26 Fat Controller Became Topham Hatt
“The Fat Controller” in Thomas & Friends is called “Sir Topham Hatt” in the American version, because “fat” was considered derogatory in the US but not in the UK. British releases continue to use Fat Controller and reserve his real name for formal situations. The spinoff Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go later adopted the name Sir Topham Hatt in both countries.
27. During World War I in 1917, American department store Sears published a special mail-order catalog offering weapons, uniforms, and other military equipment. Its listings included an $865 Colt machine gun capable of firing more than 400 rounds per minute, plus three Colt handguns: a revolver, a .45-caliber automatic pistol, and a .32-caliber automatic pistol. Sears shipped purchases to soldiers across the United States and offered parcel-post delivery to American troops in Europe.
28. Norwegian King Harald V was three years old when he fled the German invasion of Norway with his mother, Norwegian Crown Princess Martha, and his two sisters in 1940. They crossed into Sweden before sailing to the United States, where Harald lived in Washington, D.C. He returned to Norway after the war ended in 1945. When Harald inherited the throne in 1991, he became Norway’s first Norwegian-born monarch in roughly 610 years, following Olav IV in 1380.
29. In 1961, 90% of 219 doctors surveyed in Chicago said they usually would not tell patients that they had cancer. It reflected the era’s paternalistic medical culture, which gave physicians broad control over how much information patients received. When researchers repeated the questionnaire in 1977, 97% of 264 respondents preferred to disclose the diagnosis, almost completely reversing the earlier result.
30. While filming Japan’s original Godzilla in 1954, Japanese actor and stunt performer Haruo Nakajima performed inside a thick latex-and-foam Godzilla suit under hot stage lights after the first 200-pound version proved unusable. Nakajima could barely see or breathe and remained inside for only a few minutes at a time, while technicians regularly poured a cup of sweat from the costume between takes. By the end of the shoot, Nakajima had lost 20 pounds.
31 Gotham Began As Irving’s Insult
English folklore portrayed the residents of medieval Gotham, a village in Nottinghamshire, as fools. In 1807, American writer Washington Irving mockingly applied the name to New York City in his satirical periodical Salmagundi. Irving intended it as a jab at the city’s culture and politics, but Gotham stuck as one of New York’s most famous nicknames.
32. In 1950, after years of trials, Australia released the myxoma virus as a biological control against its invasive rabbit population. Within two years, the virus killed 99.8% of infected rabbits and cut the continent’s estimated rabbit population from 600 million to roughly 100 million. Surviving rabbits gradually developed resistance, so myxomatosis failed as a permanent solution to Australia’s rabbit problem.
33. A Polish immigrant named Henryk Siwiak was not a victim of the September 11 attacks, but the disruption they caused led him to the place where he died. After the attacks closed his Lower Manhattan construction site on September 11, 2001, he accepted a late-night cleaning job at a Pathmark supermarket across Brooklyn. Limited English and mistaken directions led him three miles from the store into Bedford-Stuyvesant, where someone shot him shortly before midnight. New York’s official crime statistics list Siwiak as the city’s only homicide that day, while reports describe him as the last person killed there on 9/11; his murder remains unsolved.
34. About 90% of new drug candidates that enter clinical trials fail before reaching regulatory approval. Between 40% and 50% fail because they do not work well enough in humans, while about 30% produce unmanageable toxicity or side effects. Poor absorption and elimination account for another 10% to 15%, while commercial or strategic problems cause roughly 10% of failures. Developing one successful drug can therefore take 10 to 15 years and cost around $1 billion.
35. American suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, publicly voiced antisemitic views while maintaining several intense, lengthy relationships with Jewish women. She recorded antisemitic slurs in her diaries and made offensive remarks at social gatherings, yet three of her most significant affairs involved two American women named Ellen Blumenthal Hill and Daisy Winton and a French artist named Marion Aboudaram. Highsmith biographer Richard Bradford found genuine affection in her relationships with Hill and Aboudaram, describing the contradiction as a central conundrum of her life.
36 Jimmy Carter Federally Legalized Homebrewing
On October 14, 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed H.R. 1337, legalizing homebrewing at the federal level. The law allowed adults to produce limited amounts of beer and wine for personal or family use without paying federal excise taxes, although individual states still controlled the practice. Homebrewing gave aspiring brewers room to experiment, and many later opened small breweries that helped create America’s modern craft beer industry.
