Some facts answer questions you never thought to ask, while others make familiar history seem much stranger. This collection spans remarkable survival stories, accidental inventions, movie secrets, ancient discoveries, and unusual moments that prove curiosity never needs a practical purpose.
1 Bretz’s Flood Theory Earned Vindication
American geologist J Harlen Bretz endured decades of ridicule after arguing in 1923 that a catastrophic Ice Age flood had carved the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington. Researchers eventually identified glacial Lake Missoula as the flood’s source, while open-channel hydraulics research and NASA satellite images further vindicated his theory in the 1970s. In 1979, the Geological Society of America awarded the 96-year-old Bretz its highest honor, the Penrose Medal. He told his son, “All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over.”
2. During the filming of American Psycho, British actor Christian Bale spoke in an American accent at all times, even when the cameras stopped rolling. When he finally used his natural British accent at the wrap party, crew members assumed he was practicing for another film. They had believed Bale was American throughout the entire production.
3. Anne Frank had an older sister named Margot Frank, who also kept a diary while their family hid in Amsterdam’s Secret Annex. Anne mentioned Margot’s diary in her own writings, but no trace of it has ever been found. While Anne’s diaries survived and were published in 1947, Margot’s diary remains a lost work of Holocaust literature.
4. In 1935, American Orthodox rabbi Tobias Geffen became the only known person outside Coca-Cola allowed to examine its closely guarded formula so he could determine whether the drink was kosher. Geffen discovered that Coca-Cola contained glycerin made from non-kosher beef tallow, as well as a grain-derived sweetener that made it unsuitable for Passover. He convinced the company to adopt vegetable-based glycerin, while its chemists replaced the problematic sweetener with cane and beet sugar. Geffen then certified Coca-Cola as kosher for year-round consumption, including Passover.
5. Nepalese mountaineer Hillary Dawa Sherpa was presumed dead in May 2026 after he was stranded at an altitude of around 7,500 meters on Mount Everest without bottled oxygen. Thus he survived for six days without a proper food supply, chewing ice, drinking melted snow and eating pieces of chocolate found in his pocket. During his descent, he fell into a crevasse and remained trapped for 2.5 days until avalanche snow raised the floor enough for him to escape. While his family prepared for his funeral, Dawa found abandoned ropes and crawled toward Base Camp until a cleanup team spotted him near Crampon Point.
6 Humans Sleep Least Among Primates
Among every primate species studied so far, humans get the least sleep, averaging less than seven hours per night. A model based on human body size, brain size, and diet predicted that people should sleep about 9.5 hours, roughly as long as chimpanzees. Humans also spend a larger share of their sleep in REM, suggesting that our species evolved shorter but more efficient sleep.
7. Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler remained extraordinarily prolific even after becoming almost completely blind, producing nearly half his life’s work after returning to St. Petersburg in 1766. When he died in 1783, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences inherited a massive backlog of his unpublished papers. The academy continued publishing them for nearly 50 years, extending Euler’s output almost half a century beyond his death.
8. A 2015 peer-reviewed psychology study asked 515 adults to compare their attachment to a sibling with their attachment to a romantic partner. Identical twins ranked their co-twin significantly above their partner, with average hierarchy positions of 1.42 and 2.10, respectively. Fraternal twins ranked their co-twin and partner about equally, while non-twin siblings clearly placed their romantic partner first.
9. In 1906, a broke and unemployed German shoemaker named Wilhelm Voigt put on a secondhand Prussian captain’s uniform that he had assembled from several clothing dealers. Claiming to act under the Kaiser’s orders, he commandeered ten real soldiers returning from guard duty in Berlin and took them by train to Köpenick. Voigt occupied the town hall, arrested Mayor Georg Langerhans and the city treasurer, and escaped with the municipal cash box containing about 3,557 marks. Police caught him ten days later, but he became a folk hero and received a pardon from Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1908.
10. Rwanda has Umuganda, a mandatory nationwide community service period from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. on the last Saturday of every month. All citizens between the ages of 18 and 65 who are able-bodied come together to clean streets, plant trees, clean ditches, repair infrastructure, or build homes for vulnerable residents. Those who do not participate without an exemption are liable to a fine of 5,000 Rwandan francs.
