get DNA out of them. But with other samples, people have managed to get nearly 2 million-year-old DNA out of permafrost. It was one of those things that, until we started the project and started having a look, we didn’t know quite whether or not the sample would be usable. The DNA is degraded, as would be expected, but we’ve got enough sequencing from two separate labs to get enough ‘coverage’ of the genome so that we can have a look at it. There are still gaps, but there’s enough that we can still do the analysis that we’ve been doing. A key thing is that, when we started this project, it was very important to say – and still to say – that nothing that we could ever find in Hitler’s DNA would excuse what he did. If I can get that message across, I think that’s super-important because no matter what we found, it doesn’t excuse what Hitler did in his lifetime. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-2696366-e250414.jpg" width="2766" height="3910" alt="Corporal Adolf Hitler (right) in a military hospital during WW1. “We’ve got to keep in mind that genetics is only one small piece of the puzzle,” says Alex J Kay. “Hitler was very much a product of his times”" title="Corporal Adolf Hitler (right) in a military hospital during WW1. “We’ve got to keep in mind that genetics is only one small piece of the puzzle,” says Alex J Kay. “Hitler was very much a product of his times”" /> AJK: We’ve got to keep in mind that genetics, as Turi has just said, is only one small piece of the puzzle. Hitler was very much a product of his times, of the First World War and postwar revolution in Germany. He was a product of a particular political radicalisation that took place in Germany in the 1920s. He was also the product of a traumatic childhood, losing four of his five siblings and both his parents by the age of 19. We have to keep in mind all of these factors when trying to understand the man Hitler became, and how it was possible for him to do what he did – and also in assessing how important these genetic findings are in the bigger picture. We’ve also got to emphasise that Hitler was a central figure in what then happened in the Second World War, and in the Holocaust, but he was only one man. There were hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian perpetrators [and other collaborators] who committed the most horrific crimes. There were many millions of people who followed Hitler and profited from the Nazi regime. We can’t explain what happened just by looking at Hitler and certainly not just by looking at Hitler’s genes. Read more | The final mystery of Richard III: how 21st-century science cracked a 500-year-old cold case One of the claims the programme specifically debunks is the idea that Hitler might have had Jewish heritage. How did you go into looking into this and how specifically did you debunk it? TK: I’m going to let Alex talk about the history here, but I can give you the genetics. So essentially my understanding is that there were queries about who Hitler’s paternal grandfather was. The story is that Hitler’s paternal grandfather wasn’t actually from the Hitler family and might have been Jewish because Hitler’s paternal grandmother was working in the house of a Jewish family at the time. The fact that we have a Y chromosome match between the blood and a distant male-line member of the Hitler family shows that Hitler’s grandfather was indeed from the Hitler family. AJK: Rumours that Hitler might have had some Jewish ancestry have been around for the best part of a century. They were already circulating in the 1920s. Some people believed that his paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, who had worked for a period of time in a Jewish household, had become pregnant as a result of that. The foreign press got hold of these rumours and made a lot out of them. It’s very important that we’ve been able to debunk that, because this has been something that both scholars and the general public alike have been very interested in – understandably, because of Hitler’s rabid antisemitism and his crucial role in the extermination of 6 million European Jews. There’s no truth in the rumours. Hitler did not have Jewish ancestry. Work also began on sequencing the entire genome of Hitler’s DNA. Before we talk about the potential this has for revealing new information about Hitler’s health, where do we need to be cautious when we’re talking about this kind of research? TK: I think a genetics lesson here is important because, when you’re looking for a genetic predisposition towards particular health conditions, there are two types of health condition that you can look at. There are particular health conditions where we know it goes back to a single gene, so if something is wrong with a particular gene, you will develop this condition. And then there are other conditions where we know it’s both polygenic, meaning many genes, and also multifactorial. So genetics is just a component of the condition, but there are all kinds of other factors that are involved. You could be genetically predisposed towards heart disease, for example. If you are being healthy, eating well and exercising, you’re less likely to go on to develop this than if you are sedentary, and you’re sitting on the sofa and you’re eating doughnuts all day. With things like smoking, chemical factors come into it, too, and we know that smoking makes you more likely to develop lung cancer, for example. So when we were looking at these two