The Color Is Plane Wrong
Even though the flight data recorder carried on all military and commercial planes is called a “black box,” it is, in fact, bright orange. It wouldn’t make sense to paint the box black, as that would only make it harder to find after a plane wreck.
Despite their name, centipedes do not necessarily
have 100 legs; the number of appendages ranges anywhere
from 28 to 354, depending on the species.
And millipedes don’t have a thousand legs, either.
The Lightbulb Was Not Edison’s Bright Idea
Thomas Alva Edison is credited with hundreds of inventions; not the least of these is the electric lightbulb. Ask any schoolchild who invented the lightbulb, and he or she will, without hesitation, name Thomas Edison. But the truly illuminated know the first lightbulb was actually invented in 1802 (nearly seventy-seven years before Edison’s version) by an English chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, who made an arc lamp glow by passing electricity through a platinum wire. Davy never pursued any practical use for his invention, and the world stayed dependent on candlepower and oil lamps for several more decades. In 1845, an American, J. W. Starr, developed a lightbulb using a vacuum bulb and a carbon filament—a design very similar to Edison’s. When Starr died at the age of twenty-five, an Englishman, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, continued to work on his design. The main problem with this and previous designs was that the filament would burn only for a short while, rendering the lightbulb impractical for any real use. In 1877, Edison went about searching for a filament that could stay illuminated for a long period of time. After trying nearly 8,000 possibilities, he found one—a carbonized cotton thread. So Edison discovered a way to make a lightbulb work for an extended period of time? Not really. Remember Joseph Swan? Well, he discovered using a carbonized piece of cotton thread would do the trick, too—ten months earlier. In fact, he filed a patent infringement suit against Edison and won. So Edison, living up to his credo that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” became inspired, made Swan a partner in his lighting company, and later bought him out.
Captains Cannot Tie Knots
The captain of a ship is usually known for two things: volunteering to go down with a sinking ship and performing marriages. Well, we all know the first one isn’t always true, as countless captains have returned safe and sound after disasters on the high seas. But the second one, that of a captain being able to perform a wedding ceremony, is also false. The case of Norman v. Norman in 1898 established that the captain of a ship has never had any legal authority to perform a wedding.
George Washington could never have thrown a silver dollar
across the Potomac River. The first dollar coin was minted
in 1794, just five years before Washington’s death. Also, the
Potomac is over a half-mile wide at its narrowest point.
The Evening Star Is a Stand-In
Shortly after sunset, one can see a bright beacon of light called the Evening Star over the western horizon. There’s no use wishing on this star, as it is an impostor—it’s actually the planet Venus.
Corn oil is derived from corn, so banana oil must come from
bananas. Actually, banana oil is a petroleum chemical used in
lacquers and glues that has a faint banana scent.
Real Steamboat Inventor Steamed
Robert Fulton is usually credited with inventing the steamboat in 1807, and the name of his boat is given as the Clermont. But as you’ll find from most of the entries in this book, like steam, most of what we know about history is full of hot air. A man named James Rumsey exhibited a crude steamboat on the Potomac in 1784, and three years later, John Fitch demonstrated a forty-five-foot steamboat to the Continental Congress.
Fitch tried to establish a regular passenger service between Philadelphia and New Jersey, but his venture ran out of steam. So why does Robert Fulton get all the glory and not the men who truly invented the steamboat? Because Fulton established a successful steamboat line on the Hudson River between New York and Albany, and we usually remember people who become popular. Fulton’s boat was called North River Steamboat, but because the town of Clermont was the first port on its route, it acquired the nickname Clermont. John Fitch, who was granted the patent on the steamboat in 1791, died broke, while Fulton drove full steam ahead into our history books.
The Great Wall of China Is Out of Sight
Part of the mystique surrounding this amazing engineering marvel is that the 1,864-mile-long wall of China can be seen from space. But when one actually stops to think about this claim, it simply crumbles. Why would the Great Wall be seen from space when Beijing’s new Golden Resources Shopping Mall, the world’s largest at six million square feet, can’t be? The foundation for the wall story started in 1938, when Richard Halliburton, in his book Second Book of Marvels, announced that the Great Wall is the only man-made object visible from the moon. I suppose a sequel to this book would include how Halliburton could know that, when it would be another thirty-one years before Apollo 11 actually landed on the moon. And according to the astronauts, not even the earth’s largest mountain ranges are visible from the moon.
One Half of All Marriages End in Divorce
This statistic is the ace in the hole when it comes to showing the moral decay of our times—politicians use it, preachers use it, marriage counselors use it—but statistically speaking, it’s useless. This figure is derived by taking the number of marriages per year and comparing it to the number of divorces per year. And since there are nearly half as many divorces as marriages, people conclude that half of all marriages end in divorce. This statistic would be correct if everyone married only once and divorced only once, but thanks to the Larry Kings and Elizabeth Taylors of the world, things just don’t add up. The actual number of marriages that end in divorce is closer to 1 in 4, or 25 percent.