11 Sushi Tradition Favored Bare Hands
Sushi was traditionally eaten with the hands rather than chopsticks, and both methods remain acceptable in Japan. Some restaurants, including high-end establishments, encourage diners to use their hands because chefs often press the rice lightly, allowing chopsticks to make the piece crumble. Sushi enthusiasts may switch to chopsticks for pieces covered in sauce, while diners should always use chopsticks for sashimi.
12. In 1764, English inventor James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, enabling a single worker to spin eight threads at once, instead of one spindle. This caused a massive increase in yarn production. Other spinners feared that the machine would take their jobs and in 1768 a group broke into Hargreaves’ home and smashed his machines. The attack drove Hargreaves and his family from Blackburn to Nottingham, where he set up a small spinning mill. Hargreaves patented the machine in 1770, but he gained little in royalties as it was copied by others.
13. 13.Charles Byrne was an Irish exhibition performer in the 1780s who made his living by exhibiting his extraordinary height to paying audiences. Byrne was 7’7″ tall. Terrified that surgeons would seize his corpse after his death, Byrne instructed his friends to seal him inside a lead coffin and bury him at sea. After Byrne died in 1783, a surgeon named John Hunter reportedly paid his friends 500 pounds for the body and boiled it down to a skeleton. The Hunterian Museum in London displayed Byrne’s remains for more than 200 years, from 1799 until finally removing them from public view in 2023.
14. For the 1989 film Batman, Jack Nicholson negotiated a percentage of the film’s profits and merchandise sales as part of his deal to play the Joker. Although he appeared only in Batman, his contract also gave him a share of merchandise sales from Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin. In the end, the deal earned Nicholson a more than $60 million, or about $150 million in 2025.
15. Before Graves’ disease carried his name, Anglo-Irish surgeon Robert James Graves faced a deadly storm while sailing from Genoa to Sicily. The ship sprang a leak, its bilge pumps failed, and the mutinous crew attempted to abandon the vessel. Graves seized an axe and holed their only lifeboat, declaring, “Let us all be drowned together, it is a pity to part good company.” He then repaired the pumps with leather cut from his own shoes, saving the ship and everyone aboard.
16 Iron Hand Kept Berlichingen Fighting
In 1504, cannon fire struck the sword of German knight Gotz von Berlichingen during the siege of Landshut and drove it into his right arm, costing him his hand at the wrist. He commissioned two iron prostheses, including a mechanically complex hand with leather straps, springs, and articulated fingers that he could lock into position. The device allowed him to grip swords, shields, reins, and even a writing quill. Berlichingen continued fighting as a mercenary for another 40 years, completing his final military campaign in 1544.
17. In 1926, wealthy Toronto lawyer, financier, and practical joker Charles Vance Millar left the remainder of his estate to whichever woman in the city gave birth to the most children during the following 10 years. His unusual bequest launched the Great Stork Derby, in which 11 families competed through much of the Great Depression. The dispute reached the Supreme Court of Canada, which upheld the clause but excluded stillborn children and those born outside marriage. Annie Katherine Smith, Kathleen Ellen Nagle, Lucy Alice Timleck, and Isabel Mary Maclean each had nine qualifying children and received $110,000.
18. In 1913, English metallurgist Harry Brearley was testing chromium steels in Sheffield to make gun barrels resist heat erosion. On August 13, he prepared an alloy which contained 12.8 per cent chromium and found that it resisted nitric acid, vinegar, and lemon juice. Brearley referred to his invention as “rustless steel”, but local cutlery maker Ernest Stuart suggested the name “stainless steel”. The alloy made it possible to mass produce cheap cutlery and proved later to be one of the most widely used materials in the world.
19. After World War II, mutton consumption collapsed, and the meat almost disappeared from American menus. During the war, American GIs repeatedly received canned Australian mutton that many considered awful, and returning veterans often refused to allow sheep meat in their homes. They didn’t like it. Add to that beef competition, declining wool production, and the higher cost and longer cooking time of mutton, and it was removed from mainstream American cuisine.
