History

Weird history facts all gathered right here under our history category.  Once you have had your fill of history facts head over to our random fact generator to learn more random factoids!

WTF Fun Fact 12665 – The Initials On the Moon

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Eugene Cernan walked on the moon twice, during the Apollo 10 and Apollo 17 missions. The Apollo 17 mission, which took place from December 7–19, 1972 was NASA’s final Apollo mission and the last time a human was on the moon. Cernan boarded last, making him the last man to set foot on the moon’s surface.

During Apollo 17, Cernan and his fellow astronaut, Harrison Schmitt spent 22 hours and 6 minutes outside, and they still hold the record for the longest extravehicular activity on the moon.

Cernan then drove the lunar rover about a mile away from the takeoff site so it could photograph the ship’s take-off the following day. Before he walked back to the lunar lander, he wrote in his autobiography that he knelt by the rover and drew his daughter Tracy’s initials into the moon dust.

Cernan spoke these words as he climbed into the lunar lander and left the moon:

“As I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I’d like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus–Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.”

The crew returned safely to Earth on Dec. 19, 1972. –  WTF fun fact

Source: “Eugene Cernan: Last Man on the Moon” — Space.com

WTF Fun Fact 12663 – The Harlem Hellfighters

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Plenty of history buffs think they know all there is to know about WWI, but it’s rare to meet someone who can tell you much about the all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment of the New York Army National Guard. Despite facing racism at every turn, they still fought for their country.

They called themselves the “Black Rattlers.” Even the French had a nickname for these brave heroes – the “Men of Bronze.”

Interestingly, it was the name the enemy forces in Germany gave them that stuck – the “Harlem Hellfighters.” They fought in the most hellish places on earth – down in the trenches – and they fought there longer than any American fighters.

And while stories of their heroism spread throughout the world, they were never genuinely rewarded for it. They came home to the same racism they left.

All-Black regiments were rare at the time – the military needed men but was hesitant to work alongside Black men. But New York’s governor at the time, Charles Whitman, agreed to form a unit, something Black political leaders had to fight for! Whitman put them under the command of his former campaign manager and former Nebraska National Guard colonel, William Hayward.

First known as the 5th New York National Guard Regiment, the youngest member was just 16. Hayward recruited both black and white officers to the unit, ensuring the white soldiers were ready to act as teammates, despite the potential for racial tension.

But in the eyes of the larger National Guard, they were not equal. They were given no resources to train with – no uniforms and no weapons. They practiced in their street clothes and with broomsticks.

Then, their real training began at a training ground in the Deep South – the most unfriendly place for Black soldiers, even if they were helping to fight for democracy in the same country as the white soldiers by their sides.

In Spartanburg, South Carolina, they were asked to deal with racism without regard or retaliation as they trained to potentially give their lives. At the same time, the mayor of Spartanburg declared:

“If any of those colored soldiers go in any of our soda stores and the like and ask to be served, they’ll be knocked down. We have our customs down here, and we aren’t going to alter them.”

The unit was forged in the fire of those racist taunts and threats in the Deep South. When they set for Europe in January 1918, they became the 369th Infantry Regiment.

At first, they were given no combat duties, only menial tasks. But the French needed more soldiers. The “Black Rattlers,” as they had named themselves, went into battle under French command and before any white unit, on April 15, 1918. Their heroics earned them accolades in France, including the Croix de Guerre.

There are dozens of stories of their bravery, and more are coming out as historians begin to focus on the evidence of what they ensured. The “Harlem Hellfighters,” as the Germans named them, spent 191 days in combat, which is longer than any other American unit.

But they didn’t all come back alive – over half of them were killed or wounded defending their country. –WTF Fun Facts

Source: “The Story Of The Harlem Hellfighters, The Overlooked Black Heroes Of World War I” — All That’s Interesting

WTF Fun Fact 12662 – Cleopatra Was Not An Egyptian By Birth

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Some think of Cleopatra as the quintessential Egyptian. After all, she ruled for 21 years, and both her skills of seduction and political prowess on behalf of her territory were known throughout the world.