Even though people still believe you can get lead poisoning
from a pencil, you can’t. Lead pencils have no lead in them,
only graphite.
His Name Wasn’t Schicklgruber, Either
Adolf Hitler was neither a housepainter nor a wallpaper-hanger before he became ruler of Germany. He was a moderately talented watercolor artist but flunked the drawing tests at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and was told his talents were better suited to architecture. In turn, he became the architect of the Third Reich and was responsible for one of the darkest periods in world history.
Philadelphia Brand cream cheese was not
originally manufactured in the City of Brotherly Love,
but rather in the Big Apple, New York. The cream cheese
was branded Philadelphia to take advantage of the
reputation for fine food the city had at the time.
The Truth of William Tell Told
It’s a disturbing story, to say the least. An oppressive bailiff named Hermann Gessler was sent from Austria to Switzerland in the early 1300s to maintain control of the people. He placed his hat on a pole and ordered the citizens to salute or bow to the hat to show their allegiance. William Tell, along with his son Walter, walked by the hat without honoring it and were accosted by guards. Gessler forced William Tell to shoot an apple off his son’s head in exchange for his freedom. Tell put one arrow in his crossbow and another in his quiver and easily shot the apple from his son’s head. When asked what the other arrow was for, Tell told Gessler if he had hurt his son during the stunt, he would have used the extra arrow to kill Gessler. Needless to say, Gessler got the point. He was infuriated by Tell’s arrogance and ordered him imprisoned for the rest of his life.
Tell’s legendary prowess with the crossbow and unfailing love of freedom made him the hero of Swiss independence. The story would be even more disturbing if it were true, but it isn’t. William Tell didn’t have a son, didn’t own a crossbow, and never even saw an apple. Why? Because William Tell never existed. The great fourteenth-century hero of Swiss indepe
ndence was born in the imagination of an anonymous fifteenth-century storyteller. I quiver when I think how many people have been shafted into believing this story is real.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Beetles!
In 1545, an angry crowd of vineyard growers in Saint-Julien, France, pleaded with a judge to throw the book at local pests who were eating and destroying their crops—weevils. Believe it or not, the judge ordered legal indictments to be drawn, and the weevils were given a court-appointed defense lawyer (and the lawyer/vermin relationship was born).
The judge listened to both sides and eventually passed judgment, finding the weevils guilty, since they were obviously eating the crops. In 1546, the judge issued a proclamation demanding the weevils cease and desist. Being the law-abiding insects they were, the weevils did stop eating the crops, and their infestation disappeared nearly overnight. The weevils didn’t bug anyone for forty years, until 1587, when they once again took residence in the vineyards of Saint-Julien, and once again, the angry growers took the pests to court. There’s no record of whether the court threw the book at the weevils again or merely used it to squish them.
In 1716, the Oxford University Press printed 500 copies of a book titled Translation of the New Testament from Coptic into Latin, by David Wilkins. Not exactly a John Grisham novel, it took 191 years to sell all 500 copies.
Stop Clowning Around
The Kansas City Star ran a blurb about National Clown Week on its July 30, 1999, “Family Fun” page. Naturally, the editorial decision was made to include a silly, funny picture of a clown to accompany the article. How could you go wrong putting a picture of an adorable, goofy clown in your newspaper? Well, the only way would be if the clown in question was actually notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Besides being a convicted murderer of thirty-three boys and young men, Gacy, a Chicago native, was also an amateur clown who went by the name of “Pogo the Clown.” It was a picture of Gacy in clown makeup that was used alongside the article about National Clown Week. The Star printed an editor’s note the following day apologizing for being such Bozos.
The headline from a Los Angeles Times article in 1972 read “70-Car Fog Pileup.” In truth, only sixty-nine cars, not seventy, were involved in the accident, but an editor thought sixty-nine was a dirty number.
Bringing Down the House
The world’s first fireproof theater, the Iroquois Theater, opened in Chicago on December 1, 1903. This was a big deal for Chicago, because in 1871, the city nearly burned to the ground, and no one wanted that to happen again.
On December 30, it was standing room only, as 1,900 people packed the theater to watch the popular musical Mr. Blue Beard, Jr. As the audience listened to a close harmony version of “In the Pale Moonlight,” a blue stage light used to create a moonglow effect popped, and a piece of scenery caught on fire. “Not to worry,” the actors told the audience, “please remain seated as we lower the asbestos curtain.”
The secure feeling of being in a fireproof theater was quickly doused when the safety curtain jammed two thirds of the way down. The titanic claims of indestructibility turned the first fireproof theater into Chicago’s deadliest fire in history. The Iroquois Theater, the toast of Chicago, was now toast.
As a member of Parliament, Sir Isaac Newton spoke
only once. He asked for an open window.