20. On October 7, 1897, the New York City Post Office inaugurated a 3,750-foot pneumatic mail line between Park Row and the Produce Exchange. After sending a ceremonial dispatch containing a Bible, the Constitution, and other documents, postal workers placed a live black cat inside a canister and shot it through the twisting tube. The cat arrived dazed but unharmed, then attempted to run before workers secured it in a waiting basket. The network eventually grew to 27 miles, carried up to 95,000 letters daily, and remained in operation until 1953.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Anita Hemmings Passed As White
In 1893, a Black woman named Anita Florence Hemmings passed as white to enter Vassar College, which almost certainly would have rejected her if she had disclosed her race. A few weeks before her 1897 graduation, Hemmings’ white roommate shared suspicions with her father, who hired a private investigator to examine the student’s family in Boston. Vassar’s board met to decide Hemmings’ fate, but she appealed to the college president and received her diploma. She became Vassar’s first Black graduate more than 40 years before the college formally began admitting African American students.
22. On August 6, 1945, the uranium-based Little Boy atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, carrying about 64 kilograms of uranium-235. The reaction blew the bomb apart so quickly that only 1.7 percent of its material underwent nuclear fission. More than 98 percent remained unfissioned, yet the explosion still released energy equivalent to 15 to 16 kilotons of TNT.
23. American track athlete Jesse Owens returned home to limited opportunities after winning four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Racism made it difficult for him to earn a living despite his international fame, so he worked as a gas station attendant, a playground janitor, and a dry-cleaning manager. He also raced motorbikes, cars, trucks, and horses for prize money, later explaining, “I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.”
24. After American President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, two caskets were used. The first one was a 400-pound, solid-bronze Handley Britannia casket that carried his body from Parkland Memorial Hospital to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Bodily fluids heavily stained the expensive coffin during the flight to Washington, D.C., and it sustained further damage when workers removed it from Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base. Kennedy’s state funeral instead used a second casket made from hand-rubbed, 500-year-old African mahogany and upholstered in white rayon.
25. French military and political leader Napoleon Bonaparte kept a standing order with the perfume house Chardin for 50 bottles of Eau de Cologne every month. A surviving invoice from 1808 shows that he ordered 72 bottles in a single month. Napoleon splashed the cologne on his neck and shoulders several times a day, although the smaller 19th-century bottles contained fragrance with only about 2 percent perfume and essential oils.
RE: Fact #17 (Stork Derby Rewarded Nine-Child Mothers) – It’s sad to think about those kids growing up knowing they were basically part of a competition for money, likely missing out on the individual attention they deserved.
RE: Fact #36 (La Cabina Forced Telefonica Reassurance) – That is fascinating. I wonder if it influenced the movie “Phone Booth” with Colin Farrell and Kiefer Sutherland.
RE: Fact #35 (Attica Gunfire Killed Almost Everyone) – One definition of sovereignty is having a “monopoly on violence.” Most states do not take it well when others challenge that.
There was a George Carlin bit about how the only reason America fought the Nazis was because they wanted the monopoly on killing people they disliked, not because they disagreed with the actual extermination of groups they deemed undesirable.
RE: Fact #14 (Nicholson’s Batman Deal Kept Paying) – Why did they agree to that deal? You would think anyone would know that Batman was going to be a massive hit. It wasn’t like Iron Man before RDJ; Batman was a huge property. The 66 show was a massive TV success, and the marketing budget was huge. Unless they were completely desperate for Jack Nicholson, surely someone else would have taken the role for a standard flat fee.
Batman wasn’t expected to be the cultural juggernaut it turned out to be. Fans actually lost their minds when Michael Keaton was cast as Bruce Wayne. Jack was a massive presence in Hollywood, so his involvement gave the movie some serious buzz. It just happened to be that Keaton was the perfect fit.
Don’t forget that Tim Burton was only known for Pee Wee’s Big Adventure back then. Fanboys were rabid about him directing.
