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 12587 – Discount Turns to Debt

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In what may be one of the most expensive typos in history, in April of 2006, Alitalia had the price of their business class flight from Toronto to Cyprus (an island nation in the Mediterranean) deeply discounted. The regular cost was $3,900, but a glitch resulted in the price losing two zeros. Tickets were sold for just $39 – for a 12-15 hour flight! (And that’s just in Canadian dollars – it was $33 in US dollars. Then again, once you add taxes and fees, it was closer to $200.)

Word spread quickly on the website FlyerTalk before Alitalia could make any changes and while they didn’t release the specifics, guesses as to the number of tickets sold range from hundreds to over 2000.

The price was active for around 12 hours, and you better believe that Alitalia tried not to honor the price at first. And purchasers had the angry reaction you’d imagine. In fact, things got so heated that Alitalia ended up honoring the tickets that were officially confirmed. (People who bought through Orbitz and other brokers were largely out of luck.)

The lucky buyers who were given ticket confirmation numbers upon purchase took their trips, costing Alitalia around $7 million.

CBC News interviewed one of the lucky travelers shortly afterward, Donnie Bowers of New Haven. “I didn’t even know where Cyprus was,” he said.”I looked at the regular price, and I thought, wow, this is something to really get involved in.”

They reported that 509 people made purchases, though other sources report higher numbers.

“Why not roll the dice and see what happens?” Bowers said as he prepared for his October 2006 trip. – WTF fun facts

Source: Flyertalk Forums, 2006

WTF Fun Fact 12586 – Using Urine to Treat Stains

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Healthy urine is 95% water, 2.5% urea, and 2.5% salts, minerals, enzymes, etc. That doesn’t necessarily make it the ideal laundry detergent, but there’s plenty of historical evidence that it was used as such going all the way back to ancient Rome.

The key here is urea, which decays into ammonia. You’ll find ammonia in many household cleaners because it can cut through dirt and grease.

Even after the invention of laundry soap, some people preferred to use urine for tough stains. (Our question remains: what do you use to get out the urine stains and smell?!)

Hey, it’s free and never in short supply, so we can see why you might want to soak a particularly terrible grease stain every now and then when you had no other choice. And one would need to use stale urine to get the correct chemical reaction, so perhaps that’s easier to rinse out? We’re not sure; we’ve never tried.

Urine also had other uses back in the day – disinfecting wounds and softening leather, for example. But there’s really no reason to try this at home to see how it works.

Now, for those who continue to claim that Romans used it for whitening their teeth, we’d like to see some more evidence. The only citation for this “fact” is a poem by Catullus, famous for writing scandalous and filthy poems (and who hardly makes a factual claim).

– WTF fun facts

Source: “From Gunpowder to Teeth Whitener: The Science Behind Historic Uses of Urine” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12585 – Ronald Wayne Sells Apple

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We’ve all heard of Apple co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. But do you remember the third co-founder, Ronald Wayne?

The trio founded Apple Computer Company (now Apple, Inc) in 1976. But while Wozniak and Jobs each owned 45% of the company, Wayne had 10%, which would make him the tie-breaker in any disagreements between the two Steves.

He was the administrative brains among the computer geeks. And like any good businessman, he wanted to mitigate his risks.

Funny enough, Wayne’s first business sold slot machines (and ran out of luck, going into debt that he had to pay off personally).

The three met when they all worked at Atari, and Wayne invited Wozniak and Jobs to his house to discuss the future of computers. Jobs suggested they start a business, with Wayne (who was the 41-year-old “elder”) at the time acting as “the adult in the room.”

Wayne drafted the partnership agreement and designed Apple’s first logo (which was replaced the following year). But he got cold feet as he considered the future of the business in light of his past failure and the resulting debt.

Legally, all partners in a company are responsible for its debt, so when Jobs made a purchase order with a $15,000 loan, Wayne started to get cold feet. The vendor Jobs purchased from wasn’t known for being speedy with their deliveries, and Wayne saw warning signs.

His job at Apple also wasn’t his passion – he enjoyed engineering and his slot machine designs. So he did what any intelligent businessman might do – he moved on to greener pastures. Well, at least they seemed greener at the time.

Renouncing his 10% of the ownership after just 12 days (though Wozniak’s account is that it took a few months), Wayne sold his shares back for $800.

