Every earlier day’s six small true stories, newest first. Today’s tidbits
For more than a century, Bach’s six suites for solo cello were treated mostly as practice pieces. In 1890 the 13-year-old Pablo Casals came across a copy in a secondhand music shop in Barcelona and spent years studying them before playing them in public. His recordings from the late 1930s helped make them some of the best-loved music ever written for the cello.
Read more on WikipediaEarle Dickson, a cotton buyer at Johnson & Johnson, was tired of seeing his wife Josephine struggle to bandage the small cuts and burns she got while cooking. In 1920 he stuck small squares of gauze onto strips of surgical tape and covered them so they stayed clean until needed. His company turned the idea into the Band-Aid.
Read more on WikipediaSwedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele made oxygen by the early 1770s but was slow to publish his work. In 1774 the English minister and chemist Joseph Priestley made it on his own by heating mercury oxide, and his account appeared first. The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier later explained what the gas was and gave it its name.
Read more on WikipediaAt 18, Frida Kahlo was badly injured when the bus she was riding collided with a streetcar in Mexico City. During her long recovery her mother had a special easel made so she could paint lying down, with a mirror above the bed. Looking at herself for hours, she began the self-portraits that make up much of her work.
Read more on WikipediaIn Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg circles the globe on a bet. In 1889 the New York World sent its reporter Nellie Bly to see if she could do it faster. Traveling by steamship and train, she got back in 72 days, a real-world record at the time.
Read more on WikipediaAfter watching the little-known boxer Chuck Wepner go the distance against Muhammad Ali, a struggling Sylvester Stallone wrote the script for Rocky in a matter of days. Producers wanted an established star in the lead, but Stallone refused to sell unless he played the boxer himself. The low-budget film won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Read more on WikipediaErik Satie’s Vexations is barely a page long, but a note on the manuscript suggests playing it 840 times in a row. In 1963 John Cage organized the first complete performance in New York, with a relay of pianists taking turns at the keyboard through the night. It went on for more than 18 hours.
Read more on WikipediaHungarian architecture professor Ernő Rubik built the first cube in 1974 to help explain movement in three dimensions. Once he had scrambled it, it took him more than a month to work out how to put it back. It first went on sale in Hungary as the Magic Cube.
Read more on WikipediaErasto Mpemba was making ice cream at school when he put his mix in the freezer while it was still hot, and found it froze before his classmates’ cooled mixes. He kept asking teachers why, and in 1969 he published a paper on it with physicist Denis Osborne. The puzzle is now called the Mpemba effect, and scientists still argue about when and why it happens.
Read more on WikipediaAbove the round mirror on the back wall of his famous double portrait, Van Eyck painted the Latin words for “Jan van Eyck was here 1434”. The tiny mirror below it reflects the room from behind, including two figures standing in the doorway, one of whom may be the painter himself. The picture hangs in the National Gallery in London.
Read more on WikipediaErnest Vincent Wright’s Gadsby runs to more than 50,000 words and never uses the most common letter in English. Writing that way meant giving up words like “the”, “he” and “she”, and every past tense ending in “-ed”. The book got little notice when it came out, but it is now a famous example of a lipogram.
Read more on WikipediaThe yelp was first recorded for the western Distant Drums, for a man dragged underwater by an alligator. It is named after Private Wilhelm, a soldier hit by an arrow in The Charge at Feather River, which reused it two years later. Sound designer Ben Burtt found it in a studio library and slipped it into Star Wars, and it became an in-joke among filmmakers.
Read more on WikipediaWhen rehearsals began in the blockaded city, only 15 members of the radio orchestra were still available; the rest had starved or gone to fight. Military musicians were brought in to fill the ranks, and the symphony was performed on August 9, 1942. Before the concert, Soviet guns pounded German artillery positions to keep them quiet, and loudspeakers carried the music across the city and toward the enemy lines.
Read more on WikipediaChemists working with Harry Coover found the fast-bonding compounds called cyanoacrylates in 1942, during wartime research for military aircraft. The stuff stuck to everything, so it was shelved as useless. Coover’s team at Eastman Kodak took another look in 1951, and in 1958 the glue went on sale, later becoming known as Super Glue.
Read more on WikipediaIn December 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of a small museum in South Africa, was asked to look over fish brought in by the trawler Nerine. Among them was a strange blue fish she knew was unusual. Ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith recognized it as a coelacanth, a group believed extinct for about 65 million years, and the living genus was named Latimeria in her honor.
Read more on WikipediaGustav Klimt painted The Kiss in 1907 and 1908, at the height of his “Golden Period,” using oil paint with added gold leaf, silver and platinum. When it was put on public show, the Austrian government bought it while it was still unfinished. It now hangs in the Upper Belvedere in Vienna.