RE: Fact #5 (Hillary Dawa Sherpa Survived Everest) – That sounds a lot like Joe Simpson’s story. He fell off a cliff and into a crevasse in the Andes, and his team at base camp thought he was dead and were getting ready to leave. He managed to crawl out with a broken leg and inch his way back down the mountain, eventually making it to camp just as they were about to pack up.
RE: Fact #24 (Kennedy’s Funeral Required Two Caskets) – I’m curious how exactly it was ‘damaged’ enough to be unsuitable. It must have been messy inside, but an open casket was definitely not in the plans.
RE: Fact #33 (New Forest Nears Its Millennium) – The craziest part is that the medieval system is still in place. The ponies you see aren’t actually wild; they belong to locals exercising grazing rights that go back to those original forest laws. Every autumn, there’s a ‘pannage’ season where pigs are let out to eat fallen acorns, acorns are toxic to the ponies, but the pigs handle them fine. There’s even a Verderers Court that still manages the whole thing.
RE: Fact #43 (Watson Brake Predates Egypt’s Pyramids) – The pyramids in Egypt are surrounded by trash, and Stonehenge gets littered on and graffitied. It’s probably for the best that this site isn’t open to the public. I’d be perfectly happy with some drone footage, cool infographics, and an interesting documentary. I don’t need to go trampling all over it.
RE: Fact #46 (Boston Carried Lewis’ Contract Posthumously) – Back then, the salary cap was only around $15 million, so his $3.3 million salary really tied up over 20% of their space. It basically killed their chance to rebuild right when the Bird and McHale era was wrapping up. Under current rules, league insurance covers player deaths, and teams can request to get that cap hit cleared immediately.
The Celtics could have had Len Bias and Lewis stepping up after Bird, McHale, and Parish, but since both passed away, the team ended up struggling for years.
RE: Fact #20 (Pneumatic Mail Carried Living Cat) – What the heck.
RE: Fact #15 (Robert Graves Holed Their Lifeboat) – This story makes me appreciate the value of quality vocational training. It sounds like the crew was just a bunch of random people who wandered onto the docks looking for work, rather than actual mechanics or experienced sailors.
RE: Fact #2 (Christian Bale’s Accent Fooled Crewmates) – I was totally shocked when I first heard him speak at an awards show. Same thing with Hugh Laurie. It really goes to show just how talented those actors are.
It always makes me laugh when people say they were fooled by Hugh Laurie in House. Everyone should watch Blackadder; the guy is about as British as it gets.
His American accent is so convincing that his actual British accent ends up sounding like a parody to me.
RE: Fact #30 (Spider-Man’s Rejected Debut Became Bestseller) – Wasn’t the original concept totally different? I thought we didn’t get the version we know until Ditko started working on it.
RE: Fact #29 (Bruschetta Became America’s Garlic Bread) – People love to bash Americanized versions of food, but most of them just came about because immigrants had to get creative with whatever ingredients they could actually find to feed their families. It’s the same reason Italian immigrants swapped out traditional seafood for things like beef, pork, or chicken, which were much cheaper and easier to get here.
RE: Fact #18 (Harry Brearley Created Rustless Steel) – I’ve heard sailors call it “stain less” because eventually, even the best steel gives in to seawater.
Yeah, in Norwegian we have “rustfritt stål” and a specific term for the marine-grade stuff that handles acid better. I don’t think there’s a direct English equivalent for that distinction.
RE: Fact #29 (Bruschetta Became America’s Garlic Bread) – A lot of great food throughout history was born out of necessity, shortages, or even famine.
RE: Fact #43 (Watson Brake Predates Egypt’s Pyramids) – The state owns part of the site, and the family lets researchers in. Keeping it closed to the public is probably the best way to keep it from getting damaged.
There’s a reason Stonehenge is roped off. Before they did that, people would scratch their initials into the stones or chip off pieces. Now, you can only really get close to them during the summer solstice.