Just for comparison, in 2011, the contract signed by all 3 men in 1976 was sold at auction for $1.6 million. (Oh, and Wayne sold that as well – in the 1990s he gave it up for $500 before he knew what it might be worth someday.)

Wayne says that he made the best decision he could with the information he had at the time, which is respectable. And while he retired to a trailer park to collect stamps and play penny slots, he insists he doesn’t regret the decision.

Had he stayed with the company, his life would have certainly been different. Those shares would be worth a mind-boggling $300 BILLION today. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Apple just hit a $1 trillion market cap—here’s why its little-known third co-founder sold his 10% stake for $800” — CNBC

WTF Fun Facts 12584 – Largo di Torre Argentina

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Largo di Torre Argentina is a popular Roman tourist destination. It holds a great deal of ancient history, but that’s not why everyone goes. Many people come to see the cats. There are dozens of them climbing and napping on the ancient ruins, and while no one is supposed to feed them, you can always find cans of cat food nearby.

The location is crumbling at an alarming rate, so Rome has recently made some renovations. After all, it does hold the site of Julius Caesar’s murder by members of the Roman Senate.

Luxury fashion house Bvlgari will pay around $1.1 million to clean the ruins and build walkways through the site. Before this, people could only look down into the ruins from the street. We’re not sure how the cats feel about all this, but we will guess “cranky.” Many are not fond of people.

You might wonder how such an important historical location ended up in such disrepair in the first place, but that’s the price of expanding a city. The site was largely lost until Italian dictator Benito Mussolini set out to unearth ancient Rome and tie his dictatorship into the lore of the Roman Empire as part of a propaganda effort. They found four temples and part of the Theater of Pompey, the site of the Roman senate.

During World War II, the Largo di Torre Argentina became neglected once again, and Rome lacked the funding to restore it until recently.

And don’t worry about the cats – the feline colony is protected by the laws of the State and the Municipality. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Site Where Julius Caesar Was Stabbed Will Finally Open to the Public” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12583 – How California Got Its Name

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California is named after a 16th-century Black Queen of an island of women. The only catch is that she’s fictional.

Real or not, she’s still the inspiration behind the state’s name.

Queen Calafia was a character in Castillian author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandián, an early 16th-century adventure-romance novel. A Black warrior queen, Calafia ruled a mythical island called California inhabited only by Black women.

Calafia was also a fierce queen with quite an arsenal – armor made of fish bones, weapons made of gold, and an army of griffins (because, hey, why not?).

Needless to say, many people are surprised by this origin story. At the very least, it was rare for a man during the Renaissance to write in such a triumphant way about a woman, much less a Black woman. There is no sense of racial inferiority (which was a common trope) in her story.

So how did an American state come to be named after a mythical character?

Well, the novel was so famous in Spain that when conquistadors arrived on the tip of what is now the Baja Peninsula, they thought they had found the mythical island of California. So that’s what they called the whole area.

And while the name stuck, Calafia has been largely forgotten until recently.

An excerpt from the book reads:

“Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in written texts or in human memory. […] I tell you that on the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise. This island was inhabited by black women, and there were no males among them at all, for their life style was similar to that of the Amazons. The island was made up of the wildest cliffs and the sharpest precipices found anywhere in the world. These women had energetic bodies and courageous, ardent hearts, and they were very strong. Their armor was made entirely out of gold—which was the only metal found on the island—as were the trappings on the fierce beasts that they rode once they were tamed. They lived in very well-designed caves. They had many ships they used to sail forth on their raiding expeditions and in which they carried away the men they seized and whom they killed in a way about which you will soon hear. On occasion, they kept the peace with their male opponents, and the females and the males mixed with each other with complete safety, and they had carnal relations, from which unions it follows that many of the women became pregnant. If they bore a female, they kept her, but if they bore a male, he was immediately killed. The reason for this, inasmuch as it is known, is that, according to their thinking, they were set on reducing the number of males to so small a group that the Amazons could easily rule over them and all their lands; therefore, they kept only those few men whom they realized they needed for their race not to die out.“

–WTF fun facts

Source: “Our Origin Story’: Queen Calafia Returns to California in New Theatre Production” — KQED

WTF Fun Fact 12582 – Blessing a Sneeze

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When someone sneezes, it seems rude not to acknowledge it in some way. In fact, saying “bless you” or “God bless you” has become a part of modern etiquette.