Read more on WikipediaRobert Louis Stevenson said the central idea came to him in a dream. His wife Fanny read his first draft and suggested it should really be an allegory, and he is said to have burned that manuscript and started again from nothing. He rewrote the story in three to six days, and it became a bestseller.
Read more on WikipediaMichael J. Fox was the first choice for Marty but was busy with the sitcom Family Ties, so Eric Stoltz was cast instead. Several weeks into filming, Stoltz was let go and Fox took over. Fox shot Family Ties during the day and then went to the movie set, often not getting home until early the next morning.
Read more on WikipediaOn the 1926 Hot Five record “Heebie Jeebies”, Louis Armstrong sang a chorus of wordless, made-up syllables instead of the lyric. The story he liked to tell was that his lyric sheet slipped off the music stand mid-take, so he kept going with nonsense sounds. Whatever the truth, the record sold well and helped turn scat into a lasting part of jazz singing.
Read more on WikipediaRoy Plunkett, a chemist at DuPont in New Jersey, was working on new refrigerant gases when a cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene stopped flowing even though it still weighed as much as a full one. Cutting it open, he found a slippery white solid: the gas had turned into a polymer, PTFE. DuPont later sold it as Teflon, now best known on non-stick pans.
Read more on WikipediaGerman scientist Alfred Wegener proposed in 1912 that the continents had once been joined and had slowly moved apart, pointing to coastlines that fit together and matching fossils across oceans. Most geologists rejected it because he couldn’t explain what moved them. Only after his death, when plate tectonics emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, was he proved largely right.
Read more on WikipediaAt a Sotheby’s auction in London, a framed copy of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon sold for just over £1 million. Moments later a shredder hidden in the frame pulled the canvas down through its base, leaving the bottom half in strips. The half-shredded work was renamed Love Is in the Bin, and when it was resold in 2021 it fetched far more than the original price.
Read more on WikipediaEdgar Allan Poe’s poem about a talking raven appeared in a New York newspaper in January 1845 and was reprinted again and again, making him a celebrity almost overnight. He was paid only about $9 for it, and he stayed poor for the rest of his life.
Read more on WikipediaOrson Welles’s first film told the story of a newspaper tycoon that many saw as a portrait of William Randolph Hearst. Hearst’s papers refused to review or advertise it, and it lost money on its first release. Decades later it was regularly named the greatest film ever made.
Read more on WikipediaPrince Nikolaus Esterházy kept his court musicians at his summer palace at Eszterháza in rural Hungary much longer than expected, while most of their wives waited back home. Joseph Haydn answered with his Farewell Symphony: in the final slow section each player stops, snuffs out the candle on his music stand and leaves, until just two muted violins are left. The prince seems to have got the message, because the court went back to Eisenstadt the day after the performance.
Read more on WikipediaOn October 8, 1958, at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, surgeon Åke Senning implanted a pacemaker designed with inventor Rune Elmqvist into patient Arne Larsson. The device failed after three hours, and a second one lasted two days. Larsson went on to receive 26 different pacemakers and died in 2001 at 86, outliving both the inventor and the surgeon.
Read more on WikipediaIn 1811, when Mary Anning was 12, her brother Joseph dug up a 4-foot skull from the cliffs near their home at Lyme Regis, England. A few months later Mary found the rest of the skeleton, more than 5 yards long. It was an ichthyosaur, and when it was auctioned in 1819 it was sold as a “Crocodile in a Fossil State” to the British Museum.
Read more on WikipediaEdward Hopper completed his painting of a late-night diner on January 21, 1942, and said it was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue in New York where two streets meet. The Art Institute of Chicago’s director, Daniel Catton Rich, went to see it and arranged its purchase. The museum bought it on May 13, 1942, for $3,000, and it is still in Chicago today.
Read more on WikipediaIn April 1929, J. M. Barrie gave the copyright of his Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, asking that the income it earned never be disclosed. Later, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 gave the hospital a perpetual right to royalties from performances and publication of the work in the UK. The boy who never grew up keeps helping sick children.
Read more on WikipediaBefore the film, movie snow was usually made from untoasted cornflakes, which were so noisy underfoot that dialogue had to be re-recorded afterwards. For Frank Capra’s Christmas classic, RKO’s special effects chief Russell Shearman developed a new “chemical snow” from water, soap flakes, foamite and sugar. The snowy Bedford Falls scenes were shot in the spring and summer of 1946, partly on RKO’s movie ranch in Encino, California.
Read more on WikipediaIn January 1924 a New-York Tribune article reported that George Gershwin was working on a jazz concerto for bandleader Paul Whiteman’s upcoming concert, even though Gershwin had turned the idea down. Whiteman talked him into it, and with only about five weeks to go Gershwin wrote the piece. Rhapsody in Blue premiered at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, with Gershwin himself at the piano.