It’s sad that people ruin things, but the restricted access is probably for the best. There’s a funny story about how Stonehenge became state property, too: a local wealthy man bought it on impulse at an auction, but his wife didn’t like it, so he donated it to the government to maintain.
RE: Fact #1 (Bretz’s Flood Theory Earned Vindication) – Is that Bretz? We used to call them the Bretz Floods, and he didn’t even need NASA to back him up. Once airplanes were invented, people could fly over Washington state and finally see those massive ripples in the ground from the floodwaters for themselves.
RE: Fact #19 (Canned Mutton Repelled American Veterans) – That kind of thing happened with a lot of foods. Frozen items took off because they didn’t require rationed metal for cans, and tons of new drinks appeared due to supply shifts during the war. Even things like pizza and tiki culture blew up because soldiers brought home a taste for what they found overseas. The British diet changed completely too, since so many pre-war staples just weren’t available anymore.
RE: Fact #14 (Nicholson’s Batman Deal Kept Paying) – He is also close friends with Danny DeVito. When DeVito was offered the role of The Penguin for the sequel, he called Jack for advice on whether to take it. Jack just told him, “Try to get the same deal I did.”
DeVito had actually already pulled off a similar deal. He, Schwarzenegger, and Ivan Reitman took no upfront pay for Twins the year before and just split 40% of the gross.
RE: Fact #34 (Microbes Thrive Three Kilometers Underground) – Living inside solid rock would be absolute hell if you were sentient. Maybe that is what hell is.
It is not exactly solid rock, but I work underground as a geologist every day. It is not that bad.
RE: Fact #23 (Jesse Owens Became A Janitor) – Jesse Owens’s career essentially ended right after the 1936 Olympics because the AAU banned him for life for not doing their exhibition tour. They forced him to race all over Europe to make them money, and when he was too exhausted and flew home to support his family, they stripped his amateur status for missing one race. He couldn’t compete anymore, so he went from gold medalist to working at a gas station and a dry cleaner, eventually going bankrupt.
RE: Fact #7 (Euler’s Papers Outlived Him Decades) – Essentially, a dead Euler was still outpublishing most living mathematicians of his era.
I’ve always wondered if anyone else even compares to Euler in terms of productivity. He’s always called “one of the most prolific, ” but I can’t think of a better candidate, even if it’s a bit subjective. He was so prolific that dozens of theorems are named after the “second” person to work on them, because labeling everything “Euler’s Theorem” would be absurd.
Paul Erdős. He was one of the first traveling mathematicians who barely owned a house; he’d just visit collaborators, stay at their homes, publish papers, and move to the next spot. He didn’t care about anything more than math. Every waking second he wasn’t doing math felt like time wasted. If we’re talking about impact, though, maybe Euler still takes the crown.
RE: Fact #25 (Napoleon’s Seventy-Two-Bottle Cologne Order Survives) – I think people might be imagining him spraying it constantly, but he was probably just pouring the small bottles into his bath water.
RE: Fact #24 (Kennedy’s Funeral Required Two Caskets) – A bit off-topic, but I’ve been inside both expensive and cheap caskets, and both times the lid was closed. If you’re going to spend eternity in one, you might as well go for the fancy one. It was actually more comfortable than my own couch.
RE: Fact #2 (Christian Bale’s Accent Fooled Crewmates) – He’s definitely one of the most famous method actors out there. I’ve always wondered why so many British actors can pull off perfect American accents, but it rarely works the other way around. I still remember finding out Hugh Laurie was British while watching House, and it blew my mind as a kid.
RE: Fact #42 (Movie Shots Shrunk Across Decades) – Back in 1930, movies were blocked and shot a lot like stage plays. People stood in one spot, and they often used just one camera angle without even cutting back and forth. As the medium evolved, directors learned to use the camera’s perspective more intentionally.
