Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Throughout the Ages

by Leland Gregory

  Descent of the Scent

  We’ve all seen images of people in crowded theaters wearing 3D glasses, but that isn’t the only strange movie format that’s been created. In the early 1960s, a movie named Scent of Mystery, directed by Jack Cardif, incorporated the radical technique called Smellovision. Developed from the Aromarama technique of Charles Weiss, Smellovision accompanied the film with a series of odors that were fed into the theaters’ air-conditioning units. Was it popular? Actually, it stank! The aromas from one scene mixed with the odors of the previous scene, leaving theatergoers gagging on a vile stench. The film Scent of Mystery was later released as Holiday in Spain without Smellovision, but the movie still stank.

  Dumb Statements in History

  “I guess we’ll get through with them in a day.”

  (General George Custer at Little Big Horn, 1876)

  Seldom Is Heard These Discouraging Words

  Everybody sing with me: “Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play.” Americans have sung “Home on the Range” since 1911, so what could possibly be wrong with the song? Well, actually, there are two things:1. The real home where the buffalo roam is in Africa or Asia (the Cape buffalo of Africa and the water buffalo of Asia). The species we have in the United States is properly called bison.

  2. There are no antelope in the United States, either. They’re also native to Asia and Africa. What the song calls “antelope” was probably the pronghorn, which is a lot tougher to rhyme. Antelopes grow their horns throughout their lives, whereas pronghorns (Antilocapridae) shed their horns annually.

  But “Oh give me a home, where the bison roam, and the deer and the pronghorn play” doesn’t quite have the same feeling, does it?

  Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 hit song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”

  was written by a man (Robert Hazard).

  Really up a Tree

  In 1978, British army soldiers were called in to serve as temporary firemen during a strike of local firefighters. An elderly woman called the firehouse on January 14 to ask assistance, as her cat had climbed a tree and was unable to get down. The army arrived quickly and valiantly rescued the woman’s cat, placing the purring puss into the woman’s grateful hands. So happy was the woman with the army’s handling of the situation, she invited the brave men in for tea. They accepted her invitation, and after a pleasant time together, the volunteers bade their host a fond farewell, got back into their fire trucks, and promptly ran over and killed the rescued cat.

  To fight off Roman ships in 300 B.C.,

  Carthaginians catapulted live snakes at them.

  Testing One, Two, . . .

  On August 3, 1970, sixty-two-year-old Miriam Hargrave of Yorkshire, England, finally passed her driving test—her fortieth attempt. After so much struggle and perseverance, one would assume she started driving right away. But unfortunately, after spending so much money on driving lessons—$720—she couldn’t afford to buy a car. If it took her forty attempts to pass a simple driving test, it’s a good thing she never got on the road.

  The blindworm, also known as the slowworm or deaf adder, is

  neither blind nor deaf nor even slow—heck, it isn’t even a

  worm or an adder. The blindworm is actually a legless lizard

  that can see, hear, and move as quickly as a normal snake.

  Not with a Wimper, but with a Bang

  On December 6, 1917, the largest man-made explosion of the prenuclear age happened when a ship loaded with munitions exploded in the harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia, killing more than 1,900 people. The explosion was so massive that one man, William Becker, who was in a rowboat about 300 feet away from the ship when it exploded, was propelled 1,600 yards—the length of sixteen football fields—across the harbor. He was uninjured during his unexpected trip across the harbor and was able to swim to safety—he lived until 1969. Of course, it was difficult to watch football with him: “Sixty-yard touchdown? That’s nothing. I once went 1,600 yards for a splashdown!”

  Myth

  Romans used chariots in battle.

  Truth

  No. As one must hold on to both reins while

  driving a chariot, they were absolutely useless on the battlefield.

  Romans used chariots only in sports and as transportation.

  Thanks to Hollywood for this myth.

  Stop Your Whining

  Wine merchant William Sokoin paid $300,000 for a 1787 bottle of Château Margaux once owned by Thomas Jefferson. He planned to sell it to the highest bidder from a group of 300 wine collectors gathered at Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant in 1989. He hoped to make a profit in excess of $200,000 for the wine, but his dreams were shattered when, moments before the bidding started, he dropped the bottle and broke it.

  MTV (Music Television) aired its very first music video,

  Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles, at midnight,

  August 1, 1981. MTV became an overnight phenomenon,

  but the Buggles didn’t. The group disbanded later in the year.

  The Defendants Suck!

  In the thirteenth century, the town of Mayenne, France, was infested with a swarm of mosquitoes that plagued the inhabitants to such an extent they filed a lawsuit against them. When the pesky public nuisances flew in the face of authority and refused to answer the summons, the court appointed a lawyer to act on their behalf. The courtroom was abuzz as defense counsel pleaded his case, and spectators waited with bated breath as the judge handed down his verdict. The judge banished the bugs from his jurisdiction, but took pity on them and gave them a patch of land outside the town limits where they could swarm in peace forever. What the townfolks needed wasn’t a case against the mosquitoes, but a case of DEET.