However, Egypt belonged to the empire created by Alexander the Great (who, incidentally, had a sister named Cleopatra) and was subsequently ruled by a family called the Ptolemys. The Ptolemaic dynasty was Macedonian, so while Cleopatra was born in Egypt, she likely had no Egyptian blood.

In the end, her ethnicity makes very little difference other than to note that the Egyptians were not being ruled by their own people at the time. There is at least some slight chance that because the ethnicity of mothers was not recorded after the time of her great-grandfather, Cleopatra could have conceivable had some Egyptian blood in her if she had been born of a concubine to the king. But we will never know for sure. The recorded wives of Macedonian kings were all of Macedonian descent.

Among the many amazing things about the powerful ruler is that Cleopatra was the only ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty ever to bother to learn the Egyptian language.

Cleopatra herself did not maintain the Macedonian bloodline since her children were fathered by two famous Romans, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

Egypt became part of the Roman Empire shortly after Cleopatra’s death. – WTF Fun Facts

Source: “Cleopatra’s true racial background (and does it really matter?)” — Oxford University Press Blog

WTF Fun Fact 12661 – The Beatles Refuse To Play In Segregated Florida Stadium

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The Beatles had it written into their contract in the 1960s that they would never play in segregated stadiums.

The first time they encountered the problem was in Jacksonville, Florida in 1964 when they found out that their 32,0000-seat show at the Gator Bowl was going to be race-segregated. They said they’d rather lose the money than play for a segregated audience, forcing the city to back off the policy. It was the height of Beatlemania, and the band agreed to play once they desegregated the stadium.

“We never play to segregated audiences and we aren’t going to start now,” said John Lennon. “I’d sooner lose our appearance money.”

But The Beatles didn’t want to have to back out of contracts with the possibility of losing money anymore, so they had it written into their contract that a crowd had to be desegregated for them to play a show and that they would still be paid if they found out at the last minute that the city hadn’t heeded this obligation. – WTF Fun Facts

Source: “The Beatles banned segregated audiences, contract shows” — BBC News

WTF Fun Fact 12660 – America’s First Female Mayor

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America’s first woman mayor was put on the ballet by the men in Argonia, Kansas to run for the Prohibition Party.

Susanna Kinsey’s family came to Kansas from Kentucky. There, she met her husband Lewis Salter while attending the Kansas State Agricultural College. The couple moved to Argonia where they raised a family and Susanna became an officer in the local Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

As a joke, the men in her town added her name to the ballot in 1887 for mayor and probably regretted their decision when she surprised them by winning 2/3 of the vote. They may have thought the joke was clever, but they were not. Women had earned the right to vote in city elections that very same year.

The other thing Argonia men failed to realize about Salter was that at 27, she actually had a lot of knowledge about politics. She was the daughter of the town’s very first mayor and the daughter-in-law of Kansas’ former lieutenant governor.

Salter performed her duties but never sought elected office. –  WTF fun facts

Source: “Susanna Madora Salter” – Kansapedia

WTF Fun Fact 12659 – The Dancing Plague

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The summer of 1518 was a weird one in part of the Holy Roman Empire. A plague of sorts broke out in July in the city of Strasbourg, and its main symptom was giving people the uncontrollable urge to dance.

It all began with a woman called Frau Troffea, who was seen stepping out into the street and twisting and twirling all alone to no music at all. Multiple sources say she danced for a week.

When others joined her, it wasn’t to keep the party going. They couldn’t help themselves. They danced until they literally couldn’t dance anymore – either because their feet were broken or bleeding or because they passed out or even died of a heart attack.

It’s said that by August, nearly 400 because afflicted with the mysterious and destructive desire to dance themselves to death. By September, officials had taken the remaining dancers to a mountain shrine…allegedly to pray away their affliction.

To say doctors handled it poorly is both an understatement and a bit unfair, considering the world had no germ theory of disease yet. Some blamed foot, others called it a “hysteria,” and some local physicians blamed it on “hot blood” that made bodies try to gyrate out the fever. They even had stages built, and professional dancers brought in to try to ease whatever was happening in people’s bodies and minds. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work.

