Every earlier day’s six small true stories, newest first. Today’s tidbits
Rain delays pushed his set to Monday morning. Only about 30,000 of the festival’s peak crowd of some 450,000 were still there to hear his psychedelic take on the national anthem.
Read more on WikipediaEngineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes sealed two shower curtains together hoping to make wallpaper. It failed as wallpaper and as greenhouse insulation, but found its calling as packing material.
Read more on WikipediaArno Penzias and Robert Wilson could not get rid of a faint hiss in their radio antenna in New Jersey, even after clearing out pigeon droppings. It turned out to be the cosmic microwave background, and won them a Nobel Prize.
Read more on WikipediaThe figure began as part of The Gates of Hell, a huge bronze doorway inspired by Dante’s Inferno, and is often thought to show Dante pondering his poem. It later became a famous sculpture on its own.
Read more on WikipediaTired of his detective, Doyle sent him over the Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem.” Readers were upset, and Doyle later brought Holmes back.
Read more on WikipediaThe Disney short opened in New York on November 18, 1928, and was one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound.
Read more on WikipediaThe channel went on air on August 1, 1981, and the first music video it played was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles.
Read more on WikipediaJournalist László Bíró noticed that newspaper ink dried quickly without smudging. With his brother György, a chemist, he designed a pen with a tiny rolling ball and patented it in Paris in 1938.
Read more on WikipediaNicolaus Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published in 1543. It was printed just before his death that year.
Read more on WikipediaAfter German and Italian planes bombed the Basque town of Guernica, Picasso painted the huge black, white and grey mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair.
Read more on WikipediaFriends gave Lee a year’s wages as a present so she could take a year off from her job and write. The result was To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960.
Read more on WikipediaIn L. Frank Baum’s novel the magic shoes are silver. The filmmakers made them red to show off the new Technicolor process in The Wizard of Oz.
Read more on WikipediaAlmost completely deaf, he shared the stage in Vienna with the conductor. The singer Caroline Unger turned him around so he could see the audience applauding.
Read more on WikipediaMary Anderson is said to have watched a New York streetcar driver struggle to see through the sleet and designed a hand-operated wiper blade. She received a patent for it in 1903.
Read more on WikipediaHenri Becquerel left uranium salts on wrapped photographic plates in a drawer during cloudy weather. When he developed them anyway, they showed clear images, proving the uranium gave off rays on its own.
Read more on WikipediaGrant Wood posed his sister Nan Wood Graham and his dentist, Byron McKeeby, in front of a farmhouse style he had seen in Eldon, Iowa.
Read more on WikipediaThe novel sold poorly and got mixed reviews. Only in the 20th century, after his death, did it come to be seen as one of the great American novels.
Read more on WikipediaThe awards were handed out at a private dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and the winners had been announced months in advance.
Read more on WikipediaAfter hearing Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere in Rome in 1770, the young Mozart reportedly wrote out the whole piece from memory that day. The Vatican closely guarded how it was sung, which helped make the feat legendary.
Read more on Wikipedia3M chemist Spencer Silver made a weak, reusable adhesive in 1968. Years later his colleague Art Fry used it to keep bookmarks in his hymnal, and the sticky notes went on sale in 1980.
Read more on WikipediaUrbain Le Verrier worked out where an unseen planet must be from wobbles in Uranus’s orbit. Johann Galle pointed a telescope there in Berlin and found Neptune the same night he got the prediction.
Read more on WikipediaVincent van Gogh painted it while staying at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, from the view out his east-facing window, adding an imagined village.
Read more on WikipediaOn a boat outing on the Thames near Oxford, Charles Dodgson made up a tale for young Alice Liddell and her sisters. Alice asked him to write it down, and it was published in 1865 under the name Lewis Carroll.
Read more on WikipediaWarner Bros.’ film starring Al Jolson was mostly silent, but its synchronized songs and a few spoken lines made it the first feature-length talkie and a huge hit.
Read more on WikipediaBorn Richard Starkey, he took his stage name from the rings he wore. Shortening his surname to Starr gave him a cowboy-style name for his Rory Storm and the Hurricanes days.
Read more on WikipediaAfter a hunting trip in the Alps, Swiss engineer George de Mestral studied the burrs stuck to his dog’s fur and saw tiny hooks catching on loops. He spent years copying the idea and patented his hook-and-loop fastener in the 1950s.
Read more on WikipediaReturning from holiday, Alexander Fleming noticed mould on a bacteria dish he had left out, with a clear ring where the bacteria had died. That mould gave the world its first true antibiotic.
Read more on WikipediaVincenzo Peruggia, who had worked at the Louvre, took the painting while the museum was closed and kept it in his apartment for two years. He was caught in 1913 trying to sell it in Florence, and the theft helped make it the world’s most famous painting.
Read more on WikipediaIn December 1926 her car was found abandoned and a huge search began. She was eventually discovered at a hotel in Harrogate, registered under another name, and opinion is still divided on why she vanished.
Read more on WikipediaIt went up in 1923 reading “HOLLYWOODLAND” to sell homes in a new hillside housing development. When the city had it repaired in 1949, the last four letters came down so it would name the whole district.
Read more on WikipediaOn 8 August 1969 photographer Iain Macmillan stood on a stepladder in the middle of the street while a policeman held traffic, and shot six frames of the band crossing.
Read more on WikipediaRaytheon engineer Percy Spencer noticed the chocolate in his pocket had melted while he worked near radar equipment. Experiments with popcorn kernels followed, and so did a patent.
Read more on WikipediaPhoto 51, made in Rosalind Franklin’s lab at King’s College London, showed a telltale X pattern. It became key evidence for the double helix described in 1953.
Read more on WikipediaCritic Louis Leroy borrowed the title of Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise to mock the artists at their first group show. The name stuck.
Read more on WikipediaStuck indoors by bad weather near Lake Geneva, Lord Byron challenged his guests to write ghost stories. Mary Shelley, then 18, started the novel published in 1818.
Read more on WikipediaBuddy Ebsen was cast first as the Scarecrow, then swapped to the Tin Man. The aluminum powder in his makeup made him seriously ill and he was hospitalized, so Jack Haley took over the role.
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