WTF • Fun • Fact    ( /dʌb(ə)lˌju/  /ti/   /ef/ • /fʌn/ • /fækt/ )

     1. noun  A random, interesting, and overall fun fact that makes you scratch your head and think what the...

WTF Fun Fact 12792 – Hazelnuts In Nutella

Nutella was invented during WWII when cocoa was so hard to find that Italian chocolatier Ferrero decided to mix in hazelnuts. And that’s how Nutella was born.

However, our worldwide love of Nutella makes it pretty hard to produce enough hazelnuts. In fact, a quarter of all hazelnuts grown go into Nutella.

Nutella is hogging the hazelnuts

Don’t get us wrong, we’re not complaining. In fact, that’s how we prefer to eat out hazelnuts, and Nutella has a nice, small ingredient list. It’s just most nuts come from a small strip of land on the coast of Turkey – and they’re not easy to grow. However, those farmers have been growing hazelnuts for over 2000 years!

According to NPR (cited below), “Ferrero, the Nutella-maker, now a giant company based in Alba, Italy, uses about a quarter of the world’s hazelnut supply — more than 100,000 tons every year.”

Hot commodities

Of course, this has pushed up the price of hazelnuts. And any time something goes wrong with the strip of land in Turkey, things get even worse (for example, they had a frost in 2013 that drove prices up 60%).

There are other places in the world where the nuts can be grown, for example, Chile and Australia – and even Oregon. But a disease called Eastern Filbert Blight has also threatened crops.

If you’re thinking of getting in on the hazelnut growing business, you might want to think twice. As Thomas Molnar, a Rutgers plant scientist told NPR: “If you just want to get one of these trees and grow hazelnuts in your backyard, though, Molnar does have a warning. “I haven’t seen any other food that drives squirrels more crazy than hazelnuts. Squirrels will do almost anything to get their greedy little paws on the nuts before you do.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Thanks To Nutella, The World Needs More Hazelnuts” — NPR

WTF Fun Fact 12791 – When Were Doritos Invented

Actually, the interesting question isn’t when were Doritos invented but where. And those answers are: in 1960s, and at Disneyland of all places!

The invention of Doritos

Not only were Doritos invented at Disneyland, but they also started off as trash.

Doritos is a Spanish word meaning “little pieces of gold.” And these valuable little things started out their lives as pieces of tortilla thrown out at Disneyland’s Mexican restaurant in Frontierland, called Casa de Fritos. (The restaurant is now called Rancho del Zocalo Restaurante).

As you may have guessed, that early restaurant was owned by one of Disney’s corporate sponsors, Fritos (another delicious snack).

From trash to treasure

According to the Disney blog Walt’s Disneyland (cited below: “All non-Fritos ingredients served at Casa de Fritos, such as the tortillas, meat, beans, and fresh produce, were supplied by Alex Foods…

And it was a salesman for Alex foods who “noticed that Casa de Fritos was tossing unused tortillas in the trash at the end of each day” in the 1960s. “He suggested that the cook cut the surplus tortillas into triangles, deep fry them, and season them in the style of a Zapotec Mexican snack called totopos. The cook took the salesman’s advice and fried up the first batch of what we now know as Doritos.”

Once the chips became popular at Disneyland, Fritos realized they might have greater commercial success.

The invention of mass Dorito production

When a Frito executive tasted the new treat in 1964, he asked Alex Foods if Fritos could mass produce the snack. And they were so popular that Alex Foods could not keep u with demand.

That’s when Frito-Lay took over Doritos production at its Tulsa, Oklahoma plant for nationwide distribution in 1967. And the rest, as they say, is history! – WTF fun facts

Source: “Disneyland: The Birthplace of Doritos?” — Walt’s Disneyland

WTF Fun Fact 12790 – Dog Branded a Fake Hero By NYT

In 1908, the New York Times ran a story calling a dog in Paris a fake hero. But before you jump to the canine’s defense, you might want to hear why. It turns out he was a bit of a bad boy.

