Nearly forgotten amid the Union victories of 1863 was the Union attempt to bring the war back to where it started: Charleston, South Carolina. The siege of Charleston became the site of numerous engineering innovations that presaged warfare of the next 60 years, as the North tried to take the city and fort that symbolized the birth of secession.
Who doesn't want to start their day feeling minty fresh? That question goes back farther than you might imagine.
On November 26, 1914 the battleship HMS Bulwark was moored in the river Medway, part of a fleet assembled in anticipation of a possible raid against London by the Imperial German fleet when, without any warning, as one witness reported, “there was a flash, a cloud of smoke, and the ship vanished.”