The world is more interesting than you think.
Unexpected facts, big ideas, and little discoveries. Find something that sparks your curiosity today.
A little more wonder
The race cars powered by zeppelin engines
Wealthy aristocrat Louis Zborowski found early 1920s race cars dreadfully boring, so he started buying massive World War I aero engines and bolting them onto…
Discover more
The animator who made films with salt and feathers
You might think animation requires thousands of intricate digital drawings, but Aleksandra Korejwo simply looked at a pile of table salt and decided she could…
Discover more
Before smartphones, Cincinnati told time with a giant ball
Long before smartphones silently synchronized to atomic clocks, keeping accurate time required highly theatrical urban infrastructure. Enter the Cincinnati…
Discover more
Butter royalty sold colonialism at Wembley
Convincing the British public that their crumbling empire was still a fun, relatable endeavor required literal dairy sculptures. The 1924 Wembley Exhibition…
Discover more
When Philadelphia's giant train shed caught fire
In the late 19th century, architects loved building monumental, arched train sheds to trap a maximum amount of toxic steam and soot for dramatic effect.…
Discover more
How math made virtual robots play MIDI music
Watching a live band play is cool, but apparently not as cool as watching mathematically perfect, non-existent robots shoot rubber balls at xylophones. The…
Discover more
STACKY FOR IPHONEA bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.
Keep discovering with Stacky. Interesting facts in an app that is always within reach.
Walt Disney couldn't afford Disneyland's first hotel
Disneyland might be a billion-dollar mega-resort today, but Walt Disney originally blew his entire budget just building the rides. He had to beg his wealthy…
Discover more
The computer that modeled Britain’s economy with water
Trying to explain economics is boring, so a rogue engineer built a computer out of perspex tanks, sluices, and colored water to literally visualize liquid…
Discover more
How Disney softened Oskar Fischinger’s wildest ideas
Imagine inventing avant-garde music visualization, only for a cartoon mouse to slap some glitter on it and call it a day. That's what happened to Oskar…
Discover more
The 10,000-mile car race with no roads
In 1907, a French newspaper casually challenged drivers to race from Peking (Beijing) to Paris. Keep in mind, this was before "roads" existed in most of Asia.…
Discover more
The economist who blamed sunspots for crashes
William Stanley Jevons was a brilliant pioneer of modern economics, but he possessed an incredibly weird, unshakeable obsession. He genuinely believed that…
Discover more
The man who became a priest, spy, MP, and abbot
The phrase 'career pivot' doesn't quite cover Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln. Born an Orthodox Jew in Hungary, he somehow managed to become a Presbyterian…
Discover more
The man who saved Britain's canals from roads
Before L.T.C. Rolt came along, Britain’s historic inland waterways were practically viewed as inconveniently wet ditches waiting to be paved over. After WWII,…
Discover more
Paracelsus accidentally mapped out fantasy lore
Paracelsus was a brilliant 16th-century toxicologist, but he was also a legendary drunk who formally classified fairies like a Victorian biologist. He wrote…
Discover more
The Kitty Genovese story was wildly exaggerated
Your Intro to Psych professor's favorite anecdote about human apathy is mostly fabricated journalism. Academia gleefully parroted the story of 38 silent…
Discover more
Why some brain damage can erase fear and trigger hypersexuality
Lose chunks of your temporal lobes and you'll suddenly want to mate with a chair and eat handfuls of dirt. Klüver-Bucy syndrome strips away your amygdala's…
Discover more
Lozen reportedly felt cavalry through her hands
Military strategy usually involves scouts and maps, but the Chihenne Apache warrior Lozen reportedly just used supernatural intuition. Known as the 'shield of…
Discover more
How the gold standard helped trigger the Long Depression
Welcome to the 19th-century vibescession. When the United States and Europe aggressively shifted to the strict gold standard in 1873, they effectively deleted…
Discover more
The early scooters that folded into luggage
Micro-mobility gadgets are not a Silicon Valley invention, nor are they any safer now than a century ago. Early 20th-century inventors patented ridiculous…
Discover more
The WWII gun attachment that destroyed its own bullets
Shooting around corners sounds like a brilliant video game mechanic, but the real-world physics are an absolute nightmare. In WWII, desperate German engineers…
Discover more
The law that stopped banks gambling with your savings
Imagine walking into a casino, and the guy rolling the craps dice is using your grandmother’s pension fund. That was the American banking system before 1933.…
Discover more
Obsolete medical diseases hidden in print
Medical history is essentially a graveyard of hilarious, obsolete diagnoses used to control people. Crack open a vintage edition of Taber's Medical Dictionary…
Discover more
Japan's “Youth 18” pass has no age limit
The Seishun 18 Kippu translates directly to 'Youth 18 Ticket,' designed by Japan Railways to encourage cash-strapped teens to explore the country on cheap,…
Discover more
IBM fought a genius for his memory patent
Corporate extortion is practically an American pastime, especially when it involves bleeding-edge tech. In the 1940s, Dr. An Wang invented the pulse transfer…
Discover more