particular types of conditions, what we were doing with Hitler’s DNA was, firstly, running it through standard NHS ‘pipelines’. But also, because there have been so many medical biographers over the past [few] years and also during his lifetime who had suggested particular conditions, we did send the DNA to experts in particular fields to ask “Is there anything here that stands out to you?” This is where colleagues at the Pasteur Institute found there’s a deletion [a type of mutation where a part of a chromosome or a segment of DNA is lost] in a gene known as PROK 2, which is strongly associated with Kallmann syndrome, which has implications for testosterone levels and the development of sexual organs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/09-DNA-structure-Credit-Blink-Films-ca2cd88.jpg" width="1860" height="818" alt="The structure of a DNA strand. Expert testing shows that Hitler had a PROK 2 deletion, strongly associated with Kallmann syndrome (Image by Blink Films)" title="The structure of a DNA strand. Expert testing shows that Hitler had a PROK 2 deletion, strongly associated with Kallmann syndrome (Image by Blink Films)" /> We also found that Hitler was in the top 1 per cent for polygenic scores for schizophrenia, bipolar and autism. It’s probably a good idea that I give a quick explanation about how polygenic scores work. So this is where geneticists say: “Right, we’ve got all of these people over here with this particular condition. What are the genetic variants that they seem to have in common with one another that these people over here without the condition don’t seem to have, or have at much lower frequencies?” What you can then do is take somebody’s DNA and ask: “Well, where do they sit on this particular distribution?” This was work done by the IPSYCH team in Denmark. And this is where Hitler came in as being in the top 1 per cent for these three particular conditions – and that is incredibly rare. This is one of the areas in which the documentary enters into territory where we need to be careful about what we’re talking about. Did either of you have concerns about making connections between Hitler and specific conditions, however delicately phrased and couched? TK: That’s really important. In the documentary, what we do is we put all of the caveats in: we do talk about how this is not diagnostic just because he’s getting these scores. It is talking about a genetic predisposition, and you can’t run a straight line from this particular polygenic score to him being diagnosed with this particular condition. The other thing that’s very important to say is that it’s incredibly rare for people with these conditions to go on to commit violent acts, let alone genocide. They’re more likely to be on the receiving end of violence. And as Alex was saying, Hitler was not active on his own. There were hundreds of thousands of people who were helping him. They’re not all going to have the same genetic makeup as one another. These caveats are really important to put out there. In the documentary, we’re clear we cannot say that he had any of these particular conditions, but there is a genetic predisposition towards them. AJK: As a historian, I would say we have to approach this research like we would approach any other historical source, namely with care. We have to double-check it. We have to compare it against other sources of information, other evidence that we have, other things that we know. That would be the first step in any approach in dealing with this. And in this case, as Turi has already wonderfully explained, this is an indication of predisposition. We do not know whether Hitler had any of these conditions. And therefore for me, the finding, while fascinating, is less important than the findings on potential Jewish ancestry – because we now know something definite, whereas with the polygenic scores the findings are merely an indication. I do think it’s striking, as Turi has said, that Hitler had this top 1 per cent predisposition in all three of these categories, but we’re not saying, “Oh, look, Hitler might have had one of these conditions” – it’s actually that he’s in the top 1 per cent for all three. Potentially, this kind of explosive mix makes it quite a quite remarkable finding, but it’s not proof of anything yet because it’s just an indication. I would also say that we’re talking a lot about what responsibilities the makers of the programme have and the people involved in it. Both Turi and I, and everybody else involved in the programme, take these responsibilities very seriously. I also think, by the same token, that anybody watching this documentary and then commenting on it, particularly journalists reporting on it, equally has a responsibility to report on it in a serious way and to place it in context – not to emphasise one particular aspect to the exclusion of everything else, not to remove all the caveats that we have put in. That responsibility works both ways. During the media frenzy of the past few days, and when some journalists have emphasised certain findings of the programme or certain indications in the programme to the exclusion of others, or when people have talked about the risk of stigmatisation, I have asked myself: “Would some people have preferred us not to reveal certain findings, just to reveal some findings but hold back other findings?” Surely, if we’d done that and it had come out at some point in the future, that would’ve been a good reason to reproach us? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/14-Hitler-Credit-BAYERISCHE-STAATSBIBLIOTHEK-8fabb60.jpg" width="3998" height="2641" alt="Hitler, dressed in a long overcoat and a cap, looks out over the sea" title="The DNA testing revealed that “there is a genetic predisposition towards” Hitler having schizophrenia, bipolar and autism, but there can be no direct diagnoses from these findings (Image by BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK)" /> TK: Just to echo what Alex has said, it’s been really interesting to see how some of the journalism has gone. You know, they haven’t bothered to take on board everything that Alex and I talk about, about how it’s so important that you take this in the context of what we know about DNA and in the context of the historical setting for all of this. And also to echo that our role is to lay out what we have found, and to put in all of the caveats about what we can and cannot say. But again, as Alex was saying, if we held back information, that would be seen as kind of gatekeeping and elitist, and I would not feel comfortable with that. I think it would be inappropriate to withhold information. Among the research findings is the fact that Hitler’s DNA bears evidence of a genetic mutation that in some cases can result in abnormalities, including a micro-penis. Lots of the more salacious reporting has focused on this. Given that, do you have any regrets about its inclusion and the fact it’s overshadowed the rest of the research? TK: In the documentary and in the academic paper, we talk about how the DNA cannot tell us what Hitler’s genitalia looked like. All we can do is report that [a micropenis] is known to be strongly associated with Kallmann syndrome. He will have had some form of Kallmann syndrome. These are various phenotypes, or ways in which the condition manifests itself in somebody. All we can do, again, is put the caveats in. And this is where Alex’s work is really important, because there are historical documents around what we already know about Hitler’s genitalia. It’s when you put the genetics and the history together that you get a better understanding of all this. Read more | Simon Schama on British history if Hitler had beaten Churchill: "The Holocaust would have happened here" AJK: It was slightly predictable, the way that some newspapers and some media outlets have reported on this. For me, it’s not particularly interesting what Hitler’s genitalia looked like. What is interesting is the discovery that he had Kallmann syndrome, which is a genetic disorder. It actually explains a lot about Hitler’s private life – or, more accurately, his lack of a private life, because Kallmann is associated with low testosterone levels, low sex drive, and it impacts on the development of the reproductive features and the reproductive functions. It tells us a lot about how Hitler [might have] felt about intimate relationships, how he felt about himself, his level of self-consciousness, and thereby goes some way to explaining why he devoted himself completely to politics, to the exclusion of any kind of private life or relationships. Hitler is obviously not the only political figure to have foregone intimate relationships or sexual relationships or romantic relationships. But if we compare him to all the other leading Nazi figures, he is the outlier. All the other senior Nazis had wives, had children, often had extramarital affairs. So Hitler is unique in that respect and historians have puzzled over why this was for a long time. And I think this finding of Kallmann syndrome is really very significant and striking because it adds that final piece of the puzzle in explaining why Hitler basically didn’t have a private life. So as a historian, you do think there are real findings here that help explain Hitler’s personality and even his actions? AJK: Absolutely. Now they don’t explain all of his actions by any stretch. We talked earlier about environmental and social factors, the context of the times in which Hitler lived and his childhood experiences. All of those factors are equally, if not more, important than any genetic findings. However, these genetic findings contribute to our understanding of Hitler and why he behaved in certain ways. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-514704098-6f0fed0.jpg" width="3164" height="2641" alt="A black and white photo of a group of men in Nazi uniform walking down a set of steps. In the centre of the image is a young woman in a long black coat with 8 buttons down the front" title="Adolf Hitler pictured with Eva Braun, whom he met in 1929. Eyewitness testimony suggests the couple’s relationship was platonic, says Alex J Kay (Image by Getty Images)" /> Hitler did have a relationship with Eva Braun. Do the findings shed any new light on that particular relationship? AJK: Not specifically about that relationship as such, but it tallies with what we know about that relationship. Everything we know suggests that Hitler and Eva Braun were companions as much as anything else. We have numerous eyewitness statements from people who were close to them, from people who spent a lot of time with them. Hitler’s caretaker of eight years at the Berghof, his mountain retreat, Herbert Döhring, said there was never any evidence that Hitler and Eva Braun had sex. Christa Schroeder was one of Hitler’s secretaries for 12 years. She said exactly the same. Heinrich Hoffmann, who was the photographer who introduced Hitler and Eva