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 12640 – A Presidential Wild Child

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Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth, the eldest child of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, was apparently quite a hoot.

Her mother died just days after she was born, and she was initially raised by her aunt, Anna Roosevelt. But when her father remarried in 1886, she was sent to live with the family and her five half-siblings.

She was intelligent and bold and happy to be in the spotlight as a celebrity first daughter. She made news for such antics as smoking on the White House roof and carrying a pet snake named Emily Spinach in her handbag, sometimes taking her out and wearing the snake around her arm. She also publicly bet on sports races, something ladies of the stature didn’t do at the time.

It appears that her parent wanted to do something about her behavior but felt unable to do so since she was such a darling of the press.

Later in life, she became a political power of her own, marrying a Republican representative from Ohio, but they argued over her support of her father’s Progressive Party politics. However, Alice also wrote a newspaper column condemning some of those, including Rosevelt’s response to The Great Depression. Alice was also vocal in protesting the U.S.’s participation in the League of Nations and had isolationist tendencies – at least up until Pearl Harbor drew the country into WWII.

She was at the center of Washington society for decades after that, hosting the Kennedys, Nixons, and Johnsons.

After having a double mastectomy later in life, she insisted on referring to herself as “Washington’s only topless octogenarian.”

Those who joined her for tea would catch a glimpse of a pillow that read, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”

Alice Roosevelt died at age 96 in 1980. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Alice Roosevelt Longworth” — Theodore Roosevelt Center

WTF Fun Fact 12638 – Drinking Gold To Stay Young

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Humans have always been obsessed with living forever. And, as you may have guessed, we’ve continued to fail.

The practice of drinking cold goes all the way back to ancient China and Egypt but came back into high fashion in the 16th-century in France. Members of the court of King Henry II tried different tonics with gold to reduce wrinkles and stave off death, but, of course, it killed many of them.

De Poitiers was very influential, and despite her choice of cocktail ingredients, she did live to be 66. According to Atlas Obscura: “Brantôme, the French historian, once wrote about meeting de Poitiers six months before she passed away at the age of 66. Though he admitted to not knowing much about the ‘potable gold and other drugs’ she took daily, which contributed to her ‘fine appearance,’ he quickly added: ‘I believe that if this lady had lived another hundred years she would not have aged … in her face, so well-composed it was.'”

Gold drinking was perhaps even more popular in the medieval period after an alchemist devised a method for dissolving solid gold into a liquid. The drinkable gold was called aurum potabile (or aurum potable), and it was advertised as a medicinal drink that could cure everything from epilepsy to manic episodes.

One of the oddest recipes comes from Pope John XXI, who, in In 1578, wrote a recipe for an elixir of youth that included “taking gold, silver, iron, copper, iron, steel, and lead filings, then placing that mixture ‘in the urine of a virgin child on the first day,’ then white wine, fennel juice, egg whites, in a nursing woman’s milk, in red wine, then again in egg whites, in that order, for the following six days,” according to Atlas Obscura.

Bottoms up! – WTF fun facts

Source: “Drinking Gold Was a Grisly Anti-Aging Trend of 16th-Century France” — Atlas Obscura

WTF Fun Fact 12635 – A Pre-Raphaelite “Supermodel”

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Elizabeth “Lizzie” SiddaI wasn’t beautiful by conventional 19th-century standards. Tall, thin, and red-headed, she worked in a hat factory, making her pale skin and gauntness even more striking. She wouldn’t have been noticed as beautiful at the time except that she caught the eye of Walter Howell Deverell in the winter of 1849. He was a member of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters trying to bring back Renaissance traditions.

It turns out all of the painters all found her to be a perfect muse. Siddal eventually became a member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement herself as an artist and poet.

Being an artist’s model was a scandalous profession at the time, but it was Deverell’s wealthy mother who arrived to ask Siddal’s mother for permission for her son to paint her. Apparently agreeing that it was a safer profession, she was allowed to model part-time.

Deverell painted her as Viola in Twelfth Night, Holman Hunt painted her for A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Priest from the Persecution of the Druids (1850), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted her for the first time in 1850 in Rossovestita. Siddal and Rossetti eventually got engaged, and he painted her thousands of times, even becoming jealous and refusing to let others paint her after a while.