There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea
Lake Peigneur, a scenic lake near New Iberia, Louisiana, was home to Jefferson Island and the beautiful Live Oak Gardens botanical park. In stark contrast to the natural beauty were the numerous oil and gas rigs that dotted the landscape. On the morning of November 21, 1980, Wilson Brothers Corporation, which had been hired by Texaco to tap into Louisiana’s rich oil deposits, set up an oil rig in the middle of Lake Peigneur and started drilling. A test hole was being drilled at Well No. 20, and things were going along normally until the drill hit 1,228 feet. Instead of the classic scene of oil shooting up into the air, the engineers noticed that a whirlpool had formed, and the 1,300-acre lake was quickly disappearing. The crew had inadvertently drilled into the Diamond Crystal salt mine, and the lake water was pouring into the tunnels. They watched dumbfounded as their five-million-dollar rig, a tugboat, eleven barges from the canal, a barge loading dock, seventy acres of Jefferson Island and its botanical gardens, parts of greenhouses, a house trailer, trucks, tractors, a parking lot, and a whole lot of other stuff went down the drain. Fortunately, one thing that didn’t go down the drain was Leone Viator Jr. and his nephew, Timmy, who were fishing off a fourteen-foot aluminum boat when the disaster struck. The water drained so quickly their boat got stuck in the mud at the bottom of the lake, and they were able to walk back to shore. It’s rare that a fisherman can say he was the one that got away.
Oh, Hell, Caesar
Claudius I (Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, 10 B.C.-A.D. 54) was poisoned by his wife, Agrippina, with a lethal dose of mushrooms. As he lay writhing on the floor, a doctor was summoned to his aid. The doctor thought if he could make the emperor throw up the noxious mushrooms, that might save Claudius’s life. The doctor took a feather and began tickling the emperor’s throat, hoping to stimulate the gag reflex. The responsibility of saving the ruler of the Roman Empire might have been distracting to the doctor, who lost his grip on the feather. Claudius inhaled the feather into his throat and chocked to death on it.
On April 24, 1898, Spain declared war on the
United States, thus starting the Spanish-American
War. The United States declared war the very
next day but, not wanting to be outdone,
had the date on the declaration of war
read April 21 instead of April 25.
Not a Barrel of Laughs
In 1920, fifty-eight-year-old barber Charles Stephens wanted to take his high-dive and parachute artistry to new heights and maybe make a splash as a world-famous daredevil. So Stephens rolled out the barrel and let everyone know he was going to attempt the ultimate in stunts—going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. He thought adding extra weight to the barrel’s bottom would help stabilize it, so he attached a 100-pound anvil, climbed into the barrel, strapped his feet to the anvil, surrounded himself with pillows, and placed his arms through two straps that were bolted inside. The force of the plunge tore open the bottom of the barrel, taking the anvil, with Stephens still strapped to it, to the bottom of the river. The barrel disintegrated on impact, and the only piece ever recovered was a stave with the right arm strap attached to it. How did they know it was the right arm strap? Because Stephens’s right arm, with a tattoo reading “Forget me not, Annie,” was still in the strap. Annie was his wife and the mother of his eleven children whom Stephens, with his Wile E. Coyote stunt, left behind and over a barrel.
Sticking His Neck Out
A large number of resolutions pass through the Texas State House every session, and Representative Tom Moore Jr. was concerned at how little attention legislators paid to the bills on which they voted. So in 1971, as a joke, he introduced a bill honoring Albert DeSalvo for his pioneering work in population control. DeSalvo, the notorious Boston Strangler, confessed to killing thirteen women in the Boston area. Moore’s bill commended the Boston Strangler for servinghis country, his state, and his community. . . . This
compassionate gentleman’s dedication and devotion to his
work has enabled the weak and lonely throughout the nation
to achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their
future....He has been officially recognized by the state of
Massachusetts for his noted activities and unconventional
techniques involving population control and applied psychology.
The resolution passed unanimously. I’m sure Representative Moore could barely choke back his laughter.
The letter D in D-Day has given rise to many assumptions of its meaning: Dooms-Day, Death-Day, Deliverance-Day, etc. But the truth is the D stands for “Day” in the s
ame manner the H in H-Hour stands for “Hour.”
King for a Day
In a bizarre quirk in American history, we actually had a president who served for only one day, and his name was David Rice Atchison. James K. Polk’s term ended at noon on March 4, 1849, and Zachary Taylor was scheduled to take the presidential oath of office that same day. But March 4 fell on a Sunday, and Taylor decided to take the oath on Monday instead. That meant from noon on March 4, when Polk’s term expired, until noon of March 5, when Taylor was sworn in, the United States was without a president. The Constitution states: “In case of the removal, death, resignation or disability of both the President and Vice President of the United States, the President of the Senate Pro Tempore shall act as President.” The president of the Senate pro tempore at the time was—you got it—David Rice Atchison. Atchison was never sworn in, never lived at the White House, and didn’t know he had been president for a day until years later. He has been denied his place among the other presidents of the United States—which is just as well, since people are generally known by the company they keep.
Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Throughout the Ages Page 2