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.