37. In 1974, Omaha police made America’s last recorded arrest under an ugly law, one of several ordinances that barred people described as diseased, maimed, mutilated, or deformed from public view. An officer detained a homeless man because he had visible scars and marks across his body. Prosecutors filed no charges because the ordinance never defined ugly, making it impossible to prove the man’s guilt. That same year, Chicago became the final U.S. city to repeal its ugly law.
38. In 1990, the U.S. Secret Service investigated a Steve Jackson Games employee named Loyd Blankenship as part of a real hacking case, then raided the tabletop publisher’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. Agents seized three computers and more than 300 floppy disks, including the master manuscript for Blankenship’s upcoming role-playing game GURPS Cyberpunk. Steve Jackson Games sued for lost revenue and privacy violations, winning two of its three claims in 1993. The court awarded $50,000 in statutory damages and $250,000 in attorney’s fees after finding that agents had no basis to suspect the company of wrongdoing.
39. In November 1986, Queen Elizabeth II wrote a secret letter to Sydney’s lord mayor and the city’s residents while visiting the Queen Victoria Building. Staff sealed it immediately under her instructions and secured it inside a glass case in a restricted area at the top of the building’s main dome. The envelope directs Sydney’s lord mayor to choose a suitable day in 2085, open it, and deliver her message to the city’s citizens. Its contents remain unknown.
40. In 2021, a bus-sized extreme ultraviolet lithography machine from Dutch company ASML cost about $150 million and helped manufacturers produce advanced computer chips. It contained 100,000 parts and 2 kilometers of cable, while delivering one required 40 shipping containers, 20 trucks, and three Boeing 747s. To create EUV light, the machine fired high-powered lasers at tin droplets 50,000 times per second. Six precision mirrors then guided that light through a patterned reticle to etch features only a few dozen atoms wide onto chips.
41 Little Bighorn Cost 42,000 Rounds
At the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana Territory in 1876, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s regiment expended or lost about 42,000 rounds, a rough rate of one hit for every 840 rounds. Lakota and Cheyenne warriors captured some ammunition from cartridge belts and saddlebags, so the soldiers never fired every missing round, and their actual hit rate was higher. Many warriors remained between 300 and 1,200 yards away, while the Army gave its troops little marksmanship training and only about 20 practice rounds per year. Poor training and weak fire discipline played major roles in the cavalry’s defeat.
42. Methuselah, believed to be the world’s oldest aquarium fish, is at least 94 years old (as of 2026) and enjoys belly rubs. The 1.2-meter, 18.1-kilogram Australian lungfish arrived at San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium from Australia in 1938, although her exact age remains unknown. Her caretakers believe she is female and say she also enjoys fresh, seasonal figs.
43. Eleonora’s falcons in Morocco imprison live birds for later meals by plucking their flight feathers and trapping them inside deep rock crevices. Researchers documented the behavior in 2014 on the Mogador Islands off Essaouira, where the falcons hunt migrating birds during their July to October nesting season. The researchers believe the falcons keep their prey alive for one or two days so it remains fresh, since dead birds dry out too quickly.
44. When American politician George Wallace became governor of Alabama in 1963, he promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” His “forever” lasted less than two decades. In 1979, Wallace renounced his segregationist past, called his attempt to block Black students from the University of Alabama wrong, and publicly asked Black Americans for forgiveness. He won a fourth term as governor on a liberal platform in 1982 and later appointed a record number of Black Americans to state positions.
45. Who, Me? was a top-secret, sulfurous, nonlethal chemical weapon developed during World War II by an MIT graduate named Ernest Crocker for the US Office of Strategic Services. It smelled strongly of fecal matter and came in pocket atomizers intended for French Resistance members to spray discreetly on German officers, humiliating them and demoralizing the occupying forces. Its volatile sulfur compounds often left the sprayer smelling as foul as the target. After only two weeks, the OSS declared the experiment a failure.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
46 The Mousetrap Run Prevents Filming
British writer Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap has run almost continuously in London’s West End since 1952, pausing only from March 2020 to May 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its contract forbids the rights holders from producing a film adaptation until the West End run has closed for at least six months. Producer John Woolf bought those rights in 1956, but he and his heirs have never been able to use them. Christie also asked that its source story, Three Blind Mice, remain unpublished in the UK while the play continued, although it appeared in a 1950 US collection.