RE: Fact #12 (Spinning Jenny Provoked Violent Backlash) – “Science has provided the possibility of liberation for human beings from hard labor, but science itself is not a liberator. It creates means not goals. Man should use science for reasonable goals. When the ideals of humanity are war and conquest, those tools become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three [years old]. We must not condemn man’s inventiveness and patient conquest of the forces of nature because they are being used wrongly and disobediently now. “The fate of humanity is entirely dependent upon its moral development.”” – Albert Einstein
RE: Fact #25 (Napoleon’s Seventy-Two-Bottle Cologne Order Survives) – That’s almost two bottles a day. Now I’m picturing him constantly reaching into his coat, pulling out an atomizer, and spritzing himself every twenty minutes.
People supposedly drank it. It was originally sold as a cure-all mixed with water and sugar. When laws forced companies to list their ingredients, they just rebranded it as ‘Eau de Cologne’ with a wink and a nod that you shouldn’t actually drink it.
RE: Fact #26 (Khatiwada Died Flying Yeti Airlines) – I’m pretty sure there was a passenger livestream of this, and things went downhill incredibly fast. It was such terrifying and heartbreaking footage to watch.
RE: Fact #16 (Iron Hand Kept Berlichingen Fighting) – You’re skipping the poetic part, he’s credited as the first person to use the phrase, “he can lick my ass.”
Which led to arguably one of the most famous compositions in history, Mozart’s “Leck mich im Arsch.”
RE: Fact #31 (Starlink Loses Satellites Every Day) – The ISS orbits at 400km, and there’s still enough air resistance there that it needs boosters to stay up. Since Starlink satellites are even lower at 300km and don’t have boosters, having one or two drop out of orbit daily seems perfectly reasonable given how many are up there.
RE: Fact #6 (Humans Sleep Least Among Primates) – Well, chimps don’t have to worry about creating deliverables for shareholders, so there’s that.
RE: Fact #44 (Ogallala Aquifer Refills Over Millennia) – Meanwhile, in Arizona, they’re literally dumping water onto the ground in an attempt to raise the groundwater levels.
RE: Fact #7 (Euler’s Papers Outlived Him Decades) – My favorite Euler fact is that he was apparently a very kind and helpful person. He spent a lot of time corresponding with young mathematicians, encouraging them and helping them improve their work.
RE: Fact #11 (Sushi Tradition Favored Bare Hands) – Also, you should dip the fish side into the soy sauce, not the rice, or the sushi will fall apart.
RE: Fact #32 (Maria Mitchell’s Comet Claim Prevailed) – Saying he nearly ‘stole’ the credit is a stretch. Francesco de Vico saw the comet independently and reported it without knowing Maria Mitchell had already found it two days earlier. There was no malice involved.
RE: Fact #15 (Robert Graves Holed Their Lifeboat) – As far as I know, the only version of this story comes from Graves himself, so I assume he might have taken some liberties.
RE: Fact #40 (Menominee Forest Sustains Timber Harvests) – Check out the satellite photos of this area. It’s a gorgeous, lush green stretch that really pops against the rest of the countryside.
RE: Fact #17 (Stork Derby Rewarded Nine-Child Mothers) – The guy had a real sense of humor. Forcing three guys who hated each other to live in a house together? That’s legendary.
RE: Fact #26 (Khatiwada Died Flying Yeti Airlines) – Aviation in Nepal is notoriously dangerous. Their airlines are banned from landing in a lot of countries.
RE: Fact #27 (John Fitch Invented Crash Barrels) – As a transportation engineer and driver, I’ve got to say this was a brilliant invention. It’s cheap and super effective. Most other impact attenuators cost way more and often need to be replaced after a crash, which doesn’t always happen fast enough. Any engineering solution that’s simple, effective, and affordable is top-tier, especially when it saves so many lives.
RE: Fact #19 (Canned Mutton Repelled American Veterans) – If you’ve ever actually tried it, you’d know the real problem with mutton is that it just has a very distinct, overpowering taste.
RE: Fact #44 (Ogallala Aquifer Refills Over Millennia) – For anyone wondering, here are the predictions for when the water will run out: Southern regions: 25 to 30 years. Central region: Mostly gone in 35 years. Northern region: Should be fine for a while.
RE: Fact #19 (Canned Mutton Repelled American Veterans) – Turns out, serving terrible canned meat to an entire generation of soldiers is a great way to make sure they never touch it again.
