Some facts seem ordinary at first, but the more you think about them, the more surprising they become. This mixtape brings together 50 remarkable stories, discoveries, and historical oddities that have been patiently waiting to catch you off guard.
Three-Word Mail System
1. Mongolia’s postal service put in place a system that uses a 3-word address rather than a street address. It divides the world into 9 square meter patches and gives each patch a unique 3-word address that helps postal workers deliver mail in the city or in remote places more efficiently.
2. The Ainu are Japan’s “lost” indigenous people. One of their customs was for women to tattoo over their lips, making the length seem longer to indicate maturity.
3. The hallucinogen found in “magic mushrooms” produces brain activity patterns that resemble those seen when a person is dreaming.
4. Christmas was once illegal in Massachusetts and much of New England, and it stayed taboo in that part of the country until at least 1870, when the Feds declared it a national holiday.
5. A Russian pilot named Pyotr Nesterov was the first pilot to perform a loop in an airplane and the first to destroy an enemy aircraft in flight. He died in the second attempt because planes did not have weapons and he had to ram it.
6. Before dependable and cheap alarm clocks existed, workers in Britain and Ireland were awakened by human alarm clocks who ensured they arrived at work on time. The knocker-up used a baton to tap clients’ doors or a long, light stick to reach windows on upper floors.
7. The well-known Contra cheat code “UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, START” was made by Kazuhisa Hashimoto so he could gain an advantage in the game, but he forgot to delete the code before the game was released to the public.
8. In antiquity, the ancient Greek painter Apelles was considered the greatest painter in the Greek world, a standing noted by writers such as Pliny the Elder. Alexander the Great admired him so greatly that, according to Pliny, he even gave one of his concubines to Apelles to use as a model. Although he was famous, none of Apelles’s original works remain, and only written praise survives to show his ability.
9. An Irish Titanic passenger named Jeremiah Burke sent a farewell note in a bottle during the sinking. It later landed near his home, where his mother identified his handwriting.
10. On Emma Watson’s 18th birthday, paparazzi tried to take under-skirt photos by lying on the pavement outside her house. If the pictures had been taken 24 hours earlier, publishing them would have been against the law.
Cameron Declines Film Pay
11. James Cameron voluntarily gave up his salary and points (a percentage of the film’s income) for “Titanic” (1997) when its budget exceeded his original estimate, rising from $100-120 million to $200 million. He wanted to make sure studio executives did not believe he had tricked them into getting the movie made.
12. The “Great Male Renunciation” was a late 18th-century change in Western fashion, when men started abandoning bright colors, jewelry, and varied garments. Instead, they began favoring darker, more practical clothing, with the black suit eventually becoming the serious male standard.
13. In 1945, Percy Spencer, a school dropout and self-taught electrical engineer, was working at Raytheon. One time, after he stepped in front of a magnetron, a device that powers radars, he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Later that year, he submitted a patent for the first microwave oven.
14. When babies are born in Thailand, people commonly say that the baby is ugly. A superstition says attractive babies will be taken by evil spirits. It is rude to say positive things about the baby.
15. Warren Buffett earned enough money by selling Coke Bottles and magazines door to door to purchase a 40-acre farm when he was 14.
16. Angelman’s syndrome is a genetic disorder that causes the affected person to have an unusually happy personality and an interest in water.
17. When a person sleeps in a new environment for the first time, the human brain stays half awake.
18. Nicholas Owen constructed “priest holes,” hidden rooms meant to shield Catholic priests from persecution in England. After the Gunpowder Plot, Owen was seized, brought to the Tower of London, and tortured to death on the rack. Pope Paul VI canonized him as a martyr in 1970.
19. The Soviet Union had an internationally televised song contest. Because few viewers had phones, they would switch their lights on if they liked a song and off if they did not. The state energy company recorded the power spikes and sent the reports to the station to choose the winner.
20. To demonstrate the company’s importance to the local economy, Geneva Steel paid its employees bonuses in $2 bills, which then began appearing in local businesses.
Keaton’s First Job
21. Actor Michael Keaton began his show business career as a production assistant on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” He assisted with the puppets and operated the trolley.
22. After Winston Churchill was hit by a car in New York in 1931, his physician wrote a medical note stating that Churchill’s recovery “necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at mealtimes,” and set 250 cc’s (8 oz) per day as the minimum.
23. Comic book writer Jim Shooter began making comics at age 13 and submitted them to DC comics. The head of DC liked them so much that he promptly hired Shooter to write Superman stories. At age 14, he received a regular position and worked to help support his struggling parents.
24. During a major 2015 crackdown, officials in the People’s Republic of China confiscated more than 100,000 tons of illegal frozen meat, and some of it had been kept in storage for over 40 years.
25. John Stith Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola, was a Civil War veteran who became dependent on morphine because of pain from a saber wound in his chest. Looking for an alternative to morphine, he created the original Coca-Cola formula using the coca plant for pain relief.
Add Comment