In what probably seemed like a good idea at the time but feels a bit cringy to think about now, the town hired some backup musicians. That didn’t work either (and it probably made things worse).

A dance marathon sounds like fun and games until people start dying, and reports say they did by the dozens.

Similar dance plagues happened throughout the empire, but none were as extensive and well-documented as the 1518 incident.

The best explanation we have is that it was such a stressful time in Strasbourg that summer (disease and famine were rampant) that it triggered hysteria around the city that manifested as dancing because of St. Vitus, a Catholic saint people believed had the power to curse them with a dancing plague. –  WTF fun facts

Source: “What was the dancing plague of 1518?” — History.com

WTF Fun Fact 12658 – An Independence Day Coincidence

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The 4th of July may just be the most common day for U.S. presidents to die.

As America celebrated 50 years of independence on July 4, 1826, it also mourned the passing of two of the men responsible for it. 83-year-old Thomas Jefferson and 90-year-old John Adams died just hours apart on that day. And despite their advanced ages, it came as a shock to people, who found it very suspicious (apparently, we didn’t need the internet to start conspiracy theories).

People didn’t necessarily suspect foul play – they were not anywhere near one another at the time. In fact, some people found it to be the work of the divine. In a eulogy, Daniel Webster called it “proofs that our country and its benefactors are objects of His care.”

It is a bigger coincidence than one might normally feel comfortable with, however. It’s one thing to die on the same day and quite another for that day to be such a momentous occasion.

If there was another other going on, it may have simply been that both were very ill and on the verge of death but tried their best to hang on to see that 50th anniversary.

If you’re a fan of weird coincidences, you may also be interested to know that James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, also died on July 4 (but in 1831). And Zachary Taylor is presumed to have caught cholera on July 4th immediately following the holiday festivities in1850 (though he did not die until July 9th). – WTF Fun Facts

Source: “Two Presidents Died on the Same July 4: Coincidence or Something More?” – History.com

WTF Fun Fact 12656 – Wilmer McLean’s Role in the Civil War

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People say Wilmer McLean “was perhaps the only man who ever had the first major pitched battle of a war fought in his front yard and the surrender signed four years later in his parlor.”

It’s a strange fact that few people know about the Civil War – but it all started and ended at one man’s house.

Wilmer McLean was a grocer from Virginia, but his farm was one of the first places to see artillery fire on July 21, 1861, in what would later become known as the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) in Manassas, Prince William County, Virginia. That’s because it was being used as a headquarters for Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard. McLean swiftly regretted getting involved after a cannonball fell through his kitchen.

That’s when McLean took his family to Appomattox, Virginia, hoping to never see violence again (and to headquarter his own business supplying sugar to the Confederate Army in a more strategic location).

While he had long retired from the military himself, the war found him again as the Confederates lost and General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant. All they needed was a safe place to meet. And that’s when McLean got a second knock on his new door on April 9, 1865.

A messenger requested to use his home – his parlor, to be exact – for the surrender. McLean is supposed to have said, “The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor.” That’s where Lee surrendered to Grant and effectively ended the U.S. Civil War.

McLean may have seen history twice, but his house got ransacked both times as Army members made off with his furniture, knowing it would be a part of history. However, they handed him money as they did it. For example, Major General Edward Ord paid McLean $40 (equivalent to around $700 today) as he made off with the table on which the document of surrender was signed.

If you want to see what McLean’s house looked like before that event, it has been recreated at the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. – WTF Fun Facts

Source: “Key Civilians at Appomattox” – National Park Service

WTF Fun Fact 12655 – Alexander the Great and His Horse

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King Alexander the Great spent his entire adult life trying to conquer the world on behalf of Macedonia, and by his side, nearly the entire time was his horse, Bucephalus.

The ancient writer Plutarch wrote much of what we know about the life of Alexander, including the story about how the 12-year-old future king won his noble steed.