RE: Fact #35 (Attica Gunfire Killed Almost Everyone) – Tom Wicker witnessed that carnage and wrote a book about it called A Time To Die.
RE: Fact #28 (Airline Padding Manufactured Better Punctuality) – Coast-to-coast flights were about 30 minutes faster back in the 60s. Pilots used to be able to set their own cruise speeds and usually redlined them. Now, flight speeds are determined by spreadsheets to save on fuel costs because airlines know people won’t complain about a few extra minutes in the air. It’s pretty strange that we’re flying slower now than we were 60 years ago.
RE: Fact #11 (Sushi Tradition Favored Bare Hands) – Wow. I feel like a chump for always using chopsticks. It makes sense, though, it’s basically a handheld rice taco. Still, I’m going to stick with my chopsticks and deal with the pieces falling apart.
RE: Fact #4 (Tobias Geffen Made Coca-Cola Kosher) – The fact says he asked the company for a list of ingredients, but isn’t an ingredient list totally different from the actual formula? I guess companies weren’t required to disclose ingredients on their products back in 1935, or at least didn’t make them public.
The issue is that some things are allowed to remain vague. Labels like ‘natural’ or ‘artificial flavoring’ can mean almost anything, and some of those hidden components might not be kosher or could be problematic for holidays like Passover.
It isn’t just about the ingredients themselves; it’s about the processing equipment and the substances used to create those ingredients. For example, cane sugar is plant-based and theoretically always kosher. However, white cane sugar is sometimes processed using bone char. If that char comes from a non-kosher animal, the sugar isn’t kosher. Geffen would have looked at the ingredients but also asked deep questions about the entire process.
RE: Fact #50 (New York Strike Automated Elevators) – It’s a pretty risky strategy to go on strike when your strike effectively proves that your job is no longer necessary.
RE: Fact #39 (Childbirth Inspired Half-Life’s Baby Monster) – Having a much easier birth with my second child really helped cure the PTSD I had from the terrifying experience of my first.
RE: Fact #23 (Jesse Owens Became A Janitor) – Back then, to be in the Olympics you were required to be an amateur. You couldn’t have your sport be your full-time job.
The Olympics were really stubborn about keeping professionals out, even though many Eastern bloc athletes were professionals in all but name. That said, I’m not sure there was really a professional track circuit in the 30s for Owens to make money in anyway. Even if he could, being a Black man in that era put major limits on what he could actually earn.
RE: Fact #42 (Movie Shots Shrunk Across Decades) – This really bugs me during action scenes. I want to actually see a fight happen, but instead, we get a half-second clip of a punch, a quarter-second of someone getting hit, and then quick flashes of the next move. It drives me crazy.
RE: Fact #12 (Spinning Jenny Provoked Violent Backlash) – There used to be entire rooms of people called “computers.” Their job was just to take numbers, perform calculations, and pass the results to the next desk. Every person was basically just a living cell in a spreadsheet.
RE: Fact #36 (La Cabina Forced Telefonica Reassurance) – José Luís López Vázquez was a top-tier Spanish actor. George Cukor even begged him to learn English and move to Hollywood. His work in La Cabina, Mi querida señorita, Atraco a las 3, El cochecito, and El verdugo is unforgettable.
RE: Fact #41 (Vermont Curator Cremated Egyptian Mummy) – Who throws away a perfectly good dead toddler? /s Seriously though, were mummies so common back then that you’d toss out “extra” ones instead of selling or donating them to other museums?
RE: Fact #16 (Iron Hand Kept Berlichingen Fighting) – You should definitely read more about this guy. His hand was incredible, but the things he got up to were wild. There really should be a movie about him.
RE: Fact #6 (Humans Sleep Least Among Primates) – I’m a human primate too, and eight hours has never been enough for me. Nine is fine, but I’d much rather get ten.
RE: Fact #47 (Goodyear Maintains F1 Victory Record) – What’s more relevant is the 2005 US Grand Prix disaster, where only six cars even started because the Michelin tires were deemed unsafe for the track.