47. In 1776, French queen Marie Antoinette informally adopted a poor five-year-old orphan named Francois-Michel Gagne after her carriage nearly ran him over. She later renamed him Armand. His grandmother consented, but Armand did not want to leave her; he screamed and kicked the queen and her attendants, and he later developed a poor relationship with his royal foster parents. After the French Revolution began in 1789, Armand reportedly embraced republicanism and joined the revolutionary army. He was killed at the Battle of Jemappes in November 1792.
48. In 1940, former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s wartime government offered a framework for a united Ireland if neutral Ireland joined the Allies against Nazi Germany. Britain feared Germany might invade Ireland and use it as a route into mainland Britain. Chamberlain was prepared to force concessions from Northern Ireland, while Churchill favored persuasion. Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera rejected the offer and maintained neutrality, arguing that entering the war could trigger another Irish civil war.
49. Belgian king Leopold II, infamous for the atrocities committed under his rule in the Congo Free State, took a 16-year-old French prostitute named Caroline Lacroix as his mistress in 1899, when he was 65. They remained together for ten years, had two sons, and received widespread condemnation in Belgium. They married secretly in a religious ceremony five days before Leopold died in 1909. Because they never held a civil ceremony, Belgian law did not recognize the marriage.
50. For the final 20 years of his life, American actor Telly Savalas, best known for playing Kojak, lived at the Sheraton-Universal Hotel in Los Angeles. He became such a familiar presence at its bar that the hotel renamed it Telly’s. On January 22, 1994, Savalas died in his room from complications of prostate and bladder cancer, one day after his 72nd birthday.
RE: Fact #21 (Meredith Victory Carried 14, 000 Refugees) – Five babies being born during that crossing seems like a lot, even with 14, 000 people. I wonder if there was some selection bias where pregnant women were prioritized for getting on the ship.
The “women and children first” mentality might explain it; statistically, it’s likely a higher number of pregnant women were given spots.
RE: Fact #4 (Celebrity Worshippers Showed Lower Cognition) – There’s definitely a connection there, but I’d be interested to know why. Do people lose focus on other things because they’re pouring their energy into celebrity culture, or are people who are already struggling cognitively more likely to obsess over celebrities?
RE: Fact #31 (Gotham Began As Irving’s Insult) – Sounds like they were a village that acted like fools just so the king would skip over them during his royal tours.
RE: Fact #26 (Fat Controller Became Topham Hatt) – I honestly thought that was just his name and ‘The Fat Controller’ was the nickname.
Yeah, it is his real name in both, but the British version leans into the ‘Fat Controller’ nickname.
RE: Fact #28 (Harald Became Norway’s Native-Born King) – Apparently, one of his earliest memories was attending FDR’s fourth inauguration.
RE: Fact #46 (The Mousetrap Run Prevents Filming) – At the close of every show, the cast comes out to tell the audience how long it has been running. They explain that it’s lasted this long because nobody has spoiled the twist, and then they make everyone swear not to reveal the ending.
RE: Fact #1 (Antenna Hiss Revealed Big-Bang Radiation) – I can see them standing there and thinking, “We’re going to need a much better way to clean this.”
RE: Fact #24 (Jordan Donated Entire Comeback Salary) – He also gave up his ownership interest in the Wizards just to return to the court, and then he donated that salary on top of it.
RE: Fact #15 (IMAGE Reappeared After Twelve Years) – It really is a shame they lost contact again just a month later. They still aren’t entirely sure what went wrong. It wasn’t reporting any issues before it went silent initially, and there is no sign of damage or debris. When they reached it in 2018, the onboard computers were running and sending the right data. It acknowledged a few commands, then just went dark and hasn’t been heard from since. It must have been incredibly frustrating for the NASA team to get their hopes up and track down old equipment just to talk to it, only for it to vanish again after a few messages.
Maybe it just caught a glimpse of what was happening on Earth and decided to go back to sleep.