According to Siddal’s biographer Lucinda Hawksley:

“Although today Lizzie Siddal’s willowy build, gaunt features and lustrous copper-coloured hair are considered signs of beauty, in the 1850s being very thin was not considered sexually attractive, and red hair was described by one female journalist as “social suicide”. Through her modelling work and the success of the paintings she appeared in, Lizzie helped change the public opinion of beauty.”

Siddal became most famous as the muse for Millais’s Ophelia. –WTF fun facts

Source: “The tragedy of art’s greatest supermodel” — BBC Culture

WTF Fun Fact 12632 – The Penal Treadmill

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If spending time on the treadmill feels like cruel and unusual punishment, that’s because it was designed to be. Prisoners were supposed to learn from their sweat, and the machines would typically power a mill or a water pump of some sort.

The “treadwheel” was invented by engineer William Cubitt and was first installed in London’s Brixton Prison. Prisoners would press down their feet on steps (sounds more like an elliptical!) that would cause a wheel to turn and ground corn.

Now, maybe you think it wasn’t so bad if you choose to walk on a treadmill today, but not only were there partitions between the (up to 24!) prisoners on the treadmill, but they were put on the machine for hours—ten hours in the summer and 7 in the winter.

When the British began to “reform” their prisons, they were concerned that the poor would use them to get free meals and a place to sleep, so they felt like they needed to deter them. Hence the punishment.

Eventually, the treadmills were no longer used to power machines and were merely an instrument of punishment…or some would (and did) say torture.

By 1842, 109 out of 200 prisons in the UK were making prisoners “work the treadmill.” But eventually, people began to see them for what they were, and by 1901, only 13 remained. Of course, they also exported the idea to America, which had four prison treadmills.

Eventually, prisons converted their work to a factory model, ostensibly to teach prisoners practical skills while incarcerated in the name of rehabilitation.

According to JSTOR Daily:

“It resurfaced in 1913 with a U.S. patent for a “training-machine.” In the 1960s, the American mechanical engineer William Staub created a home fitness machine called the PaceMaster 600. He began manufacturing home treadmills in New Jersey. (He used it often himself, right up until the months before his death at the age of 96.) Now, it’s the top selling piece of exercise equipment in the U.S.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “Treadmills Were Meant to Be Atonement Machines” — JSTOR Daily

WTF Fun Fact 12630 – Jack Ryan, Missile and Doll Engineer

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In his relatively short life (he died at just 65), engineer Jack W. Ryan designed and co-designed quite a few things that changed the world. That includes such dissimilar things as Raytheon’s Sparrow and Hawk missiles, Barbie, and Chatty Cathy.

According to a biography and an exposé on Mattel written after his death, he was also surrounded by scandal and just generally not a wholesome guy. That’s hard to put aside since some of that may have influenced his career trajectory, but it’s still the case that he played a significant role in both military technology and the toy company Mattel. Which is kind of weird, right?

As vice president of research and design (and later a consultant) for Mattel Inc., he helped design Hot Wheels as well. But when it came to Barbie, it was his unique engineering that helped seal the deal – he’s the reason she can bend her legs and turn her arms. It is, ahem, probably worth noting that Mattel was sued over the design because Ryan “borrowed” it from a German “adult” doll called Bild-Lilli. He knew he had to make it less provocative, but it does explain a bit about why Barbie might look so…adult.

Of course, let’s not forget that the IDEA for Barbie belongs to Ruth Handler, the president of Mattel. She was the one who came up with the idea of a 3-dimensional life-like doll for kids. She was also once indicted for influencing the company’s stock price too, so let’s just say that toy companies aren’t the best place to let your children hang out. Stick to the toy stores. –WTF fun facts

Source: “JACK RYAN DIES; BARBIE DOLL AND MISSILE INVENTOR” — The Buffalo News

WTF Fun Fact 12627 – The Face of Resusci Annie

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If you ever learned CPR, there’s at least a fair chance that you learned it using a life-sized mannequin called Rescue Annie (aka Resusci Anne, L’Inconnue de la Seine (Unknown Woman of Seine), the Mona Lisa of Seine, and The Most Kissed Girl in the World). We use these large dolls so that we don’t have to practice on each other, which is a good thing since CPR can result in broken ribs.