Braun in the first place, said their relationship was always platonic. We also know they didn’t share a bedroom, either at the Berghof, in Hitler’s bunker in the final weeks of the war, or in Hitler’s suite of rooms at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. They always had separate rooms, so everything points to this having been a platonic relationship and not a sexual relationship. One of the experts featured in the documentary is Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who’s director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. He says: “The experience of neglect and abuse” – which you have talked about, Alex, in Hitler’s childhood – “is much more relevant to understanding why someone grows up with hate and anger rather than the genetics – the two interplay.” I wondered if either of you had anything you’d like to add to that? TK: As a geneticist, I’m the first person to say that genetics is just a part of the puzzle of who somebody is. This is where, again, it’s marrying genetics up with the history when we talk about what appears to be a genetic predisposition. We’ve got to set that really in the context of who was this individual? How did he grow up? What was the time that he was growing up in? The genetics is only going to give you a very small part of who somebody is and goes on to become. AJK: Simon Baron-Cohen is obviously in a much better position to comment on the relative importance or impact of genetics versus upbringing or childhood. However, I would be inclined overall to agree with him that environmental and social factors, particularly neglect and abuse during childhood, have a huge impact on the adult that a person becomes. And therefore, as I said earlier, these are at least as important as genetic factors – and I would be inclined to say more important. As we’ve been stressing, the genetics is only a part of the jigsaw puzzle, and doesn’t explain and cannot explain everything. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/17-Hitler-as-a-Child-Credit-NARA-c1e5ebb.jpg" width="1896" height="816" alt="A black and white photo of a young boy wearing a dark jacket and light shirt. He is looking seriously at the camera" title="Hitler as a child. It’s likely that abuse suffered by Hitler during his childhood greatly contributed to his character later in life (Image by NARA)" /> We are talking in the middle of a week where you’ve been at the centre of a media storm. Has the backlash in some quarters been along the lines of what you expected or has anything here come as a surprise? TK: I don’t want to speak for Alex, but we knew it was going to be controversial. For me, the most important thing to do is to say: “This is what the DNA can say, this is what the DNA cannot say.” We knew that some parts of the media were not going to listen to that, but all we can do as scientists is just keep the guardrails in about what we can and cannot say from somebody’s DNA. Again, it’s also placing all of this within the historical context. AJK: I think we did anticipate this would be big. This is a major project. It’s a world-first analysis of Hitler’s DNA, right? We all knew it would be controversial because of who this is. That’s perfectly understandable. I think we all also expected some dissenting voices. I personally have been a little surprised at just how huge it’s been and how global the response has been in the media. I wasn’t entirely expecting this magnitude of response. TK: I think it goes back to what Alex was saying about a responsibility in the media to report accurately. And while we knew that some people were not going to do this, in some ways the magnitude of how it’s been portrayed was something that I don’t think any of us were quite expecting. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/22-Hitler-General-Credit-BUNDESARCHIV-f932c12.jpg" width="1736" height="820" alt="A close up photograph of Hitler, with a short black moustache and a very serious expression on his face" title="According to Turi King, DNA testing like this provides “another layer of information” for historians to use to understand Hitler further (Image by BUNDESARCHIV)" /> What do you hope is the next stage for our understanding about Hitler and the period of history in which he was part? TK: From a geneticist’s point of view, we have done this analysis. I keep coming back to the guardrails about what DNA can and cannot say, and context. It’s another layer of information that historians such as Alex can draw on in terms of how they understand Hitler. AJK: I’m still trying to digest the reactions to this step in our attempts to understand Hitler. I think I say somewhere in the documentary that this will change the way we think about Hitler in the future and that we’ll be talking about it for a long time. I stand by that. I do think that it has added very significant new information and added a new layer of understanding. I don’t know if this is realistic, but I would actually hope that maybe in the future we can treat Hitler a little bit less like a mythical figure or a monster, although he was certainly guilty of monstrous acts, and instead try to understand how a human being can get to the point where they do this kind of thing. I’ve always been a little bit concerned when people dismiss Hitler and the Nazis as monsters, because if we dismiss somebody as a monster then we’re not obliged to explain them or understand how they could commit the acts they committed. But the scary fact of the matter is that Hitler was a human being and all of those hundreds of thousands of Nazi perpetrators who did monstrous, horrific things were human beings. So sadly, we need to understand how this was possible. Turi King is the lead geneticist on the research into Hitler’s DNA. Alex J Kay is a historian specialising in Nazi Germany. Their groundbreaking work is covered in the two-part Channel 4 and Blink Films documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator
The place where TIME began | A history of GMT
On location at Royal Observatory, Greenwich in southeast London, HistoryExtra's Elinor Evans unpacks how astronomers, mathematicians, and global powers collaborated to create Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
Long before smartphones and digital clocks, time was a local affair, creating chaos, confusion and even danger. On location at Royal Observatory, Greenwich in southeast London, HistoryExtra's Elinor Evans unpacks how astronomers, mathematicians, and global powers collaborated to create Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Joined by Louise Devoy, Senior Curator of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, we investigate the milestone innovations in this story, including the story of the Observatory Time Ball, the Shepherd Motor Clock, and George Biddell Airy's meridian Prime Meridian. From solving longitude at sea to defining timezones for the entire planet, this is the story of how we learned to master time. View Green Video on the source website Find out more about the history of time, space and navigation and plan a visit to the Royal Observatory
The first king of the English can teach us valuable lessons about how to navigate a world revolutionised by AI, says Professor David Woodman
Are we losing the need to learn? That’s one of the things that people are worrying about with the advent of AI. Feels like a fair concern to me. Rather than learning something yourself, you can ask AI to tell you the answer, translate something for you, tell you how to fix something, even transcribe a medieval manuscript, if that’s your bag. It’s all a bit too easy, isn’t it, and humans, like water, tend to seek out the easiest route, the path of least resistance. So that’s potentially a pretty big problem. If we don’t need to learn, will we bother to learn, and if we don’t bother to learn, are our minds going to atrophy? Academics talk about ‘digital dementia’, and researchers are looking at whether AI is going to cause a general downturn in our cognitive abilities. Unless something changes, and with AI’s rapid development, chances are that we won’t actually need to learn in the future, or at least not in the same way that we do today. So maybe we need to learn to love learning, if we’re going to avoid falling victim to brain rot. And that, perhaps surprisingly, is where Æthelstan, first king of England, comes into the mix. Creator of the kingdom Æthelstan, to remind you, was the grandson of King Alfred the Great, son of King Edward the Elder. Crowned in 925 in Kingston-upon-Thames (an event marked to this day by a tooth-shaped stone ringed by Victorian railings on the side of the road), Æthelstan went on to create the kingdom of England as we recognise it today. Famously he won a substantial victory over an alliance of his adversaries at the battle of Brunanburh in the year 937. Read more | King Æthelstan: England's colossus Professor David Woodman, from Cambridge University, is Æthelstan’s most recent biographer, and he is a keen observer of the apparently contradictory sides of the character of the man: “One of the great paradoxes of early medieval history is that Æthelstan absolutely was a great military figure. He was somebody who secured his position by military victories. He had to put down various coalitions that rose against him. But simultaneously he was somebody who had a very keen sense of the importance of learning and sponsoring reading.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/2WE1KADbattle-218bf1c.jpg" width="1648" height="1214" alt="A black and white painting showing a large battle scene, with hundreds of soldiers fighting on foot and horseback. In the background, there are cliffs and three ships on the sea" title="A 20th-century depiction of the great battle of Brunanburh in 937, which was a turning point in the creation of English national identity (Image by Alamy)" /> Æthelstan encouraged scholars to come to his court, and he also facilitated the exchange of texts and learning between these visitors. He probably took inspiration from his grandfather in this, because Alfred sponsored a rejuvenation of learning, in the 880s when he was less occupied by Viking raids. Following Alfred’s lead, Æthelstan ran with this love of learning. He drove for even mundane documents to be dressed up in learned language, as an ostentatious demonstration of the scholarly nature of his court. The diplomas that were issued in his name were works of literary scholarship, which demanded the attention of the reader. “In order to understand the brilliance of these diplomas, you have to do a very close reading of them today, where you uncover the literary allusions. We have allusions to seventh-century works by Aldhelm of Malmesbury, for example, embedded in these works,” says David. “Now, you can imagine that for your average nobleman sitting at a meeting of the royal assembly of Æthelstan, these allusions probably would have been lost on that person. They wouldn’t have been able to understand them. And in fact, maybe they thought, oh no, not another long turgid Latin diploma of the royal scribe being trotted out. And in a way that’s the point. I think they were designed to impress. They were designed to show the advances that were taking place.” So, according to David, we need to see Æthelstan as a real lover of learning, and an advocate of a learned culture among his courtiers. That’s a powerful statement by a powerful figure. He even seems to have had an allegorical board game, the Gospel Dice, which might have allowed players to study the Gospels in an innovative way. In modern terms, we might call that a gamified learning experience. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/2B8GMG2-1a48607.jpg" width="1155" height="1732" alt="A page of text, showing a game. Across the top of the page, there is writing in several small red boxes in columns, followed by some paragraphs of text. At the bottom, there is a large red grid, with several black squares on it, in a circular shape" title="The Gospel Dice was an allegorical board game that is thought to be have been played by King Æthelstan (Image by Alamy)" /> Making the effort What can we take from this? Well, there was a lot going on in Æthelstan’s reign, not least the project to create a new polity and fend off the Viking threat. So if he could maintain an interest in learning under that sort of pressure, maybe there’s a lesson for us as we wrestle with how to deal with the threat, or opportunity, of AI. “In this age that we’re living in, we are witnessing a revolution in terms of the way that people access information. Large language models, things like ChatGPT, are enabling instant access to lots and lots of details: very useful tools are at our fingertips. But I do think we lose something in that shorthand access to detail. It’s only by engagement, close reading of a scholarly article or a primary text that you really get a sense of that text, you really understand the nuance of it,” notes David. If we rely on summaries created by artificial intelligence, if we forego the close reading, then we lose the ability to do that work for ourselves. That, says David, is where we can take a leaf out of Æthelstan’s book: “For me, a big lesson from the reign of Æthelstan is that emphasis on engagement of learning, on close reading.” Read more | Be wary of technology’s big promises, but roll with the changes The beauty of the printed page We’re talking about the concentrated hard yards of Æthelstan Intelligence over the easy option of Artificial Intelligence. But I suppose the question is whether we can be convinced to get our heads down and really engage with the written word, when we know that AI will be able to make things quicker and less onerous for us. Maybe, that’s where the beauty of the printed page comes into play, and that takes us back to Æthelstan and the Anglo-Saxons once more. If you’ve ever looked at a 10th-century illuminated manuscript, you’ll know what fantastic works of art they can be, and how much labour must have been invested in them. It’s hard not to want to study them up close – they demand detailed attention, precisely because so much attention was lavished upon them. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/2PK8DWK-7720151.jpg" width="3814" height="3814" alt="A manuscript illustration showing a king wearing green and orange, holding a sceptre. He is sitting in the middle of a large blue circle" title="Can paying attention to illuminated manuscripts, like this one depicting King Æthelstan, help rekindle our love for physical print products? (Image by Alamy)" /> Though most of these manuscripts are digitised and available for virtual study, David’s first choice is to head to the library, turn the vellum pages, and get to grips with the physical object. Given the chance, I’d absolutely do that too. We’re not all academics with the opportunity to research these amazing Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscripts in the original, but perhaps we should be encouraged by the continuing enduring power of print in wider culture. People are still making and buying handsomely produced books and magazines (like BBC History Magazine, for example), when we could just as easily be looking at the digital versions. Obviously there’s a balance, and we would be foolish not to make use of the benefits that AI is bringing, both to scholarly research and to life generally. But we should be mindful of letting too much learning potential slip away, for the sake of a quick answer or easy solution. “We need to maintain that close reading, that close understanding. But we also need to use tools like ChatGPT to advance our knowledge in various ways. You can get so much more done with these large language models, the way in which they can access data and trawl through it much faster than us. That’s a huge advantage. So I think if they’re used in complementary terms, that’s very important. But we need not to forget the core skills that we have in the first place.” According to David Woodman, Æthelstan would have approved of this message – he reckons the Anglo-Saxon lover of learning would have been a pragmatist when it came to the potential of AI. And that’s the Life Lesson from History we should take from this formative English monarch – let’s embrace learning for the sake of learning, and not let AI disempower our mental faculties. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.