RE: Fact #6 (Bottle Scam Generated 177, 451 Refunds) – I’m not scared of the guy who recycled 177, 451 bottles. I’m scared of the guy who recycled the same one 177, 451 times.
RE: Fact #41 (Little Bighorn Cost 42, 000 Rounds) – Even ignoring the lost ammunition that drives the shots-per-hit number up, the Civil War required 200 to 500 rounds to hit one target, and those were slow-loading muskets. Custer had cased cartridges and could fire much faster, which leads to more ammo spent with fewer hits. The number of rounds per casualty has just gone up over time. In WW1 it was 10, 000 rounds, in WW2 it was 25, 000 to 45, 000, in Vietnam it hit 50, 000 to 200, 000, and in Iraq it was over 200, 000. So, 840 rounds per casualty actually seems right in line with the trend of technological improvement.
RE: Fact #44 (George Wallace Renounced Segregationist Politics) – It seems like he never actually bought into those beliefs. It was just a cold political calculation to win over white blue-collar voters in Alabama, especially since he had more liberal views on racial equality earlier in his career.
RE: Fact #6 (Bottle Scam Generated 177, 451 Refunds) – I heard about a case where two cleaners kept feeding the same bottles into a recycling machine, taking them back out of the bin, and running them through again until they had 100 euros worth of deposit slips. They spent the whole night doing it, but when they tried to use the slips, the cashier got suspicious because nobody honestly accumulates that much on a single receipt. Of course, they did the whole thing right in front of security cameras, so they were charged with fraud and fired.
RE: Fact #27 (Sears Sold Mail-Order Machine Guns) – That 1917 military equipment catalog from Sears was wild. You could buy everything from Colt machine guns and pistols to uniforms and camping gear. They offered parcel-post delivery anywhere in the US, or even to soldiers in Europe. It wasn’t just for troops, either, anyone could buy from it. And the best part? It came with the standard Sears guarantee: if you weren’t perfectly satisfied, you could send it back for a full refund.
RE: Fact #7 (Bee Space Unlocked Modern Beekeeping) – Beekeeper here: bees treat “bee space” as more of a suggestion than a law. Sometimes we end up with “crazy comb” where they build across the frames instead of on the foundation. It rarely gets so bad you can’t get the frames out, but sometimes they get stuck together. If you catch it early, it’s best to just scrape the extra wax off and put it back; the bees will usually chew it up and rebuild it the right way. The real weirdness is the propolis. It’s essentially regurgitated tree sap, and they use it to glue down anything they can’t carry out, twigs, dead bugs, or even your hive tool if you leave it inside. I’ve had hives where I couldn’t move the entrance reducer bar at all because they’d sealed it shut with rock-hard resin.
RE: Fact #9 (Feige Nearly Resigned Over Downey) – Marvel had a huge issue with their “Creative Committee” in New York. They were totally disconnected from the filmmaking process but would constantly meddle. There are plenty of stories about this, but the most obvious one is that they wanted to strip the music and those perfect needle-drop moments out of Guardians of the Galaxy.
People like Perlmutter, who is a well-documented bigot, usually don’t have a clue how art actually works.
RE: Fact #34 (Drug Candidates Face Ninety-Percent Failure) – That is why it’s so common to start a drug discovery campaign by screening millions of compounds. If you’re lucky enough to find a few thousand potential binders, almost all of them will still fail at some point.
RE: Fact #18 (The Good Place Concealed Twist) – The first season was fun and had a vaguely Shyamalan-esque vibe, but season two is what really makes the show special. It asks real questions: can people actually change? What do we owe each other? Do we have free will? It’s a goofy sitcom with something meaningful to say.
RE: Fact #45 (Who, Me? Stench Weapon Backfired) – This reminds me of the CIA’s weird plots to ruin Castro, like the plan to make his hair fall out so he’d lose his standing. They really had some bizarre, failed ideas to take him out.
RE: Fact #43 (Eleonora’s Falcons Keep Prey Alive) – It is funny to me that people think this is so dark. Humans have been doing this for centuries; we just have different methods for keeping our food captive. We also have a long history of keeping our own species captive, often with the intent to harm or kill them, not just eat them.