A horse dealer tried charging Alexander’s father a very high sum for the horse (to be fair, his father was King Philip II of Macedon). No one had seemed it a good deal since the horse could not be tamed. But young Alexander saw some potential and made a deal with the horse seller – if he could tame it, he could keep it. If not, he would pay the high sum.

Of course, we know where this story goes – Alexander subdued the horse and then rode it into nearly every battle for decades until the horse died during a campaign in India.

As someone who felt he had the right to conquer the world, Alexander left his name all over it, including over 70 cities named Alexandria.

But he loved his horse Bucephalus so much that when it died in 326 BCE, he named a city Bucephala.

The ancient writer Pliny the Elder also wrote about the event:

King Alexander had also a very remarkable horse; it was called Bucephalus, either on account of the fierceness of its aspect, or because it had the figure of a bull’s head marked on its shoulder. It is said, that he was struck with its beauty when he was only a boy, and that it was purchased from the stud of Philonicus, the Pharsalian, for thirteen talents. When it was equipped with the royal trappings, it would suffer no one except Alexander to mount it, although at other times it would allow anyone to do so. A memorable circumstance connected with it in battle is recorded of this horse; it is said that when it was wounded in the attack upon Thebes, it would not allow Alexander to mount any other horse. Many other circumstances, also, of a similar nature, occurred respecting it; so that when it died, the king duly performed its obsequies, and built around its tomb a city, which he named after it” The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2, translation by John Bostock, Henry Thomas Riley.

– WTF Fun Facts

Source: “Bucephalus: The Horse of Alexander the Great” — ThoughtCo.

WTF Fun Fact 12653 – The Amazing Nellie Bly

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Nellie Bly was one of the first female investigative journalists. The daughter of a county judge, she was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran. But she borrowed the name Nellie Bly from an American minstrel song because women never wrote under their real names.

Bly searched for a job for months in NYC before sneaking into The New York World’s headquarters to pitch a story.

In order to inform Americans about the horrific conditions inside the country’s psychiatric hospitals (called “insane asylums” at the time), she volunteered to become a patient on the condition that The World would send a lawyer to get her out after ten days.

Her riveting account was the beginning of investigative journalism, and her book Ten Days in a Mad-House was widely read and awarded.

But she didn’t rest on her laurels after that. Instead, her next project was to travel around the world in 72 days (in 1889-1890, so there were no airplanes!) with just one bag. Of course, this was designed to challenge Phileas Fogg’s Around the World in 80 Days.

After her successful and highly-publicized trips, the papers called her the “best-known and most widely talked of woman on earth.”

At age 50, she reported from the front lines in Austria during WWI, interviewing soldiers on the battlefield and in the trenches.

While she married a millionaire, she ended up buried in a pauper’s grave after dying of pneumonia at age 57. That’s because she spent all of her time and money helping people out of poverty. In 1978, the New York Press Club funded a small and simple headstone with her name in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery. However, today, she also has a memorial on Roosevelt Island, the site of the asylum where she did the first investigative work that made her famous. – WTF Fun Facts

Source: “10 Facts About Nellie Bly” — History Hit

WTF Fun Fact 12652 – Stalin’s Penchant for Editing Photos

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It’s a good thing Stalin didn’t have Instagram, or he would have spent a lot of time updating it.

Josef Stalin’s Great Purge was his way of systematically eradicating members of the Marxism–Leninist party who were in his inner circle when he thought they had betrayed them. And he did eradicate them quite literally (by firing squad).

But he also used a propaganda technique that erased many historical records of them – he had them edited out of photos. In that way, Stalin was a photoshop pro before Photoshop was born.

According to the writers at History.com:

“After consolidating his power in 1929, Stalin declared war on Soviets he considered tainted by their connections to the political movements that had come before him. Beginning in 1934 he wiped out an ever-changing group of political “enemies.” An estimated 750,000 people died during the Great Purge, as it is now known, and more than a million others were banished to remote areas to do hard labor in gulags.”