But where did this come from?

Most people have been told that the habit comes from the belief that the soul momentarily separates from the body during a sneeze. Therefore, “bless you” is a way of sending your best wishes their way in case the soul doesn’t come back. Some also believe that blessing the soul prevents it from being snatched up by evil spirits while it was disconnected from the body during a sneeze.

But it’s likely that the origin of “God bless you” goes back to 590 AD when a plague was ravaging Europe. Sneezing was often the first sign that someone was ill (and while they didn’t realize it at the time, it was also the way the plague spread). In order to bless the would of those who may get deathly ill, Pope Gregory the Great commanded that sneezing people be given a quick blessing.

While “God bless you” and “bless you” go back to the 6th century, the acknowledgment of a sneeze goes back even further – by hundreds of years. Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his 77 AD Natural History:

“Why is it that we salute a person when he sneezes, an observation which Tiberius Caesar, they say, the most unsociable of men, as we all know, used to exact, when riding in his chariot even?”

The superstition predates the pope, but Pliny offers no explanation as to why the sneeze was acknowledged.

Of course, there are secular ways of acknowledging a sneeze as well. Those who don’t believe in disembodied souls can keep it polite with a quick “gesundheit.”

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Why We Feel Compelled to Say ‘Bless You’ When Someone Sneezes” — The New York Times

WTF Fun Fact 12578 – Mike the Headless Chicken

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It’s hard – and gross – to think about, but the phrase “like a chicken with its head cut off” originates in a biological oddity of chickens.

You see, you can decapitate a chicken and it will continue to run. They aren’t zombies (because they’re not actually dead yet), it’s just that the animal’s spinal cord circuits still hold residual oxygen. It’s kind of a sick biological joke that the most decapitated animal has this odd feature if you think about it.

The circuits that still have oxygen to operate no longer have a brain to control them, so the spinal cord’s signals go to the legs, causing the chicken to run (typically for just a few seconds).

This is pretty rare since chickens are typically laying down when this happens, but it has certainly happened.

Now, Miracle Mike the Headless Chicken (as he was dubbed by Life Magazine in the 1940s) is a different story. Poor Mike’s owner left a tiny part of his brain stem intact with a messy chop.

On September 10, 1945, Lloyd Olsen was beheading chickens on his farm, and got a runner, but was surprised to see that he didn’t keel over immediately.

Olsen’s great-grandson, Troy Waters, told the BBC years later that his grandparents put the chicken on the screen porch for the night and were shocked to wake up and see “The damn thing was still alive,” according to Waters.

But this isn’t some sketchy legend. Headless Mike toured the country, drawing slack-jawed audiences at carnivals. It was photographed and recorded by the news in various towns and in Life Magazine.

The family had their share of interlopers who insisted on coming to see Mike but also got plenty of hate mail for not just putting him out of his (or perhaps just their) misery. – WTF fun facts

Source: How Mike the Chicken Survived Without a Head — Encyclopedia Brittanica

WTF Fun Fact 12577 – Catgut strings

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While it may sound like many cats were harmed in the making of music, strings were once may from the entrails of animals (just probably not cats). The practice goes all the way back to Greek mythology (but later, was anything but a myth).

The Greek god Hermes was said to have strung his lyre with cow entrails. And in mythological fashion, he stole those cows from his brother Apollo who he then lulled into blissful acquiescence with his playing (to the point that Apollo gave him his entire herd).

Meanwhile (or, probably, prior), in Egypt, instruments strings were being strung with a material called catgut. The Egyptians loved their cats so much it’s unlikely they used cats (and that catgut is more than a bad translation), but the name stuck. And so did using animal intestines for string, especially later on for violins. Much later, a similar method of creating string from intestines was used for tennis rackets.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “catgut is tough cord made from the intestines of certain animals, particularly sheep, and used for surgical ligatures and sutures, for the strings of violins and related instruments, and for the strings of tennis rackets and archery bows.”

They continue with a little history lesson:

“The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians and the later Greeks and Romans used the intestines of herbivorous animals for much the same purposes. The origin of the term catgut is obscure; it is not known if the intestines of cats were ever put to such uses.”