Dog Saves Child

As the story is told, a heard a child screaming for help one day by the Seine river in Paris. And like a proper hero, he jumped in to rescue the poor kiddo.

Of course, he was greatly rewarded.

It turns out that the slab of meat he received as a reward was something he didn’t want to give up. So he presumably figured he’d just wait by the Seine to see if his heroics could be of service again. And it didn’t take long for another child to fall in.

Once again, the dog saved the child and was rewarded.

Now, remember the story of Pavlov’s dogs.

“Fake hero” dog pushes children

Eventually, someone noticed that a suspicious number of children were falling into the Seine, and always nearby a certain meat-loving canine. At first, people thought there was some sort of child-drowning criminal wandering about the neighborhood.

It didn’t take long for people to figure out that the dog eventually started pushing kids in if he had to wait too long for a rescue and reward scenario to present itself.

That’s what landed him on the front page of the NYT in a story titled “DOG A FAKE HERO.”

Now, whether the story is true or not, we can’t say. We only know what the NYT reported. Sadly, they didn’t follow up on what may have happened to the dog nor did they mention whether or not any of the children noticed that they took a swim courtesy of the canine.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “The Dog Who Kept Pushing Kids Into A River To Acquire Steak Rewards” — IFL Science

WTF Fun Fact 12789 – Volvo’s Seat Belt Patent

Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin saved countless lives by inventing the V-type three-point safety belt in 1959. And while the Swedish car company could have made millions by licensing the design to their competitors, they decided to gift the design to the world instead of patenting it for themselves.

The story of the seat belt

The two-point (over the waist) seat belt already existed at the time, but for those of us who remember them, they could manage to do harm even at a hard stop. And those weren’t even a standard feature in most cars!

Volvo’s president at the time, Gunnar Engellau, lost a relative to a traffic accident in which the seat belt was part of the problem. It was his loss that inspired him to find the best engineer possible to build a better seat belt.

Interestingly, that engineer happened to work for rival car company Saab. But Engellau managed to hire away Nils Bohlin and tapped him to work exclusively on the new design.

The story of the patent

Car companies patent all of their designs. If they’re good, other car companies have to pay to license them for their own vehicles. If other companies try to copy patented designs, they get sued. A U.S. patent, for example, gives you a 20-year monopoly right over a design.

But the engineers knew that this wasn’t the right thing to do. They had invented something to protect human welfare and retaining exclusivity meant everyone would have to buy a Volvo to be safe.

Engellau knew that wouldn’t happen.

Yes, they took out a patent on the design to give credit where credit was due, but Volvo then gifted the design to all other rival car companies.

As Forbes (cited below) put it: “Having sponsored the R&D, they gifted their designs to competitors, to encourage mass adoption and to save lives.”

Imagine that.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Volvo’s Gift To The World, Modern Seat Belts Have Saved Millions Of Lives” — Forbes

WTF Fun Fact 12788 – Monopoly, The Landlord’s Game

Charles Darrow is credited with inventing the board game Monopoly, but even he wasn’t aware of the real inventor of the game. Lizzie Magie invented Monopoly, only she called it “The Landlord’s Game.”

The Landlord’s Game becomes Monopoly

In 1932, Charles Darrow was playing a real-estate board game with friends. It wasn’t a game you could buy in a box, but one that was passed between friends who made their own boards. Darrow presumably had no clue it had been invented by a progressive feminist writer named Lizzie Magie nearly three decades earlier. She had called it The Landlord’s Game, but it was colloquially known as “the monopoly game.”

Darrow was so taken with it that he asked for a set of rules and took the idea to Parker Brothers. Then he seems to have taken credit for inventing it altogether, which helped him make millions in royalties.

According to The Guardian (cited below), “one journalist after another asked him how he had managed to invent Monopoly out of thin air – a seeming sleight of hand that had brought joy into so many households. ‘It’s a freak,’ Darrow told the Germantown Bulletin, a Philadelphia paper. ‘Entirely unexpected and illogical.'”

The Real “Monopoly”

Magie wrote about her game in a political magazine in the early 20th century, noting: “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences. It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life’, as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, ie, the accumulation of wealth.”