While we never really thought about how she got her face, 2 dental students in the UK decided to do some research a few years back and find out just how Rescue Annie got made. And the answers are creepier than we could have imagined.

The face of Annie is the death mask of a woman who drowned and was never identified.

In the late 19th century, the body of a girl was pulled out of the River Seine in Paris. An examination of her face led to guesses that she was roughly 16 years old, but no one could identify her.

The body was put on public display in the hopes that someone could identify here, which was common practice at the time (and a popular attraction). People were more than a little curious about the placid-looking teen, who came to be known as “L’Inconnue de la Seine (the Unknown Woman of the Seine).” 

The pathologist who performed the girl’s autopsy had a model maker create a death mask for her. It was a plaster cast tmade by Lorenzi model makers, the same people who eventually decided the mask was too good not to be shared, so they replicated it in bulk and sold copies. You can still purchase “Noyée [Drowned Woman] de la Seine” from them.

So how did a death mask come to be the face of a CPR doll? Well, in the 1950s when Archer Gordon decided to make a CPR dummy for medical students to practice on, he called on toymaker Åsmund Laerdal, who had seen a copy of the mask and decided to use it for the face.

The website calls her Resusci Anne, a name that just somehow stuck. The company estimates that roughly 300 million people have laid their lips on a version of the doll to learn mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Another fun fact? Michael Jackson’s line “Annie are you okay?” in the song “Smooth Criminal“ is an homage to the doll. In CPR training, trainees are told to check for a response in the patient by asking “Annie are you okay.”  – WTF fun facts

Source: “How a girl’s ‘death mask’ from the 1800s became the face of CPR dolls” — Live Science

WTF Fun Fact 12626 – Joseph Ducreux’s “Meme” Paintings

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The painting by Joseph Ducreux that you may have seen in memes is a legit 18th-century painting titled Self-Portrait in the Guise of a Mocker. It happens to be a self-portrait and a rather unique style. At the time, paintings took enormous time to make, so goofy “selfies” might have seemed a waste.

However, Ducreux was keenly interested in the pseudoscience of physiognomy, the attempt to assess a person’s character from their facial features and expressions. Hence the interesting poses he struck in his self-portraits.

But Joseph Ducreux was a skilled oil painter. A miniature of Marie Antoinette he made in 1789 won him a baronetcy and the title of “First Painter to the Queen” of France.

Of course, his place in high society made him unpopular during the French Revolution, so he hid out in London for a bit. That’s where he created the last portrait of Kind Louis XVI before the royal was beheaded.

He returned to France after the revolution and continued his career as a painter, indulging in the self-portrait series at the time.

They may look silly, but to Ducreux, they served a scientific purpose. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Quirky Self-Portraits of 18th Century Painter Joseph Ducreux” — Open Culture

WTF Fun Fact 12625 – The Hall of Records

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We’ve all seen pictures of Mount Rushmore National Memorial. There aren’t many places in the U.S. to see giant sculptures carved into the side of mountains.

This sculpture happens to be in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. The 60-foot-high monument depicts U.S. presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. It was completed in 1941, planned and executed by a man named Gutzon Borglum (his son, Lincoln, helped oversee the site).

You might not know that Borglum thought it needed a little something extra in the form of a written description. Specifically, he wanted to carve an inscription of the nine most important events in U.S. history from 1776 to 1906, roughly 80 by 120 feet in size. And he wanted it to be in the shape of the Louisiana Purchase.

His plan to add some extra flair failed since the text could not be made legible. Also, they needed the planned space for Lincoln’s head.

Borglum then developed a plan to build a room inside the mountain to hold documents and other artifacts that were important to American history. It was to be drilled into a small canyon behind Lincoln’s mouth and accessible by an 800-foot granite stairway.

This “Great Hall” was designed to have bronze and glass cabinets inside, containing documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. And, of course, it wouldn’t be complete without the planned bronze eagle with a 38-foot wingspan with the words “America’s Onward March” and “The Hall of Records” engraved above it.

