Mayday, the radio distress call, was proposed in the early 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, who ran radio at Croydon Airport near London. Much of the traffic was to Paris, so he chose a word that sounded like the French m'aider, meaning help me. The Morse SOS signal was hard to distinguish by voice on the telephone, so a spoken word was needed. It was introduced for cross-Channel flights in February 1923, and a flying boat's crew used it successfully within the same year. In 1927, an international radio convention adopted it as the voice distress call worldwide.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.