When was the last time you walked to the corner stationery shop? Most of these shops double up as mobile recharge dispensers & photocopy stations.   As the world goes digital the physical photocopying business has lost some of its foothold to scanning. Well, 16 th September 1959 was a monumental day in the world of photocopying & this weekend’s GK nugget will shed some light on that.  16 th September 1959 was the day when the Xerox 914 , the first successful commercial plain paper copier (which revolutionized the document-copying industry) was introduced to the public in a demonstration at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, shown on live television. Chester Carlson , the inventor of photocopying, was a patent attorney who invented the technology since he found the task of making multiple copies of important papers by hand extremely tedious. He experimented with photoconductivity to develop a process called ‘ electrophotography ’ which he patent

Do you remember playing the board game ' Scotland Yard ' as you grew up? And the excitement of acting like the elusive criminal 'Mr. X' or the quick thinking policemen of London's Metropolitan Police service -Scotland Yard? Well, we might have moved on from the game, but this week its time for the London police force to move on to their new headquarters & that's what this week's GK Nugget will talk about. Let's start with why the London Police force is called Scotland Yard . The name derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police (Met) headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard . The Scotland Yard entrance became the public entrance to the police station, and over time the street and the Metropolitan Police became synonymous. One version of the story says that when the crowns of England and Scotland merged in 1603 , James VI of Scotland became James I of England . Seizi

The temperature in Mumbai has been erratic & I’ve been enjoying a few ice creams on the hot & humid days. The other day I popped into the nearby Baskin Robbins shop to try their Paan flavoured ice cream, which sent me down memory lane. Do you remember when the company 1 st entered India in 1993 & customers were allowed to sample ice cream flavours using their iconic pink spoons before choosing which one to buy? That was pure heaven for a kid.  Anyway, Baskin Robbins celebrates 71 years this month & so today’s GK Nugget is about one of the world’s largest chain of ice cream stores ( over 2,800 in the US & 5,800 around the world ). The company was formed by brothers-in-law Burton Baskin & Irvine Robbins merging their respective ice cream parlors, in Glendale, California, USA. Burton's Ice Cream Shop (opened in 1945) and Snowbird Ice Cream (opened in 1946) (owned by Irvine Robbins) merged in 1953 to form Baskin Robbins. The brothers-in-law

The Guinness World Records’ 2017 edition is being released on 8 th September (a day after the iPhone 7 goes on sale, no connection though). But they’ve already declared some of the record holders. 22 year old singing sensation Justin Beiber walks away with 8 titles in the record book, some of them being Most streamed track on Spotify in one week (The song “What Do You Mean?”), Most viewed music channel on YouTube (individual) , Most followers on twitter (male) (85 million and counting), etc. Also, in the week gone by, Majuli, Assam (in the Brahmaputra river) was recognized as the largest river island . It covers an area of around 880 km² (340 miles²). So this week’s GK Nugget will look at the Guinness World Records: First published in 1955 , the Guinness Book of Records was the brainchild of Sir Hugh Beaver , Managing Director of the Guinness Brewery , UK. (It was later renamed the Guinness Book of World Records and finally, the Guinness World Records).