RE: Fact #16 (Japan’s Liberty-Sized Shafts Prevent Flooding) – Sure, but how much does it cost to ship the Statue of Liberty to Japan seven times a year?
RE: Fact #47 (Armand Joined France’s Revolutionary Army) – “This little unfortunate was nearly twenty in 1792; the fury of the people and the fear of being thought a favourite of the Queen’s had made him the most sanguinary terrorist of Versailles. He was killed at the battle of Jemappes”. It sounds like he might have done it to save his own neck, similar to how Philip Equality tried to survive by voting for his own cousin’s execution and changing his name.
RE: Fact #18 (The Good Place Concealed Twist) – There is a funny clip on YouTube of Tahani, Jason, and Janet finding out about the season finale twist.
RE: Fact #31 (Gotham Began As Irving’s Insult) – Gotham is still around, just south of Nottingham. And it’s pronounced like “goat-em.”
RE: Fact #8 (Bean Victory Raised Ticket-Sneaking Suspicions) – I don’t remember what we actually went to see, but I definitely told my parents and my friends’ parents that we were headed to see Pacific Rim Uprising. We came home and raved about it, saying it was even better than the first one. About a week later, my dad went to see the movie himself and caught us in the lie immediately.
RE: Fact #10 (Nishiyama Onsen Ended Fifty-Two-Generation Ownership) – The idea of “continuous operation by the same lineage” is pretty misleading. Like many Japanese businesses, this inn kept it in the family by formally adopting adult employees whenever there wasn’t a biological heir. I’m not saying adopted people aren’t family, but adopting a man in his 20s or 30s isn’t the same thing as raising a child, and it’s certainly not continuing the same bloodline.
RE: Fact #38 (Jackson Games Defeated Secret Service) – People often leave out who actually wrote that. It was Loyd Blankenship, known online as The Mentor, who wrote the Hacker Manifesto back in 1986. The Secret Service saw a hacker writing about hacking and one agent even called GURPS Cyberpunk a handbook for computer crime. The company nearly went under and had to lay off half their staff, but they ended up printing The book that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service on the cover, which became their best marketing tool.
Reminds me of the marketing for Report From Iron Mountain: On The Possibility And Desirability Of Peace.
RE: Fact #7 (Bee Space Unlocked Modern Beekeeping) – The idea of destroying an entire hive just to get honey sounds terrible, so this guy really saved the craft.
RE: Fact #20 (Paper Decomposition Creates Old-Book Smell) – For those interested in the chemistry, vanillin, benzaldehyde, and furfural aren’t just byproducts of paper, they are commonly used in perfumery as well.
RE: Fact #46 (The Mousetrap Run Prevents Filming) – I’m a huge Agatha Christie fan, so I have to weigh in. You know that classic joke, ‘the butler did it’? It’s actually from the 1800s, way before Christie started writing. She never actually used a butler as the murderer. Maybe a killer would pose as one, or the butler was guilty of something else, but she never made the butler the culprit. It was considered cheating. In the Golden Age of mysteries, it was a game of wits between the writer and the reader. The butler is a ‘cheat’ character because they have keys to every room, access to everything, and a valid excuse to be anywhere at any time. Of course, the butler did it, that’s why it was a cliché. 🫡
RE: Fact #50 (Telly Savalas Called Sheraton-Universal Home) – Having your 72nd birthday party at your own local hangout, surrounded by friends, and then passing away the very next day… as far as celebrity exits go, that’s about as poetic as it gets.
RE: Fact #22 (Oney Judge Escaped Presidential Enslavement) – When Pennsylvania introduced laws to gradually free enslaved people at a certain age, Washington started rotating his enslaved staff out of the state before they hit that age just to keep them enslaved.
RE: Fact #36 (Jimmy Carter Federally Legalized Homebrewing) – Most alcohol regulations are just nonsense meant to protect distributors. My favorite example is when a tasting room attached to a distillery has to buy their own products back from a distributor just to offer tastings.
RE: Fact #6 (Bottle Scam Generated 177, 451 Refunds) – I knew someone who drank an 18-pack of Coors Banquet every day. He used to drop a piece of pea gravel into every can before crushing it just to get a bit more cash at the recycling center.