Then some gruesome detail that animal lovers should probably skip:

“The intestinal tubes (called runners) of sheep are washed, cut in ribbons, and scraped free of mucous membrane and circular muscle tissue. The ribbons are placed in an alkaline bath for several hours and then stretched on frames. While still moist they are removed, sorted by size, and twisted into cords of varying thickness. A smoothing and polishing operation completes the process.“

Professional string players can still buy catgut strings and they have a lot of influence over sound quality. But the pros can “go vegan” with their strings, using ones with a synthetic core that sounds much like catgut strings and are also longer-lasting. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Are Violin Strings Really Made of Cat Guts?” — SHAR Music

WTF Fun Fact 12576 – We’re Fools About April Fools’ Day

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With all the pranks and accompanying joy (and trauma!), you’d think we’d have a solid way of tracing the origins of April Fools’ Day back to its source. But it’s unclear who the original “fools” were.

It seems safe to say that the holiday is in some way tied to the Spring equinox, a time of celebration and merriment for many. But what’s with all the pranks? Are we still celebrating the ancient Roman festival of Hilaria with a 21st-century twist? Or perhaps something closer to India’s Holi festival?

Or did something else happy on April 1 in the distant past spark interest in celebrating this day with hijinx?

Some believe its roots lay in France in 1582 when some were deemed foolish for not knowing about the switch from the Gregorian calendar to the Julian calendar and therefore celebrated the new year on April 1 instead of January 1.

What’s interesting is that different parts of the world have other stories about the day and its tradition, providing a clue that it goes back quite far and spread around the world before people began writing about it.

So if anyone tries telling you they know the origins of April Fools’ Day, just remember that no one really knows. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Who Were the First Pranksters? No Jokes Here—All About the Origin of April Fools’ Day!” — Parade Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12575 – American Bologna

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The Italians may have brought bologna to America, but there’s little resemblance to the mortadella meat of Italy. The meat became a household staple for just about everyone during the Great Depression since it was cheap. It continued to reign supreme on shelves after that because it was easy to make into lunch sandwiches.

When Americans think of bologna, we tend to think of those yellow packages and round slices. And that’s because of a German immigrant who began his career beginning at age 14 when he apprenticed with a Chicago butcher.

Oskar Ferdinand Meyer spent six years in Chicago meatpacking until he could afford to lease his own marketspace and put his skills to use. He had learned traditional European sausage-making techniques over the years.

That’s how what we now know as Oscar Meyer bologna began, and success came early because of a growing German-American immigrant population in Chicago. His company later created the technology for vacuum packing sliced meats to make lunch making much more effortless.

So while the Italians brought proto-bologna to America in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was young Oskar who took steps to make it mainstream. – WTF fun facts

Source: “How Lunch Became a Pile of Bologna” — Eater

WTF Fun Fact 12574 – John Hinckley Jr. Stalked Jimmy Carter

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If the police had just looked at the journal sitting next to the guns would-be assassin John Hinckley, Jr. was trying to transport through the Nashville International Airport in 1980, they would have foiled his entire plot.

Of course, at the time, they had no idea Hinckley had plans to kill a U.S. president.

For those who don’t know the details, it didn’t matter much to Hinckley which president he shot. His only goal was to get the attention of actress Jodie Foster, who he had become obsessed with after seeing her in the 1976 Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver. The film also starred Robert DiNero as Travis Bickle, a Vietnam vet and taxi driver with plans to assassinate a senator.

Creepily, Foster (who starred as child prostitute Iris in the film) was only 12 years old during filming. But in 1980, she was a freshman at Yale, and Hinckley was sending her letters that went unanswered.

Not content to be ignored, Hinckley made plans to emulate Travis Bickle but made his target even bigger – the president.

In 1980, Jimmy Carter was president, but on the campaign trail for reelection and running against Ronald Reagan. It appears that Hinckley’s first plan was to assassinate Carter, and he got pretty close at least twice – once in Dayton, OH, and once in Nashville, TN. Both times he got close to the president, but it appeared to be more of a trial run to ensure his plan would work. However, he was certainly capable of carrying out the plan in Tennessee because he was armed.

Despite deciding against shooting President Carter in Nashville, Hinckley would regroup. A scare at the airport in which security found multiple weapons in his luggage didn’t deter him. Neither did getting hauled into the Metro Nashville Jail, but that’s likely because he was quickly released on a small bond and paid $62.50 in total for his transgression (at least, the one people knew about).

