Culture & entertainment
Discover facts about culture & entertainment. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Culture & entertainment
The controversial inventor who put sound in movies
History loves a lone genius, but Lee de Forest was mostly just a fantastic plagiarist with a massive ego. Though he proudly claimed the title 'Father of…
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How Edison let a rival put films on a screen
Thomas Edison loved suing people into oblivion, which makes his colossal oversight regarding the Kinetoscope absolutely hilarious. He refused to pay $150 to…
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Chinese inventors built the first zoetrope in 180 AD
Hollywood likes to think it invented moving pictures, but some guy in the Han Dynasty beat them by nearly two millennia. Ding Huan created a device featuring…
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The BBC's spaghetti-tree hoax fooled Britain
You can't blame the internet for fake news when the BBC pulled off the ultimate troll job in 1957. The esteemed broadcaster aired a totally deadpan…
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The animation trick born on a New York rooftop
Disney gets all the credit, but a guy tracing his brother in a clown suit actually birthed modern animation. Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope by…
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The woman who made sound films before Hollywood
The history books aggressively lie to you by claiming "The Jazz Singer" was the first sound movie. Over a decade earlier, cinematic trailblazer Alice…
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How one man hid films from the Nazis
Henri Langlois was a cinematic obsessive who realized that early nitrate films were either decaying into explosive goo or being actively destroyed by invading…
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The children's show that ruined thousands of TVs
In the 1950s, a children's show called "Winky Dink and You" invented interactive television by asking kids to draw bridges and ropes directly onto their TV…
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The BBC aired a robot apocalypse in 1937
Before we had Black Mirror making us terrified of our toasters, the BBC was already traumatizing a few dozen rich Londoners with a live broadcast of Karel…
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The pinup star who accidentally preserved lost films
Micki Marlo wasn't aiming for the history books when she shimmied through 16mm film reels for 1960s Scopitone jukeboxes, but her delightfully campy…
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Lawyers dumped DuMont's TV archive in the East River
The DuMont Network was an absolute pioneer of early television, but if you want to watch their archive today, you'll need scuba gear. In the 1970s, the legal…
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Бейсболист пришёл на лекцию с пистолетом
Major League Baseball players usually spend their off-seasons golfing or filming terrible car commercials. Moe Berg spent his hunting Nazis. A profoundly…
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A celebrity evangelist may have staged her own kidnapping
Long before influencers were staging fake apologies for clout, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson was laying down the blueprint for religious grifting. As…
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The Orwell adaptation that panicked Britain
Imagine dropping a gritty, totalitarian nightmare on unsuspecting post-war viewers. When the BBC aired a live television adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen…
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Color TV debuted with a puppet show
When RCA finally figured out how to transmit a compatible color television signal in 1953, they didn't unveil this world-changing technology with an epic…
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Robert Paul's Animatograph birthed the cinema hall
Before we had to mortgage a house for theater popcorn, Robert W. Paul was hijacking British music halls with his Animatograph. In 1896, Paul figured out that…
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The four-letter word that got a film banned
Shirley Clarke spent the early 1960s aggressively blurring the line between documentary and fiction, mostly to annoy the cinematic establishment. Her film…
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The film that made audiences smell flatulence
Mainstream cinema gave us 3D glasses; underground legend John Waters gave us weaponized stench. For his 1981 film 'Polyester', Waters distributed 'Odorama'…
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A three-vote loss was an exact tie at the Oscars
Hollywood math has always been aggressively terrible, and the early Academy Awards were the absolute peak of numerical delusion. During a notorious Best Actor…
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Edison's lost Frankenstein survived in a bedroom
You’d expect the only surviving copy of Thomas Edison’s 1910 'Frankenstein' to be guarded in a climate-controlled vault. Instead, it was sitting in the…
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How one Earth photo became TV logos
Television networks love a good rebrand, especially when the main asset is completely free. When the Apollo 17 crew snapped their famous 'Blue Marble'…
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The clockwork gear that saved early cinema
Early cinema was an unwatchable stutter-fest until Oskar Messter borrowed the 'Maltese cross' gear from clockmaking to stop film strips from ripping to…
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When Soviet artists trained workers like machines
The Soviet obsession with productivity got so intense in the 1920s that Aleksei Gastev tried to literally engineer human workers into meat machinery. Through…
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The film Customs agents burned over Hedy Lamarr
Long before the internet, moral guardians lost their absolute minds over a blurry, black-and-white depiction of a woman enjoying herself. US Customs agents…
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