She created two sets of rules – “an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents,” according to The Guardian’s story about a book on the history of the game titled, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game by Mary Pilon.

Magie had even patented the game and published a version through the Economic Game Company. It was popular among progressive intellectuals, but interestingly enough, the monopolist’s rules became far more popular.

The real Monopoly

Magie wasn’t sure what to think when Parker Brothers approached her about buying the rights to the game for $500 after they were approached by Darrow, but she did sell them. Only later did she find out why they wanted to buy them. And she never received any of the millions in royalties that Darrow did. Nor did she receive any of the credit until recently.

According to The Guardian, “She died in 1948, a widow with no children, whose obituary and headstone made no mention of her game invention. One of her last jobs was at the US Office of Education, where her colleagues knew her only as an elderly typist who talked about inventing games.”

Today, Parker Brothers is owned by Hasbro, which still credits Darrow with inventing the game in 1935. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The secret history of Monopoly: the capitalist board game’s leftwing origins” — The Guardian

WTF Fun Fact 12787 – Debbie Stevens’ Kidney Chaos

Debbie Stevens’ kidney donation didn’t end in the most heartwarming way. However, many of the memes about her story you may see online don’t tell the whole story.

Stevens offers a kidney

Snopes (cited below) scoped out the whole story and found that shortened versions of the story are “mostly true,” however. She did donate a kidney to save her boss, and she was fired afterward.

It all started when the Long Island Atlantic Automotive Group employee heard her boss, Jacqueline Brucia, was unwell in October 2010. The two had a conversation about it and Stevens offered Brucia her kidney, to which she allegedly replied “you never know, I may have to take you up on that offer one day.”

In January 2011, Brucia followed up on the offer. However, the pair was not a match. Stevens didn’t donate her kidney directly to her boss, but she is the reason her boss found a match. As Snopes explains: “she agreed to donate it to a stranger in St. Louis, Missouri, setting up a transplant chain that enabled Brucia to receive a better-matched kidney from a donor in San Francisco.”

Debbie Stevens’ kidney complications

Stevens’ surgery took place on Aug. 10, 2011, and resulted in complications that made it difficult for her to return to her old job and perform all of the tasks she once did, such as lifting heavy objects.

According to Snopes’ investigation of the lawsuit and settlement: “When she returned to work in September (under pressure from Brucia, she alleged) she was treated curtly by Brucia, who allegedly refused to provide accommodations for these and other medical issues. Brucia is alleged to have ignored, for example, a doctor’s order that she not lift heavy objects, and she required Stevens to get permission before using the restroom. Allegedly in response to complaints Stevens made regarding harassment from Brucia, the company’s management transferred her to another dealership, where she was, her lawyer argued, similarly denied accommodations and put in a position for which she was less qualified. Atlantic Automotive Group fired Stevens for ‘performance issues’ just a few weeks after her lawyer sent a complaint to the company in March 2012. Following several depositions and rounds of discovery, both parties agreed to settle on Sept. 30, 2014.”

Legal jeopardy

While we will never know the real reason Stevens was fired, she did have enough of a case to sue her employer under the federal American Disabilities Act (ADA).

But, in the end, they settled, and Atlantic Automotive Group did not have to publicly address the reasons behind the termination. They did, however, have to pay up. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Did a Woman Get Fired After Donating a Kidney on Her Boss’ Behalf?” — Snopes

WTF Fun Fact 12786 – Endless Albatross Flying

It seems impossible, but albatrosses can go years without ever landing on the ground.

Albatrosses get a bad rap. They’ve long been a metaphor for a psychological burden that’s difficult to escape. This originated not in any real story but in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner published in 1798.

In the poem, an albatross flies out with a ship heading to sea. But the mariner shoots it with a crossbow. Since the albatross is normally a sign of good luck, the action curses him and his crew, who tie a dead albatross around his neck.

But what’s so great about an albatross

Albatrosses are large seabirds whose wingspans can reach over 10 feet. The “great albatrosses,” the wandering and royal albatrosses, have the widest wingspans—ten feet or more—of any living bird.