Construction on the Hall of Records actually began in July of 1938. It got to the point where a 70-foot tunnel was blasted into the side of the mountain. But Congress shut down the plan. Borglum died in 1941, and then the U.S. was preoccupied with WWII, so all work on the monument shut down.

According to the National Park Service:

“Although Borglum’s grand scheme for the Hall of Records had to be abandoned, the idea remained. On August 9, 1998, Gutzon Borglum’s dream was completed when a repository of records was placed in the floor of the hall entry. This repository consists of a teakwood box, inside a titanium vault, covered by a granite capstone. Etched on the capstone is the following quote by Gutzon Borglum:

‘..let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away.‘

The repository contains sixteen porcelain enamel panels. Inscribed on the panels is the story of how Mount Rushmore came to be carved, who carved it, the reasons for selecting the four presidents depicted on the mountain and a short history of the United States. This repository is not accessible to visitors but is left as a record for people thousands of years from now who may wonder how and why Mount Rushmore was carved.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “Hall of Records” — U.S. National Park Service

WTF Fun Fact 12624 – The Night Mower

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Edwin Bearn Budding is the inventor of the lawnmower. It’s a bit hard to imagine a world without lawns (though we’ve heard they’re not so great for the environment) and the people who take pride in them. In fact, the average American spends 4 hours a week taking care of their lawn.

But at first, Budding wasn’t so sure about his contraption. The year was 1830, and no one technically had a lawn to be mowed. Naturally, he figured people would make fun of him for the invention. And perhaps they would have.

Budding was so self-conscious about the invention that he would only test out his lawnmower prototypes at night, under cover of darkness, so his neighbors couldn’t see him. Of course, these were manual mowers, so they didn’t have the tell-tale engines that let us know when our neighbor is mowing today, though his machine was reportedly pretty noisy.

Most inventors seem pretty stoked about their creations, but perhaps Budding was just humble. While he was born the illegitimate son of a farmer, he got an education that led him to an interest in technical matters. He became a pattern maker at an iron foundry, then a machinist at a cotton mill.

Before his lawnmower, he also invented a pistol more sophisticated than a Colt, but it appears Colt’s 1836 patent won out in the end.

Budding’s lawnmower was conceived of during his time in the cotton mills, and in many ways, it mimics the movements of a napping machine, which uses blades to trim off long fibers from cloth evenly and efficiently.

The wrought iron machine had adjustable blades and was pushed from behind while a tray collected clippings at the front. (Frankly, it sounds better than some of the manual push mowers around today.)

After the patent, Budding went into business with John Ferrabee, who owned Phoenix Iron Works, so the machine could be mass-produced and sold (after all, you don’t get anything from just inventing something). Things went well for the pair, and a few years later, they were attracting buyers across England, selling 1000 machines by 1840.

Budding died of a stroke in 1846, so he never got to see how his invention changed people’s lives. It was used to care for sports fields and public parks, improve gardens, and cut down on manual labor on farms (a scythe or a grazing animal was your only choice before the lawnmower).

It also created a whole new class of gardeners and groundsmen who used it to create gardens as status symbols. A bit later, they were explicitly marketed to women as a fashionable way to get exercise.

We’ve come a long way since then (for better or worse), but it’s incredible to think it all started with one man mowing his lawn in the dark. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Budding Lawn Mowers” — The Daily Gardener

WTF Fun Fact 12618 – Pauline, The Presidential Cow

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Until the late 19th century, presidents brought their own cows to the White House to provide milk. There was no dairy delivery in Washington DC at the time.

When President William Howard Taft’s cow Mooly Wooly died in 1909, it was replaced by Pauline Wayne, a 1500-pound Holstein-Friesian. She was a gift to the Taft family from the farm of Senator Isaac Stephenson of Wisconsin.

The 4-year-old black and white bovine was the last presidential cow, but by far the most famous. The media appears to have been obsessed with her. Her arrival was covered by The New York Times, and her exploits appeared in publications from The Evening Independent in St. Petersburg, Florida, to The Milwaukee Sentinel.