And of the photos, they noted:

“Stalin used a large group of photo retouchers to cut his enemies out of supposedly documentary photographs. One such erasure was Nikola Yezhov, a secret police official who oversaw Stalin’s purges. For a while Yezhov worked at Stalin’s right hand, interrogating, falsely accusing and ordering the execution of thousands of Communist Party officials. But in 1938, Yezhov fell from Stalin’s favor after being usurped by one of his own deputies. He was denounced, secretly arrested, tried in a secret court, and executed.”

The more enemies Stalin made, the more photos needed to be retouched. In fact, in some group photos, only Stalin himself remains.

Stalin even went so far as to doctor photos to have himself inserted into historical moments. Oh, and he had people make him look taller and more handsome as well. – WTF fun facts

Source: “How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalin’s Great Purge” — History.com

WTF Fun Fact 12651 – The Military Researchers Who Turned a Cat Into a Phone

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Have you ever wanted to turn a cat into a telephone? We haven’t either. But in 1929, two Princeton University researchers gave it a go anyway. Apparently, they weren’t cat lovers.

Professor Ernest Glen Wever and his research assistant Charles William Bray performed the experiment that involved a live but unconscious (thankfully!) cat in order to see how the auditory nerve perceives sound.

That’s a fancy way of saying they sedated a cat, opened its skull, accessed its auditory nerve, and attached a telephone wire to it. The other end of the wire was connected to a telephone receiver.

While many of us may turn up our noses at the thought of animal research, it has saved and improved many human lives. Bray and Wever weren’t even interested in making a cat into a telephone for any practical purpose (not that we could even think of one anyway). Instead, they were interested in the research methods used to run the tests, which paved the way for more sophisticated research on human hearing and made contributions to devices called cochlear implants that convert sound vibrations into electrical signals in the brain for deaf people.

Despite not caring much about creating a cat phone, the experiment did work, and Bray was able to speak into the cat’s ears while Wever listened through the receiver 50 feet away in a soundproof room.

Princeton’s Mudd Manuscript Library wrote a blog describing it in more detail. They say:

“The common notion during this time was that the frequency of the response of a sensory nerve is correlated to the intensity of the stimulus. In the case of the auditory nerve, as a sound becomes louder, the frequency or pitch of the sound received by the ear should be higher. When Bray made a sound with a certain frequency, Wever heard the sound from the receiver at the same frequency. As Bray increased the pitch of the sound, the frequency of the sound Wever heard also increased. This experiment proved that the frequency of the response in the auditory nerve is correlated to the frequency of the sound.”

Wever and Bray received the first Howard Crosby Warren Medal of Society by the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1936 for the experiment.

Later, both men entered military research. Bray became the Associate Research Director of the U.S. Air Force Human Resources Research and then served on the civilian psychological research team for the National Defense Research Council and the Navy. Wever became a consultant to the National Research Council on anti-submarine warfare.

And cats worldwide likely rejoiced that they found other things to do. –WTF fun facts

Source: “The Cat Telephone” — Mudd Manuscript Library Blog

WTF Fun Fact 12650 – The Largest Stadium Ever Built

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Today, the world’s largest stadium/arena is Narendra Modi Stadium, which holds 132,000 spectators. But that’s a far cry from the largest one ever built. For that, you have to go back to ancient Rome’s Circus Maximus.

The Circus Maximus was a chariot racing stadium and the largest stadium in the entire Roman Empire. To this day, no one has ever built a bigger enclosed stadium.

Built in the 7th or 6th century BCE, it was also used for festivals and other competitions. It was big enough to hold wild animal hunts that people could watch from their seats.

The Circus Maximus was 621 meters long and 118 meters wide. Historians estimate that it could hold an amazing 250,000 people at once (some say it may have been closer to 300,000). Even more could watch from the surrounding hillsides. There is seating for around 150,000.

While you may be more familiar with the Roman Colosseum, by comparison, that stadium only ever held 50,000 spectators.

In any case, it’s hard to imagine a city accommodating that many visitors all at once!