The albatross’ flying forte

According to Smithsonian Magazine (cited below): “Albatrosses are masters of soaring flight, able to glide over vast tracts of ocean without flapping their wings. So fully have they adapted to their oceanic existence that they spend the first six or more years of their long lives (which last upwards of 50 years) without ever touching land.”

Who knew an animal could fly, move, or even glide that long?!

The albatross’ future

Sadly, albatrosses are endangered – in fact, Smithsonian Magazine reports that they’re “one of the most threatened families of birds on earth. All but 2 of the 21 albatross species recognized by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature are described as vulnerable, endangered or, in the case of the Amsterdam and Chatham albatrosses, critically endangered. The scientists hope that the data they gather may save some species from extinction.”

The birds mate for life, but reproduction is a two-step process that requires the right conditions and a long time to produce an egg. Once it hatches, predators abound.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “The Amazing Albatrosses” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Facts 12785 – Dogs Are Family

A 2017 survey from Rover.com found that Americans are really fond of their dogs. In fact, “dog people” tend to prefer their pets over people at times.

People think of dogs as family

Aside from the finding that 54% of dog owners said they would consider ending a romantic relationship if their dog didn’t like their partner, the report also noted that:

24% of dog owners make up songs to sing to their dogs
29% share more pictures online of their dogs than of friends and family
47% of those with a significant other admit they’d find it harder to leave their dog for a week than their human partner

Other furry findings

According to Rover.com’s report on their findings, there are 54 million households in the U.S. wth dogs.

  • 94% of dog owners consider their dog a part of the family
  • 56% greet their dog first when they return home before greeting the rest of the family.
  • 78% would include their dog in family moments like marriage proposals, holiday cards, and even vacations
  • 56 percent% have celebrated their dog’s birthday

Being a dog owner is even good for our health. “Dog ownership increases leisure time and physical activity by nearly 70 percent.”

According to Rover pet lifestyle expert Brandie Gonzales, “Young Americans are less likely to be homeowners or parents than previous generations, but one category they lead in is pet ownership. They shower their dogs with attention and splurge on expensive gifts because their dog is their best friend, and they want to be their dog’s best friend too.”

Millennials may have killed department stores and traditional marriage, but they sure were a boon for the animal rescue industry! At least one thing has remained stable over time – dogs are still man’s best friend.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Rover.com Reveals New Research on ‘Dog People'” — Rover.com

WTF Fun Fact 12784 – Steve Jobs’ First iPhone Call

When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone, he made a historic phone call. We’re not sure what he was thinking at the time, but he got a bit cheeky when making his decision about who to call and what to say.

And it turns out the first iPhone call was a prank call to Starbucks.

The first iPhone call

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to a crowd in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. He opened up Google Maps on the phone and located the nearest Starbucks.

On the other end was Ying Hang “Hannah” Zhang. “How may I help you?” she asked.

“Yes, I’d like to order 4,000 lattes to go, please,” Jobs replied.

It was a potentially momentous occasion, had the order been filled. But I think we all know that no Starbucks can make that many lattes at a moment’s notice.

And it turns out Jobs was just yanking her chain.

“No, just kidding. Wrong number. Goodbye!” he said as he hung up.

Technically, it was the second call

If you want to get technical, this was the first impromptu call on an iPhone. According to Fast Company (cited below): “His call to the Starbucks that day was the first real public phone call made from an iPhone in history. Sure, Jobs had held a conference chat earlier in his presentation with Apple executives Jony Ive and Phil Schiller–but that call was prearranged and heavily scripted, no different than the dozens if not hundreds of calls they would’ve made during rehearsals, or the likely thousands of calls performed while testing the device prior to its announcement.”

Funny enough, people who know this fact still call up their local Starbucks today and try to order 4000 lattes in honor of Jobs.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Because Of Steve Jobs’s First Public iPhone Call, Starbucks Still Gets Orders For 4,000 Lattes” — FastCompany