One particular bit of drama was covered far and wide. Pauline was visiting the International Dairymen’s Exposition in Milwaukee in 1911 (with her milk sold in souvenir bottles for 50 cents each). But on the trip home, she went missing.

We always figured it would be hard to lose a cow, especially the President’s cow. But it happened.

It turned out Pauline’s private car was accidentally hooked up to a train carrying cows to slaughter at the Chicago stockyards. Can you imagine the scandal?!

Luckily, after a series of frantic telegraphs from the dairy show, train attendants ended up locating Pauline’s car as newspapers reported how she “narrowly escaped death.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “Pauline Wayne, President Taft’s Famous Cow” — Presidential Pet Museum

WTF Fun Fact 12615 – The Invention of Roller Skates

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For most intents and purposes, the idea of the roller skate can be traced all the way back to the 1760s and a man named John Joseph Merlin. But it may also be the case that he was just the first to make a spectacle of himself wearing them.

Merlin was a Belgian inventor working in Paris and London in the 18th century. He made clocks, mathematical devices, and even musical instruments. But his creativity didn’t stop there. He built wheelchairs and robots and even created his own museum dedicated to his designs in 1800, Merlin’s Mechanical Museum.

But if you’ve heard of Joseph Merlin before, it’s likely from an anecdote that he debuted the rollerskate at a festive gathering at a rather grand salon. Not content to just roll in, he rolled in playing the violin…because, well, why not?

The problem wasn’t that he had a penchant for the dramatic, it was that he didn’t seem to have practiced his entrance beforehand. At least not enough to recognize that he’d need a way to stop rolling. There were no brakes on the skates.

As the story goes, Merlin rolled in, got everyone’s attention, and then immediately crashed into a mirror. Of course, it’s not like we have video proof, but you can find the story in Thomas Busby’s 1805Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes:

“One of his ingenious novelties was a pair ofskaitescontrived to run on wheels. Supplied with these and a violin, he mixed in the motley group of one ofMrs Cowleys’ masquerades at Carlisle House; when not having provided the means of retarding his velocity, or commanding its direction, he impelled himself against a mirror of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to atoms, broke his instrument to pieces and wounded himself most severely.”

Perhaps the best takeaway from this is that an inventor should always invent something to stop his invention from hurting people – especially him or herself.

Merlin’s skates appeared to have been in-line skates, however. Encyclopedia Britannica provides a fuller story of the invention of the roller skate:

“The invention of roller skates has been traditionally credited to a Belgian,Joseph Merlin, in the 1760s, although there are many reports of wheels attached to ice skates and shoes in the early years of that century. Early models were derived from the ice skate and typically had an “in-line” arrangement of wheels (the wheels formed a single straight line along the bottom of the skate). In 1819 M. Petibled of Paris received the first patent for a roller skate. Like previous models, Petibled’s skate had an in-line wheel arrangement, using three wooden or metal wheels. The wheels were connected to a wooden block that in turn could be strapped to a boot. These early roller skates enjoyed limited popularity. The ride was rough, and stopping and turning were nearly impossible. The first practical roller skate was designed in 1863 byJames Plimpton of Medford, Massachusetts, who broke from the in-line construction and used two parallel pairs of wheels, one set near the heel of the boot and the other near the front.” –WTF fun facts

Source: “The Characters of Kenwood: John Joseph Merlin” — The Museum of Fine Arts – Houston

WTF Fun Fact 12611 – The Ancient Origins Of the Loch Ness Monster

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Perhaps the modern version of the Loch Ness Monster legend began on May 2, 1933, but that was long after the first sighting of a beast that lived in the Lochs of Ness had been “sighted.” In the early 20th century, a couple told the Inverness Courier about seeing “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface.” The journalist chose to use the word “monster,” and a new chapter in the legend was born.

Once the London newspapers heard about it, it would be a tabloid story for decades to come. Thousands of people would not only try to see the beast but collect rewards from circuses and the like to capture it.

We don’t believe in the Monster, but do you want to know another fun fact? The loch sits on an enormous ancient fault line. So feel free to rile up the believers by telling them the creature could have come from the center of the earth. They love that stuff!