As Christianity took over Rome, the stadium was used less. By the 6th century AD, it was no longer in use. The space it sat on is now a public park and little of the ruins remain because of a combination of theft of the building materials and degradation from flooding and the passage of time. However, concerts have been held on the site, including shows by Genesis and The Rolling Stones. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Circus Maximus – History and facts of the largest circus in Rome” — Rome.net

WTF Fun Fact 12648 – When Einstein Turned Down a Presidency

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Albert Einstein was asked to be president of Israel in 1952. He was considered to be the greatest Jew alive and offered both Israeli citizenship and a chance to continue his research. But he turned it down. Turns out, he just wasn’t that into people around people.

The request read:

Embassy of Israel
November 17, 1952

“Dear Professor [Albert] Einstein:

The bearer of this letter is Mr. David Goitein of Jerusalem who is now serving as Minister at our Embassy in Washington. He is bringing you the question which Prime Minister Ben Gurion asked me to convey to you, namely, whether you would accept the Presidency of Israel if it were offered you by a vote of the Knesset. Acceptance would entail moving to Israel and taking its citizenship. The Prime Minister assures me that in such circumstances complete facility and freedom to pursue your great scientific work would be afforded by a government and people who are fully conscious of the supreme significance of your labors.

Mr. Goitein will be able to give you any information that you may desire on the implications of the Prime Minister’s question.

Whatever your inclination or decision may be, I should be deeply grateful for an opportunity to speak with you again within the next day or two at any place convenient for you. I understand the anxieties and doubts which you expressed to me this evening. On the other hand, whatever your answer, I am anxious for you to feel that the Prime Minister’s question embodies the deepest respect which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons. To this element of personal regard, we add the sentiment that Israel is a small State in its physical dimensions, but can rise to the level of greatness in the measure that it exemplifies the most elevated spiritual and intellectual traditions which the Jewish people has established through its best minds and hearts both in antiquity and in modern times. Our first President, as you know, taught us to see our destiny in these great perspectives, as you yourself have often exhorted us to do.

Therefore, whatever your response to this question, I hope that you will think generously of those who have asked it, and will commend the high purposes and motives which prompted them to think of you at this solemn hour in our people’s history.

With cordial wishes,
Abba Eban“

In his reply he wrote:

“I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel [to serve as President], and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions. For these reasons alone I should be unsuited to fulfill the duties of that high office, even if advancing age was not making increasing inroads on my strength. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Offering the Presidency of Israel to Albert Einstein” — Virtual Jewish Library

WTF Fun Fact 12647 – The Voynich Manuscript

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The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious book written in the early 15th century written in a language no one knows or can trace. Yet it’s 250-pages long.

The document resides in Yale University library’s special collections. It contains a mix of Latin and Arabic letters, and no one has ever been able to decipher it, though many have tried.

Recently, a German Egyptologist claims to have deciphered it, though it’s not the first time someone has made the claim.

According to The Art Newspaper:

“The actual translation of the Voynich-book will need a couple of years of work, even if specialists in the Hebrew language, who are well versed in medieval Hebrew and the terminology of botanical and medical texts, take over the analysis,” Hannig writes. “The character of the script, the pronunciation which one needs to get used to, the peculiarity and the vocabulary of the period will cause a lot of trouble even to a native speaker of [Hebrew]. But it will take a few years to translate, and there are few ways to know if the method he’s using is correct”, the German scholar said.

What we do know about the book is that it contains 240 pages of “bear illustrations of plants, floating heads, signs of the zodiac, fantastic creatures (including dragons), castles, women bathing, and astronomical symbols. Scholars have used these illustrations to organize the manuscript’s content into six major sections: botanical, astronomical and astrological, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, and recipes. However, without the ability to read the text, its true content has remained elusive. Even the name of the manuscript’s author remains a mystery.”

The Voynich Manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, who discovered the mysterious book in 1912. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Has Yale’s mysterious Voynich Manuscript finally been deciphered?” — The Art Newspaper

WTF Fun Facts 12645 – The Legacy of Hanns Scharff

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We don’t think of any interrogators as being friendly, much less those used by the Nazis during WWII. But Prussian-bornHanns Scharff became a master interrogator by using an overwhelmingly successful technique that involved using kindness to win the trust of the soldiers he was asked to get information from.