Today we know that Hinckley’s plans were laid out in a journal he also kept in his luggage right next to those guns the police found. But no one opened it.

Of course, the very next year he would go on to shoot President Reagan in Washington, right across from the Secret Service headquarters. Reagan lived, and Hinckley was captured, but he was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 and handed over to a mental health institution. He was granted unconditional release in 2021. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Investigators Think Hinckley Stalked Carter” — The New York Times

WTF Fun Fact 12573 – The Men Who Helped Make America’s Parks

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The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was established in 1933 by Franklin Roosevelt as part of his New Deal. It took millions of young men, many of whom had been living on public assistance due to the Great Depression, and employed them to do manual labor around the country.

The CCC had many accomplishments during its 9-year tenure, such as building roads and bridges. But perhaps most memorable are the 3 billion trees they planted, the paths they created in state and national parks, and how they transformed the country’s entire park system.

Putting hundreds of thousands of struggling men to work on environmental conservation projects turned out to be one of Roosevelt’s big successes. It combated the unemployment rate and gave young men a sense of purpose.

Many of the workers came from the east, and the biggest challenge was getting them to work out west, where a lot of infrastructure work was needed. The U.S. Army stepped in to solve the logistical problems associated with transportation.

As of July 1, 1933, there were around 300,000 enrollees in work camps around the country, nearly all aged 18-25, and 1,433 total working camps had been established. The U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture hired CCC employees to fight forest fires, plant trees, clear and maintain access roads, re-seed grazing lands, implement soil-erosion controls, build wildlife refuges, fish-rearing facilities, water storage basins, and even animal shelters. Enlisted lasted 6 months, and men got on-the-job vocational training.

Workers got $30 per month as well as room and board, though they were required to send home $22 to 25 of their monthly earnings to support their families. Some corpsmen received vocational education while they served.

It’s estimated that some 57,000 illiterate men learned to read and write in CCC camps and their ranks included WWI veterans, skilled foresters, and even 88,000 Native Americans living on Indian reservations.

At its peak in August 1935, over 500,000 men were working throughout 2,900 camps. All told, historians estimate that nearly three million men (5% percent of the U.S. male population) took part in the CCC at some point. No women were allowed to serve, and Black Americans were forced to work on other projects, despite efforts to prevent discrimination.

The CCC program ended at the start of World War II as funds for the program were diverted to the war effort. But in the end, the CCC was responsible for over half the reforestation in the nation’s history.

–WTF Fun Fact

Source: “Civilian Conservation Corps” — History.com

WTF Fun Fact 12572 – Einstein Never Failed Math

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It’s incredible how pervasive myths about Albert Einstein are. In fact, very few of the quotes attributed to him are even accurate. It turns out if you just say something about the man and it gains traction, it becomes fact in some people’s minds.

And we’ve always loved the story that even though he was a genius, Einstein failed math as a schoolboy. Algebra, to be specific.

Apologies to anyone who has used their own math grades to portend their future genius, but Einstein failing any class is just flat-out wrong. He was a genius as a child, too, especially in math.

His school records were retrieved from his Swiss school by the New York Times, showing excellent grades in every subject. They state:

“The records, contained in a collection of the great theorist’s papers now being prepared for publication at Princeton, confirm that Einstein was a child prodigy, conversant in college physics before he was 11 years old, a ”brilliant” violin player who got high marks in Latin and Greek. But his inability to master French was the bane of his school days, and may have been chiefly responsible for his failing college entrance examinations.”

So, where did we get this idea? Well, it wasn’t invented out of thin air. Instead, it was the result of a misunderstanding.

The first biographers who saw Einstein’s records were likely confused by the grading system used by his school in Switzerland. At age 16, he received a 1 out of 6 in arithmetic and algebra. But what the scholars didn’t realize is that 1 was the highest, and 6 was the lowest.

Now, there’s a further explanation that makes us realize it was an honest mistake. The following year, Einstein’s grades in math were 6 on a scale of 1 to 6. However, the school reversed the grading system that year, making 6 the highest grade. – WTF Fun Fact

Source: “Einstein Revealed as Brilliant in Youth” — The New York Times

WTF Fun Fact 12571 – The Myth of Early Alien Panic

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The story goes that when H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds was turned into a radio play and broadcast by Orson Welles in 1938, millions of people around the country heard the altered opening line “Martians have invaded New Jersey!” and freaked out. In fact, we’ve long been told that it started “a panic” that night because many people had never heard a radio play and believed it was the news and that the alien invasion was true. It has even been reported that people ran from their homes in fear, caused stampedes, and even committed suicide!