Anyway, the oldest sighting we know about comes from historical accounts dating all the way back to August 22, 564. An Irish priest, who would later become known as St. Columba, reported seeing an animal in the water while visiting Loch Ness, Scotland. In fact, he not only saw it, but he also claimed it tried to eat one of his servants. Luckily, he was able to command it through some sort of priestly superpower to find a snack elsewhere.

Today, the Loch Ness Monster is one of many cryptids (animals whose existence has never been proven). While it’s neither a profitable profession nor an actual science, those interested in this phenomenon can become cryptozoologists!

According to National Geographic: “Besides the Loch Ness Monster, other lake cryptids include Champ (in Lake Champlain, the United States, and Canada); Issi (in Lake Ikeda, Japan); and the Lagarfljot Worm (in Lagarfljot Lake, Iceland). Other cryptids include chupacabras, blood-sucking creatures that threaten livestock throughout Latin America; bunyips, which lurk in Australia’s swamps; dingoneks, “jungle walruses” found in lakes and rivers in central Africa; and, of course, Bigfoot, who stalks old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.”

Enthusiasm over the Loch Ness Monster has dampened in recent years partly because of the decline of the ridiculous tabloids that used to tout their existence in the check-out aisle of the grocery store. But we think it’s also probably because so many of the photos people submitted as proof of its existence have been proven fake. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Aug 22, 564 CE: Loch Ness Monster Sighted” — National Geographic

WTF Fun Fact 12601 – The Origin of Gingerbread Men

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People ate well in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Ok, it was British food, but the desserts were good.

Decadent royal banquets were stocked with sweets like marzipan and shaped into elaborate designs of castles, animals, and even other foods. The queen also had a personal gingerbread maker.

At one of these events, she had this gingerbread maker bake cookies to resemble the foreign dignitaries she had invited. Prof. Carole Levin, an expert on Queen Elizabeth I’s court surmised that in a time of political turmoil, the amusing gesture may have even been a part of diplomacy. (We just hope the cookies were flattering and the people they resembled had a sense of humor because it’s easy for those sorts of things to backfire.)

While we don’t know which came first, around the same time, there was another, very different use of gingerbread “men.” Folk doctors (which were more along the lines of what we might think of as witches) would “prescribe” them to women looking for love. According to Levin, the woman would buy the cookie and attempt to get the man she had her eye on to eat it. They were believed to be imbued with magic that would make the man fall in love with the cookie-giver.

We’re not sure how often it worked, but it’s not NOT true that the way to some men’s hearts is through their stomachs.

The delicious-smelling cake had been around for centuries before all of this, but baking them into the shape of little people is a culinary curiosity that traces back to a specific time and place. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Surprising Reasons Why Gingerbread Men Became a Holiday Classic” — TIME Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12596 – Martin Luther’s Christmas Tree

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Christmas trees are a pagan tradition that predates Christianity (and, therefore, Christmas). That might lead someone knowledgeable about theology or Christian history to believe that the Protestant reformer Martin Luther wasn’t a fan since he wasn’t exactly known for going all-out on the holidays.

In the 16th century, so the story goes, Martin Luther was taking a Christmastime walk and was inspired by the twinkling stars above him. That’s when he got the idea to gussy up a Christmas tree. He used candles, of course, since they didn’t have those infuriating strings of lights yet.

It became a wider German tradition after that (since Martin Luther was also known for spreading his ideas around). And when German emigrated all over Europe and North America, they brought that tradition with them.

Decorated trees became an even more visible tradition when Queen Charlotte introduced the practice to her new husband, King George III, and his English court in the mid-18th century. After that, Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree was illustrated in an 1848 edition of Illustrated London News. That immediately made it more fashionable.

The tradition of lighting up Christmas trees probably came to the US around the 18th century as well when Hessian troops came to back up the British during the Revolutionary War. When German immigrants moved over in later decades under more polite circumstances, they reinvigorated the trend that others then found fascinating and decided to copy.

So just remember to blame Martin Luther when you’re untangling those lights next Christmas. –WTF fun facts

Source: “Why do we have Christmas trees? The surprising history behind this holiday tradition” — National Geographic

WTF Fun Facts 12594 – Hot Dog Diplomacy

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King George VI was the first sitting British ruler to visit a U.S. president. It was kind of a big deal after the whole Revolutionary War and the sore feelings that left.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president at the time and wanted to give the king a royal greeting, American style.

