History
Discover facts about history. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
History
How Voyager found its way across the solar system
Navigating a probe across the entire solar system apparently does not require supercomputers. The initial gravity-assist trajectories that slung these famous…
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Why football players were allowed to throw the ball
When a sport consists entirely of massive individuals running directly into each other, injuries tend to pile up. To thin out the chaotic scrums and make the…
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Why spelling became standardized
Writers used to enjoy absolute anarchy when it came to spelling their own names. Without mass-produced dictionaries, people simply wrote words out…
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Baseball bats are historically carved from single ash logs
Hitting a high-velocity sphere requires wood that balances raw power with critical flexibility. For generations, craftsmen relied on specific straight-grained…
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Early television broadcasts officially stopped late at night
In an era long before massive streaming servers, entertainment required an actual bed time. Stations would simply run out of physical programming, proudly…
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Punctuation marks were popularized by early paper printers
Before mechanical presses, texts were often just continuous blocks of exhausting letters. As book production scaled up, operators realized that forcing…
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Before golf tees, players built tiny sand mounds
Before plastic pegs were mass-produced, players had to build tiny, meticulous sandcastles just to hit a drive. Courses actually provided boxes of wet sand at…
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Astronauts repaired a rover with maps and duct tape
Trillions of dollars of advanced engineering can always be saved by the contents of a standard toolbox. After snapping a vital piece of their rover,…
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Why J arrived so late to the alphabet
For centuries, people just assumed the letter 'I' could pull double duty as both a vowel and a consonant. It was not until linguistic scholars got utterly…
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Morse code assigned the shortest codes to common letters
Efficiency is key when tapping an electrical switch by hand. The clever creators calculated letter frequencies simply by counting metal type blocks in a local…
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Why Bob Dylan was booed for plugging in
At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the undisputed king of acoustic folk decided to plug in a Fender Stratocaster. The absolute outrage from purist fans was…
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Georgia O'Keeffe painted inside a custom canvas tent setup
The legendary American modernist was so utterly obsessed with painting the harsh desert landscapes of New Mexico that she retrofitted her Ford Model A with a…
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Why Jimi Hendrix played guitars upside down
Because simply being the greatest guitarist of all time wasn't enough of a flex, the left-handed virtuoso took standard right-handed Fender Stratocasters and…
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When baseball umpires called strikes from rocking chairs
Back in the mid-nineteenth century, officiating a major sporting event was apparently a highly relaxing gig. Early umpires were actually allowed to sit in…
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Picasso lived to see Pink Floyd's Dark Side
Historical timelines are deeply deeply weird. The co-founder of Cubism and titan of modern art lived all the way until 1973, meaning he theoretically could…
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Sinatra hated the song everyone wanted him to sing
It is deeply ironic that the ultimate anthem of unapologetic self-confidence was absolutely despised by the man forced to sing it. Sinatra thought the lyrics…
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Andy Warhol made a five-hour film of a sleeping man
In a groundbreaking artistic endeavor that absolutely nobody asked for, the pop art icon released an anti-film in 1964 consisting solely of his friend taking…
Discover moreR2-D2 is hidden in a Spielberg classic
In a profound act of nerd solidarity with his buddy George Lucas, the legendary director literally embedded the iconic astromech droid into the spaceship…
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Badminton once used balls made of wool
Before the iconic feathered shuttlecock became the standard instrument of backyard warfare, elite players in India and England batted around tiny balls of…
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Figure skating once took place at the Summer Olympics
Before the Winter Games even existed, organizers brilliantly decided that sliding around on frozen water was perfectly acceptable for a summer event. They…
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The roller coaster that cost more than Disneyland
Inflation is a brutal reality, especially in the theme park business. The iconic indoor roller coaster, which opened two decades after the original park, cost…
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Beethoven counted exactly 60 coffee beans
Because nothing screams 'musical genius' quite like the obsessive-compulsive need to count out exactly sixty coffee beans every single morning. The legendary…
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The first Oscars ended in 15 minutes
Today, the Academy Awards is an incredibly bloated, four-hour endurance test of awkward speeches and elaborate musical numbers. However, the very first…
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Goya filled his dining room with terrifying murals
Rather than decorating his house with pleasant landscapes or family portraits, the increasingly deaf and cynical Spanish artist literally covered his walls…
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