Say what you want about New Jersey, but there was no great panic over it being invaded by extraterrestrials nearly 85 years ago.

We’ll grant you that it’s a believable story. In the radio era, with no way to see what was happening, some people were very likely freaked out. But did they panic, run from their homes, and cause a national hysteria?

Well, there’s no evidence of it if they did.

Numbers are thrown around with abandon when it comes to listeners, and there are some estimates that around 12 million people were listening to Welles’ broadcast that night. And even if 1 in every 12 people believed it, 1 million people freaking out would be a big deal, right? The newspapers reported it, but it’s quite likely that it belongs in that (increasingly overused) category of “fake news.”

Yet even Smithsonian Magazine, which can often be trusted to research the accuracy of historical events, propagated the myth of the panic, saying of Welles:

“He’d heard reports of mass stampedes, of suicides, and of angered listeners threatening to shoot him on sight. ‘If I’d planned to wreck my career,’ he told several people at the time, ‘I couldn’t have gone about it better.’ With his livelihood (and possibly even his freedom) on the line, Welles went before dozens of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen at a hastily arranged press conference in the CBS building. Each journalist asked him some variation of the same basic question: Had he intended, or did he at all anticipate, that War of the Worlds would throw its audience into panic?”

The only proof offered up is some old script drafts from the days when Welles and his colleagues were trying to turn the novel into a play. There are links to newspapers, but no interrogation of the reporting and whether it could be trusted or backed up. And while the magazine does have a fascinating story on how the play came to be, Slate has poked holes in the rest of the story.

Most important is the lack of a large enough audience to cause anything but a slight kerfuffle. Slate says:

“There’s only one problem: The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast.“

It turns out that a poll taken that night showed that 98% of 5000 surveyed households were listening to something else, or nothing at all, on Oct. 30, 1938. “Welles’ program was scheduled against one of the most popular national programs at the time—ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety show,” Slate notes. And to top it off “several important CBS affiliates (including Boston’s WEEI) pre-empted Welles’ broadcast in favor of local commercial programming.”

Even if people were turning the dial during musical interludes, as some have claimed, we have no way of reliably extrapolating that to 12 million people. No death has even been attributed to listening to the play and reports of people being treated for panic remain unsubstantiated.

So what’s the deal? It’s likely that newspapers weren’t so happy about radio cutting into their readership base. Slate put one final nail in the coffin, noting “Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.”

Over time, the myth grew and grew and old fake news was turned into historical evidence. But that still can’t make it true. – WTF Fun Fact

Source: “75 Years Ago, “War Of The Worlds’ Started A Panic. Or Did It?” — NPR

WTF Fun Fact 12570 – The Telephone’s Real Inventor

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In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was one of a handful of men who were working on a machine that transmitted vocal communications telegrphically. But we only remember him because he got to the patent office first (and he was already a well-known inventor).

Historians and government officials have since reexamined the research and found that Bell wasn’t actually the first to create the world-changing technology. That honor goes to an Italian-American immigrant and mechanical genius from Florence, Antonio Meucci.

In fact, in 2002, U.S. Congress recognized an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell.The Guardianreported, “Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to recognize a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death.”

“It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged,” the resolution stated. (You can read theresolution(107th Congress, H Res 269) onCongress.gov.)

While you might think there was a mad dash to the patent office, it’s actually the case that 16 years went by between Meucci’s demonstration of his “teletrofono” in New York in 1860 and Graham’s 1876 patent.

However, it was Bell’s telephone design that ended up being used to create the first telephones, so he does deserve some pretty massive credit. It’s just that Meucci deserves some and well and never really gets it.

The title of the most annoyed competitor of Bell’s likely goes to Elisha Gray, a professor at Oberlin College. He actually sent his lawyer to the patent office on the same day. Bell’s lawyer got to the desk first on February 14, 1876. His filing was the fifth entry of the day, while Gray’s lawyer was 39th. The U.S. Patent Office awarded Bell with the first patent for a telephone (US Patent Number 174,465).