Of course there was a state dinner with all the attendant fancy food. But it was a casual picnic that really made the trip memorable because that’s when King George VI had his first hot dog on June 11, 1939.

It was a private picnic, but the hot dog moment was anything but a secret. In fact, a NYT headline the following day read: “King Tries Hot Dog and Asks For More.”

The brand was Swift, for those who need to know these things. And the king very appropriately had a beer with his 2 hot dogs as well, according to the Times.

Looking back on the moment in 2009, Dan Barry wrote in the NYT:

“There is no record of the founding fathers ever eating hot dogs, no trace, for example, of mustard on the Declaration of Independence. But the hot dog has played a role in American foreign relations since at least June 1939, when the king and queen of England attended a picnic at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s estate in Hyde Park, N.Y., while soliciting American support for England in the war about to consume Europe.”

The king’s mother was with him at the time and also partook in a hot dog – but she is said to have eaten it with a knife and fork.

Upon inviting an Iranian delegation to the US, the Obama administration relied once again on the diplomatic dogs. There’s no word on how they went down, but Barry seemed to think that it was an essential part of the diplomatic process either way, noting:

“The hot dog, it seems, figures in American diplomacy only when absolutely needed. In 1999, for example, President Bill Clinton gathered at a table with Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel and the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat to eat hot dogs. Kosher, of course.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “When Franklin Delano Roosevelt Served Hot Dogs to a King” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12593 – Vienna Makes For Strange Neighbors

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In 1913, Vienna had over two million inhabitants and was home to many people who would go on to be both famous and infamous. And while we might look at a borough in Manhattan and marvel over the notable people who live within just a few miles of one another, that doesn’t make it seem any less weird that Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand were all part of the same neighborhood at the same time over 100 years ago.

Vienna’s coffeehouses were notorious cauldrons of intellectual activity at the time, and it’s not unlikely that these men all got coffee at the same place.

A Reddit moderator who goes by the handle u/commiespaceinvader explained it all more succinctly:

“In 1913, Hitler lived in a Men’s Dormitory in Meldemannstraße 27 in Vienna’s twentieth district. Being rejected from the art academy, he lived off the sale of his paintings and was unable to afford another residence, so he lived in a men’s dormitory, an institution set up for people without a fixed residence, where for a weekly rent of 2,5 Kronen, you could rent a bed.

In the same year, Trotsky lived at Rodlergasse 25 in Vienna’s 19th district. He worked as a journalist from Vienna reporting on the Balkan wars and publishing the Vienna edition of Pravda. Trotsky had lived in Vienna before after being exiled for political agitation in 1902. After the attempted Revolution of 1905 had been crushed, Trotsky again fled Russia and moved to Vienna where he had good contacts with the local Social Democratic Party and through them found employment as a journalist. Trotsky’s favorite hang-out was Vienna’s Cafe Central where he was relatively well known. There is an unsubstantiated anecdote that in 1917 when the Russian Revolution broke out, a fellow patron of the Central and an officer of the Austrian Army is to have said “And who is supposed to lead this revolution? Mr. Trotsky from Cafe Central?”

In 1913 Stalin visited Trotsky in Vienna and lived there for one month in Vienna’s 12th district in Schönbrunner Schloßstraße 30. He was sent there by Lenin to do research for an article called “Marxism and the National Question” in effect researching how Marxism in the multiethnic empire of the Habsburg’s could be applied. The house still bears a commemorative plaque, financed by the Austrian Communist Party in 1949 and put there with permission of the Soviet occupational government of Austria. As part of the state contract of Austria, signed in 1955, the Austrian government is obligated to take care of the plaque…Freud’s famous address was Berggasse 19 where today, Vienna’s Freud Museum is. And Archduke Franz Ferdinand worked in the Hofburg and had quarters in Schönbrunn palace.