Scharff was due to be sent to the front lines, but shortly before it happened, the Nazis decided that he would be an asset in interrogation because he knew English. He interrogated over 500 prisoners during his service and only failed a couple of dozen times.

Scharff became known internationally, and because he wasn’t considered a war criminal, he wasn’t tried at Nuremberg. In fact, he was able to come to the US in 1948 instead if he agreed to interrogate and testify at the trial of the Air Force pilot Martin J. Monti, who defected to Germany in 1944 and became a Nazi propagandist.

Once in the US, Scharff even met up with some of the men he interrogated in German prisons!

Eventually, Scharff was able to return to his original career as an artist, and more specifically, a mosaic artist and furniture maker. His mosaics can be found in countless government buildings, hotels, colleges, and even Disney World. He created the mosaic at Cinderella’s castle as well as ramps into Epcot Center.

He died in 1992, but his “Scharff Technique” is still taught in the US military. –WTF fun facts

Source: “Hanns Scharff; Creator of L.A., State Capitol Mosaics” — LA Times

WTF Fun Fact 12644 – The Parrot Who Saved a Dead Language

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German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt embarked on a 5-year exploration of North and South America in 1799. His trip was successful, and when he returned home in 1804, he had an extensive collection of plant and animal specimens

Humboldt also took voluminous notes, including some interesting jottings from a trip through Venezuela in 1800 where he spent some time chatting with a local parrot.

According to Mental Floss:

“According to legend, during his exploration of the Orinoco River, Humboldt met and stayed with a local indigenous Carib tribe near the isolated village of Maypures. The tribe, so the story goes, had a number of tame parrots kept in cages around the village, many of which had been taught to speak—although one, Humboldt noted, sounded noticeably different from the rest. When he asked the locals why this parrot sounded so unusual, he was told that it had belonged to a neighboring tribe, who had been the Caribs’ enemies.”

In other words, the parrot was speaking a different language than the rest. And sadly, the parrot was the only speaker left. The rest of the tribe had been wiped out, and not a single native speaker remained. Just the parrot. It was the last vestige of their linguistic culture.

Being the keen observer and recorder, Humboldt wrote down what the parrot sounded like, transcribing the sounds phonetically and coming out with about 40 words from the parrot’s (and the lost tribe’s) vocabulary.

We’ll never know how accurate the language is, but the notebook holds the last of what we have.

Interestingly, in 1997, an artist taught two more parrots to speak the language based on Humboldt’s notebook.

Some think the parrot’s story is mere legend, but Humboldt recounted his trip down the Orinoco river in his Equinoctial Regions of America in great detail and accurately described the Atures tribe that the parrot spoke the language of. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Parrot That Kept A Language Alive” — Mental Floss

WTF Fun Fact 12643 – The First Sad Clown

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Joseph Grimaldi is often hailed as the first modern “clown.” And while people tend to break down into two camps – those who find them funny and those who find them terrifying – Grimaldi’s story is proof that they’ve always been both.

Joseph Grimaldi had a long and illustrious career marked by extreme emotional outbursts. And one of the reasons we know so much about him is because of his well-written biography – by none other than a young newspaper writer named Charles Dickens.

Dickens gave readers some insight into the brutality of Grimaldi’s upbringing, and in particular, his treatment by his father, Guiseppe, a dentist and performer who moved from Italy to England for a career change.

Abusive to all of his children, he capped off his life by demanding that his daughter cut off his head before he was buried in order to receive her inheritance, all because he was terrified of being buried alive.

He wasn’t any more pleasant to his other nine children either, but only Joseph grew up and created the character of the modern clown. While he gave his all on stage, he would often burst into hysterics between acts and pull himself together just in time to entertain during the second act.

When trying to treat his intractable melancholy, he visited a doctor who had an even more depressing prescription: “relaxation and amusement… perhaps sometimes at the theater;—go and see Grimaldi.”

“Alas!” he shouted, ‘”hat is of no avail to me; I am Grimaldi.” –WTF fun facts

Source: “Here We Are Again!—How Joseph Grimaldi Invented the Creepy Clown” — JSTOR Daily