Some historians actually claim that Bell knew what was happening and may have bribed someone at the patent office to doctor documents showing his patent came in first, but we’ll probably never know. –WTF Fun Fact

Source: “Who is credited with inventing the telephone?” — Library of Congress

WTF Fun Fact 12567 – The Origin of the Countdown

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3…2…1…we have liftoff. NASA may not have stolen the words for their spaceship launches, but they did lift the idea from a sci-fi film.

Of course, countdown clocks allow everyone involved to ensure they’re on the same page at the same time, but a big part of the countdown is building suspense for those watching. And that’s why NASA decided to make the final countdown a major part of their televised launches.

But they didn’t come up with the idea on their own. Like so much technology, the concept originated in a 1929 sci-fi film titled Frau im Mond by Fritz Lang. Even more unexpected – it was a silent film!

The idea for the story came from the novel Die Frau im Mond, by Thea von Harbou (Lang’s wife at the time). According to Atlas Obscura: “The book, which follows a group of backstabbing moon prospectors, is a rollercoaster ride of love triangles, business intrigue, and lunar gunfights…” 

Lang needed the film to be a hit. The “talkie” was becoming more and more popular, so he needed a way to make his silent films just as engaging. That’s when he settled on the countdown. (Another fun fact: before Die Frau im Mond, books and movies that involved a shuttle launch usually used countUPs.)

Atlas Obscura explained further how this influenced NASA: “The film’s space advisors brought lessons they learned from the film set back with them to the Society for Space Travel, where they found that loudly timing launches to the second was not only dramatic, but helpful. When NASA launched its first successful satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958, newsreels broadcasting the event breathlessly announced, ‘the moment is at hand, the countdown reaches zero!'”

The breathless countdown worked for Lang – his was the highest-grossing film of the year in 1929. And we can’t imagine a NASA launch without the countdown (something we completely took for granted). – WTF Fun Fact

You can check out the film scene yourself (and no, that’s not the original music!):

Source: “NASA Stole the Rocket Countdown From a 1929 Fritz Lang Film” — Atlas Obscura

WTF Fun Fact 12566 – Michelangelo’s Poetic Lament

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Michelangelo didn’t have a great time painting the Sistine Chapel. The work conditions were less than stellar and his boss (Pope Julius II) enjoyed carrying around a stick to smack people with when he was upset.

While the outcome is a masterpiece, most of us can imagine the pain of spending hours looking up (he did not paint lying down) and painting with such detail – and it took him 4 years!

It was an uncomfortable job, to say the least. So uncomfortable, in fact, that Michelangelo wrote a little poem to a friend to let off some steam in 1509. He sent it to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia, and it went a little something like this:

I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water’s poison).
My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine’s
all knotted from folding over itself.
I’m bent taut as a Syrian bow.

Because I’m stuck like this, my thoughts
are crazy, perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.

My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

So, next time you feel like work is torture, just remember it could be worse! – WTF Fun Fact

Source: “‘My Poor Ass’: Michelangelo Wrote a Poem About How Much He Hated Painting the Sistine Chapel” — Mental Floss

WTF Fun Fact 12564 – Flushing Facts

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Toilet paper was invented in China around the 6th century but manufactured for the first time in the area now known as Zhejiang province in the 14th century.

In fact, the Farmer’s Almanac has a hole in the top left of each copy, a nod to the time when people would nail it to the outhouse wall for reading materials (and, yes, toilet paper).

Americans had to wait until the 19th century for a civilized way to wipe, which means there’s an awful lot of time to account for when people were…well, tidying up in the toilet with whatever was available.

Corncobs were a popular choice in rural areas, as was the Sears Roebuck catalog and the Farmer’s Almanac.

During the Civil War, Americans had J.C. Gayetty to thank for the first domestic toilet paper – “Gayetty’s Medicated Paper for the Water-Closet.”

Even after the advent of toilet paper, some outhouses were still stocked with a copy of the Farmer’s Almanac. It was so often hung in the structures for reading material (when it wasn’t be used…elsewhere) that the publishers designed it with a hole in the upper left-hand corner so it would be easier to tie it up to a hook for those who expected to spend some serious time out there.

Oh, and mark your calendars: May 6 is “Read Your Farmers’ Almanac in the Bathroom Day.”

– WTF Fun Fact

Source: “What Did People Do Before Toilet Paper?” — Farmer’s Almanac