  Baltimore’s prestigious Johns Hopkins University is not

  named after a Mr. Johns and a Mr. Hopkins—the founder’s

  name was really Johns Hopkins (Johns being a family name).

  The Incredible, Regrettable Egg

  The citizens of Basel, Switzerland, were stunned when a rooster was accused of laying an egg. In 1473, it was common knowledge that an egg laid by a rooster was prized by sorcerers, and it was known that, according to court records, “Satan employed witches to hatch such eggs, from which proceeded winged serpents most dangerous to mankind.” It looked like the rooster’s goose was cooked. But even something as foul as a demonic rooster deserves the best defense available, and the court appointed it a lawyer. The lawyer strutted his stuff and contended that “no injury to man or beast had resulted” and that laying an egg is an involuntary act, so, he surmised, his cock should walk.

  The judge was impressed with the lawyer’s impassioned plea but nonetheless found the rooster guilty of sorcery. Both the rooster and the egg (I’m not sure which one came first) were roasted at the stake—no mention if coleslaw and mashed potatoes were served as sides.

  Daniel Decatur Emmett, the man who wrote “Dixie,”

  the unofficial anthem of the South, in 1859, was a Northerner.

  Emmett was born in Ohio and stayed loyal to the Union

  during the Civil War.

  A Chili Reception

  Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World is so full of mistakes, it’s nearly impossible to categorize them all. One of the most famous is that he thought he had arrived in India, so he called the natives Indians. A lesser-known mistake occurred when his hosts served a spicy food containing hot chilies, which Columbus thought must be related to the Piper nigrum, the plant that produces black peppercorns. The spice the Indians actually used wasn’t a pepper at all—it was part of the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family and was more closely related to potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplants. But thanks to Columbus, chilies have been known as chili “peppers” ever since.

  In 1966, instead of airing coverage of the Senate Foreign

  Relations Committee’s hearing on Vietnam, CBS decided to

  stick with their regularly scheduled programs: rerun
s of

  I Love Lucy, The Real McCoys, and similar shows.

  The Sheep Were Rammed

  Nearly 6,000 sheep were drowned when a freighter arriving in a Kuwaiti harbor in 1964 capsized and sank. Authorities knew they needed to remove the carcasses immediately, before the sheep started decomposing and polluting the water. The only way to get the sheep out was to raise the freighter, and that was no small task. Engineers failed to devise a way to raise the tanker in the short amount of time they had before the harbor became polluted. Danish engineer Karl Kroyer was noodling over the problem when he remembered a 1949 Donald Duck comic book, The Sunken Yacht, in which Donald and his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, raised a sunken ship by filling it with table tennis balls. Kroyer thought it was worth a try, and soon the sunken freighter was being filled with twenty-seven million polystyrene balls—and it worked! Another idea was to flood the harbor with Woolite, but everyone thought that was a baaaaaaad idea.

  The Mayflower:Stem to Stern

  The Pilgrims were originally heading for Hudson’s River, but because of poor navigation and unexpected strong winds, the first land they saw was Cape Cod. The Pilgrims urged the crew of the Mayflower to sail further south (yes, there was a crew—the Pilgrims were simply passengers on the Mayflower), but “dangerous shoals and roaring breakers” prevented it. By the time the Mayflower turned back, the crew was so tired of the Pilgrims’ bickering and whining that they dumped them off at the first opportunity, Provincetown, Massachusetts.

  During the turbulent times of the Nixon

  administration, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford

  was nominated by President Richard M. Nixon

  to replace Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had

  resigned. When Nixon himself resigned during

  the impeachment process for his involvement in

  Watergate, Ford assumed his duties and became the

  thirty-eighth president on August 9, 1974, making

  Gerald Ford the only person to be vice president and

  president without going through the election process.

  Rock and a Hard Place

  The Pilgrims docked in Plymouth Harbor after their initial landing, but it’s doubtful they landed on Plymouth Rock, since it’s not very big. The rock wasn’t mentioned by anyone until nearly 100 years after the landing. Thomas Fraunce, a ninety-five-year-old man, claimed his father told him the Pilgrims used the rock to debark from their ship. It’s a great story, but Fraunce’s father arrived in America three years after the Pilgrims. In an attempt to preserve the rock, it was moved, and in the process, it broke in half. The bottom half, it was decided, could stay where it was. Years later, the rock was put back where it belonged, cemented back to its base, and a monument was built around it. (That’s when it was carved with 1620.) Because of its diminutive size, it is considered one of America’s most “disappointing” historical landmarks.

  What similarity do human beings and armadillos share?