…both Hitler and Trotsky are attested to have visited Cafe Central frequently for it was one of Vienna’s prime coffee houses. When Stalin was there in January 1913, he too went there together with Trotsky. It would be speculation to say anything definitively but who knows, maybe at some point in January 1913, they all were there at the same time.“

That’s some neighborhood! – WTF fun facts

Source: “1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud, and Stalin all lived in the same place” — BBC News

WTF Fun Fact 12589 – Lockheed Martin’s Metric Problem

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In a move that John Logsdon, director of George Washington University’s space policy institute, called “so dumb,” engineers at Lockheed Martin made a math error that cost millions.

Sloppy errors had plagued the U.S. space program for years by the time it all took place in 1999, but this mistake was one for the record books.

NASA’s rockets were being built by engineering powerhouse Lockheed Martin before being sent to NASA. Meanwhile, the Mars mission launched in early 1999 was run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the nine months between launch and mishap, no one had noticed that the math for the Orbiter’s orbiting program was off.

The LA Times explained:

“A navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet, and pounds.
As a result, JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds.”

Instead of landing on Mars, the Orbiter entered the planet’s atmosphere incorrectly and burned up upon entry, costing roughly $125 million.

The Times went on to explain why people were pretty fed up at this point:

“The loss of the Mars probe was the latest in a series of major spaceflight failures this year that destroyed billions of dollars worth of research, military and communications satellites or left them spinning in useless orbits. Earlier this month, an independent national security review concluded that many of those failures stemmed from an overemphasis on cost-cutting, mismanagement, and poor quality control at Lockheed Martin, which manufactured several of the malfunctioning rockets.”

The basic discrepancy wasn’t all Lockheed Martin’s fault. Engineers at the two facilities had been exchanging data for months and no one ever noticed the numbers were off.

There was a shot at redemption that year as the Mars Polar Lander was scheduled to set down on December 3, 1999, on the frozen terrain of Mars’ south polar cap.

Unfortunately, it crashed into the planet’s surface along with $165 million of hopes and dreams. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Mars Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error” — Los Angeles Times

WTF Fun Facts 12588 – The Walkie Talkie Skyscraper

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In 2013, a 38-story skyscraper needed a bit of a redesign during construction. Located at 20 Fenchurch Street in London, the building is nicknamed the “Walkie-Talkie” because of its shape. The building has an interesting top-heavy shape.

The building cost around £200million and was designed by architectRafael Viñoly. But it wasn’t very popular. In fact, in 2015, the Carbuncle Group named it the worst new building in the UK. But they weren’t the people who were most upset.

It turns out that on those rare sunny London days, the building could become a giant magnifying glass.

For 2 hours a day, the sun shone just right so that the building acted like a concave mirror, beaming that light down onto the streets. (In this magnifying glass metaphor, that makes humans the ants.)

Developers only realized that it was creating temperatures up to 243 degrees F at ground level in the summer of 2013 when a beam six times brighter than direct sunlight started melting a car – a Jaguar XJ, to be exact. The owner, Martin Lindsay, told the BBC that he only realized what happened when he saw a photographer taking photos of the vehicle and asked about it. He recalled the moment:

“The photographer asked me, ‘have you seen that car? The owner won’t be happy.’

“I said: ‘I am the owner. Crikey, that’s awful.'”

The wing mirror, panels, and Jaguar badge all melted.

“It could be dangerous. Imagine if the sun reflected on the wrong part of the body. On the windscreen, there was a note from the construction company saying, ‘your car’s buckled; could you give us a call?'” Lindsay said.

A reporter named Jim Waterson even managed to fry an egg in a pan on the sidewalk.

After that, the building got some new nicknames – “Walkie-Scorchie” and “Fryscraper,” for example.

Of course, an immediate and permanent solution needed to be found, so an awning was installed on the south side of the building to keep it from inadvertently incinerating Londoners and their pricey vehicles.

The same architect, Viñoly, also designed a building in Las Vegas with a similar problem and its windows needed to be coated in non-reflective film.

Viñoly blamed himself, but also the fact that he didn’t realize it was ever that sunny or warm in London. Meanwhile, the Jaguar owner got his repairs paid for by the developers.

–WTF fun facts

Source: “‘Walkie-Talkie’ skyscraper melts Jaguar car parts” — BBC News