1 P.T. Barnum’s Clever Trick
19th-century American showman P.T. Barnum noticed that people lingered too long at his exhibits, so he posted signs that read, “This Way to the Egress.” Unaware that “Egress” meant “Exit,” visitors followed the signs, expecting another fascinating exhibit, but ended up outside instead.
2. In 2012, a California high school student was instructed to urinate in a bucket in a supply room closet after a teacher mistakenly believed bathroom breaks were prohibited. In 2017, a court ordered the school district to compensate the student $1.25 million.
3. The Notre Dame fire of 2019 worsened when a guard was sent to investigate the alarm but was mistakenly directed to the wrong location, where he found no fire. The alarm system also failed to automatically notify the fire brigade.
4. Actor Peter Dante, known for his roles in Adam Sandler films, has not appeared in one since 2013. The incident that led to this involved Dante calling a hotel worker the N-word for not recognizing him.
5. In 2018, Japan welcomed its first female fighter pilot, inspired as a child by “Top Gun.” However, she could not pursue this career until 2015, when the Japan Self-Defense Forces started accepting female candidates for combat roles.
6 Hippos Polluting African Rivers
Hippos can pollute rivers by defecating so much that their feces deplete the water’s oxygen levels, killing fish through hypoxia. In the Mara River in Africa, around 4,000 hippos release more than 900 tons of dung each day, which also leaves harmful chemicals like ammonium and sulfide in the water.
7. Since its invention in 1959, the MOSFET transistor has become the most produced artificial object in history, with over 13 sextillion units manufactured.
8. A senior citizen named Emerich Juettner, also known as “Mister 880” within the Secret Service due to his case file number, eluded capture for ten years from 1938 to 1948. He used poorly made counterfeit $1 bills, including one that misspelled “Washington,” to support himself. He used the fake bills sparingly, only one at a time, and never at the same location twice. Eventually, authorities caught him and sentenced him to 4 months in prison.
9. Medieval peasants typically received anywhere from eight weeks to half a year off from work. At the time, the Church enforced frequent mandatory holidays to prevent the working population from revolting.
10. When Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died, his widow had his body shipped from New York to Wales. During the voyage, she discovered that the sailors were unknowingly using his coffin as a card table. She chose not to object, believing her husband would have appreciated the gesture.
11 Adopted Girls for Marriage
In pre-modern China, poor families often adopted girls to ensure their sons would have a future bride, while other poor families gave away their unwanted daughters.
12. Albert Einstein held a patent for a refrigerator, which he invented after learning that a faulty fridge seal had caused the death of a family in Berlin. However, the invention became obsolete with the development of CFC refrigerants a few years later.
13. American singer Selena Gomez named her kidney “Fred” after Fred Armisen, who created and starred in her favorite show, Portlandia. Gomez had received this kidney as a transplant from her friend, Francia Raisa, in 2017.
14. A metal shortage during World War II forced the Academy to make Oscar statuettes out of painted plaster for three years. After the war, the Academy invited recipients to exchange the plaster figures for gold-plated metal ones.
15. During breastfeeding, a baby’s saliva can flow back into the mother’s breast, triggering her body to adjust the milk’s immune components to meet the baby’s specific needs. This process is known as “retrograde milk flow.”
16 Dislodged Ear Crystals Disorder
Tiny ear crystals, when dislodged, can cause a condition known as Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV), which will cause severe dizziness and vertigo. However, a coordinated series of head movements known as Epley maneuvers can easily restore normal order and return the tiny ear crystals to their proper position.
17. Elephants in Kenya’s Kitum Cave venture into the darkness to mine salt by breaking off rocks, adapting to their mineral-deficient environment.
18. General Average was a 19th-century maritime law that required all stakeholders (cargo owners, shippers, etc.) to share losses if part of the ship or cargo was sacrificed to save the whole in an emergency.
19. Carbon black is the chemical material that’s added to tires not only to give them their black color but also to increase their durability. It also conducts heat away from the tire’s tread and belts, extending the lifespan of the wheels.
20. The “Tiffany Problem” refers to situations where a historical or realistic fact is considered unrealistic due to modern associations. For instance, despite its medieval origins, people often perceive the name “Tiffany” as modern.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 First Nuclear Reactor Shutdown
In 1942, a man standing nearby holding an axe tied a control rod to a rope, creating the first Scram button on a nuclear reactor. Cutting the rope would cause the rod to fall into the reactor core by gravity, thereby shutting down the reactor.
22. According to legend, Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman who lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, killed more than 600 young girls in order to drink their blood and bathe in it in the belief that it would prolong her youth. She was arrested in 1610, and though never tried, she was confined to a room in her castle until her death in 1614.
23. Lise Meitner, the co-discoverer of nuclear fission, was nominated 48 times for the Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry but never won.
24. During the Falklands War in 1982, the British mistakenly killed three whales, believing them to be enemy submarines.
25. In April 1980, a family accused Robert Hill, a Disneyland actor portraying Winnie the Pooh, of striking their child in 1974, resulting in bruising and headaches. Hill testified in costume, only able to communicate through gestures like head nods and tummy swings, in accordance with Disney’s strict rules for character actors.
RE: Fact #9 (Medieval Peasants’ Extended Holidays) – This is pretty interesting if you’re curious about how much time medieval people actually spent working.
Basically, medieval peasants and craftsmen were their own bosses, so they weren’t forced to “go to work” like we are. They had more control over what they did and how much money they made. But unlike us, they spent a ton of time on things we don’t have to do anymore, or that we just take for granted.
Think about it: we work to make money to buy everything. In medieval times, farming was usually done in seasons, so it wasn’t a constant grind. But everything else – keeping their houses clean, getting food, that kind of stuff – took way more time and effort than farming did. So yeah, you could say medieval peasants were actually busier than us, even though they didn’t have regular jobs.
RE: Fact #26 (Drapetomania: A Racist Fabrication) – Olmsted, this famous landscape guy, wrote about his travels in the South. He noticed that white servants sometimes ran away, so he joked that maybe the disease they were talking about actually came from white Europeans and got brought to Africa by traders.
RE: Fact #7 (World’s Most Produced Object) – 13×10^21. This is ridiculous. If you produce 1bilion of transistors every second, you would need more than 400k years to make 13 sextilion.
RE: Fact #7 (World’s Most Produced Object) – Digital integrated circuits such as microprocessors and memory devices contain thousands to billions of integrated MOSFET transistors on each device, providing the basic switching functions required to implement logic gates and data storage. Now think. How many are used in today’s electronics? There are way more than a billion produced each year by multiple different companies.
RE: Fact #3 (Notre Dame Fire Confusion) – That poor guy! He was brand new, working his second shift because his replacement was late. And to make things worse, the fire alarm system was labeled all wonky. It was like trying to find a fire in a maze!
RE: Fact #6 (Hippos Polluting African Rivers) – A bigwig asked me for a fun fact yesterday. I totally blanked and went with something about star-nosed moles instead. Should’ve come up with something cooler!