  They are the only two animals that can contract leprosy.

  Down the Tube

  A nomination in the “whoops” category goes to a worker who, in September 1978, accidentally dropped a 50¢ paint scraper into a torpedo launcher of the U.S. nuclear submarine Swordfish, jamming the loading piston. Since the submarine was still at sea, divers worked for a week attempting to free the piston, without success. Ultimately, the Swordfish had to be put in dry dock, where repairs ended up costing $171,000. Of course, knowing the government, the 50¢ paint scraper was probably purchased for $171,000, too.

  Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting The Red Vineyard

  was purchased by Anna Boch of Brussels in May 1890

  for 400 francs. It is the only painting Van Gogh sold

  during his lifetime.

  A Feather in His Cap

  “Yankee Doodle” is a strange little ditty that has stayed in the American culture since pre-Revolutionary War times. You know the tune:“Yankee Doodle went to town

  A-riding on a pony

  Stuck a feather in his hat

  And called it macaroni.”

  The rhyme was actually composed in England and was originally an anti-colonist song. Yankee, of course, was an American colonist. Doodle, according to English dictionaries of the time, meant “a sorry, trifling fellow; a fool or simpleton.” Macaroni refers not to a pasta dish, but to a foppish and bombastic style of Italian clothing. So basically, the English were saying, “Hey, look at the stupid, country-bumpkin colonist who thinks he’s stylish.” Strangely enough, “Yankee Doodle” became the colonists’ rallying anthem for the Revolutionary War and was used as a marching song. So maybe we were Yankee Doodles after all.

  He Said, She Said

  In the repertoire of every bad Humphrey Bogart impersonator is the line, “Play it again, Sam.” But Bogart never said this. In the 1943 movie Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman’s character, Ilse, not Humphrey Bogart’s, Rick, is the one who implores Sam (Dooley Wilson) to “play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’” So no one ever says, “Play it again, Sam,” and in fact, Sam never plays “As Time Goes By,” he just sings it—Wilson couldn’t play the piano, and the accompaniment was dubbed over later.

  Patent leather, invented in 1829, has the distinction

  of being the only product or process named after

  the U.S. Patent Office.

  A Revolutionary Item Up for Sale

  During the tumultuous and momentous transformation of the Soviet Union in November 1991 from communism to democracy, it seemed like anything could happen—and Forbes magazine got the scoop of the century. Apparently, in order to cleanse itself of any memory of communist control and to raise money, the new Soviet government declared that the embalmed remains of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov—better known as Lenin, the first leader of Soviet Russia and creator of the communist ideology known as Leninism—would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. USA Today, the Associated Press, and other news organizations covered the story. ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings reported the story and announced that the former communists wanted to capitalize on the capitalists, stating, “They won’t consider anything less than $15 million [for Lenin’s body].” Talk about that hard-to-find gift for the person who has everything. The following evening, Jennings broke in with an important update on the special Red sale—it was a hoax. “We said it was an extraordinary story,” Jennings said apologetically. “More to the point, it wasn’t true. We were gullible, and we assure you that the next report . . . is no joke.” In case you were wondering, Lenin’s preserved body is still on display at the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow, and if there’s any tag on him, it’s a toe tag, not a sales tag.

  New World, Old Lie

  Christopher Columbus gets a lot of credit for things he never did—like discovering America. And I’m not making the politically correct argument that he couldn’t “discover” a continent when there were people already living there. What I’m saying is that Columbus didn’t “discover” America because he never actually set foot on the American mainland. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, he landed on Watlings Island in the Bahamas. In his three subsequent excursions across the Atlantic, his landings were all in South America and the Caribbean. The explorer who actually discovered the continental United States was Juan Ponce de León, who set foot in Florida in 1513. Columbus, who was convinced he had reached Asia, never claimed to have discovered the New World. Although America wasn’t named for Christopher Columbus, I’m glad it wasn’t named for Ponce de León, either—I wouldn’t want to live in Leónville.

  We’ve all heard of London’s famous Big Ben—

  but what is it? Is it the clock? Is it the tower?

  Nope, it’s neither. Big Ben is the name for the

  thirteen-and-a-half-ton bell inside the clock tower.

  It was cast in 1858 and named in honor of

  Sir Benjamin Hall, who served as commissioner

  of works when the bell was installed.

 
Bending the Amendment

  In any debate over prayer in school, Nativity scenes or Christmas trees on state property, or statues of the Ten Commandments in courthouses, the “wall of separation between church and state as outlined in the Constitution” is bound to be brought up. Which is an interesting argument because there is no “wall of separation between church and state” mentioned anywhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment states only that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Founding Fathers included this amendment because they didn’t want the United States to establish a national church (like the Church of England)—one of the reasons the Founding Fathers took the time to write everything down—but no one, not even the courts, takes the time to read it.