Read more on WikipediaFrench doctor René Laennec felt it would be improper to press his ear to a young woman’s chest, so he rolled a few sheets of paper into a tube and listened through it instead. The heartbeat came through more clearly than he expected, and he went on to build a wooden version he called the stethoscope.
Read more on WikipediaCambridge graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell spotted a strange signal on her radio telescope’s chart paper that pulsed every 1.33 seconds. It was so regular that the team half-jokingly labeled it LGM-1, for “little green men”. It turned out to be a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star.
Read more on WikipediaGerman-American artist Emanuel Leutze painted his famous scene of the American Revolution in his studio in Düsseldorf. His first version was damaged by a fire in the studio, restored and sent to a museum in Bremen, where it was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid; a second, full-size version now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Read more on WikipediaIan Fleming, a keen birdwatcher who wrote his novels in Jamaica, owned the book Birds of the West Indies by the American ornithologist James Bond. Wanting a plain, ordinary-sounding name for his spy, Fleming borrowed the author’s name for Casino Royale.
Read more on WikipediaAlfred Hitchcock shot Rope, his first Technicolor film, in takes that ran up to about ten minutes, as long as a camera’s load of film. Every other take ends with the camera moving into an object such as a man’s jacket, hiding the cut, so the story seems to play out in real time in one apartment.
Read more on WikipediaSimon & Garfunkel first released “The Sound of Silence” in 1964 as a quiet acoustic track, and when the album flopped the duo split up. Producer Tom Wilson then overdubbed electric guitar, bass and drums, and the pair weren’t told until after the new version came out. The remix hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending January 1, 1966, and Simon & Garfunkel got back together.
Read more on WikipediaChicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition wanted a showpiece to match the Eiffel Tower, the star of the Paris fair four years earlier. Engineer George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. designed and built a 264-foot steel wheel whose cars could each carry up to 60 people. Every Ferris wheel since is named after him.
Read more on WikipediaAt Vienna General Hospital, Ignaz Semmelweis had doctors wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution before examining new mothers. Deaths from childbed fever on his ward soon fell to around 1 to 2 percent a month. Yet the medical community rejected his ideas in his lifetime, years before germ theory showed why he was right.
Read more on WikipediaGeorges Seurat worked on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in two long stretches between 1884 and 1886. Instead of mixing colors on his palette, he set small dots and dabs of paint side by side for the viewer’s eye to blend. The canvas, about 2 by 3 meters, was first shown at the last Impressionist exhibition and now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Read more on WikipediaLouisa May Alcott’s publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her for a novel about girls. She doubted she could, since she knew few girls besides her sisters, so she based the story on them and finished it within ten weeks. The first volume came out that September and was an immediate success.
Read more on WikipediaOn the night of December 10, 1938, weeks before principal photography began, producer David O. Selznick filmed the burning of Atlanta by setting fire to old sets on his studio backlot behind new façades. That same night his brother Myron introduced him to Vivien Leigh, who went on to win the role of Scarlett O’Hara.
Read more on WikipediaKeith Richards said he woke up in a Florida hotel with the riff of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in his head and taped it on a cassette player before falling back asleep. In the morning the tape held about two minutes of guitar, followed by long stretches of snoring. The song became the Rolling Stones’ first US No. 1.
Read more on WikipediaFrank Epperson said he left a glass of soda water with a stirring stick in it on his porch on a cold night in 1905 and found it frozen solid the next morning. Years later he patented the treat, first calling it the Epsicle, before his children’s name for it, Popsicle, stuck.
Read more on WikipediaWhen the first preserved platypus reached Britain, the naturalist George Shaw suspected someone had stitched a duck’s bill onto a furry body, and he reportedly took scissors to it looking for the seams. There were none: the platypus is a real egg-laying mammal from eastern Australia.
Read more on WikipediaBetween 1508 and 1512 Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling in fresco, working from a scaffold he had built high under the vault. Despite the popular image, he painted standing up, craning his head back, which he complained about in a comic poem.
Read more on WikipediaWinnie was a black bear cub bought by a Canadian army officer and named after his home city, Winnipeg; she spent her life at London Zoo. A. A. Milne’s son Christopher Robin loved visiting her and renamed his teddy bear after her, and the name passed into Milne’s books.
Read more on WikipediaThe collie who starred as the female Lassie in Lassie Come Home was a male named Pal, who got the role after the original female dog was let go during filming. Pal went on to play Lassie in more films, and his descendants carried on the role for generations.
Read more on WikipediaWhen Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was first performed in Paris on 29 May 1913, its pounding rhythms and strange, stamping choreography set off jeers and shouting in the audience. The performance carried on anyway, and the work became one of the most influential pieces of 20th-century music.
Read more on WikipediaChester Greenwood of Farmington, Maine, was testing a new pair of ice skates when he got fed up with his freezing ears. He came up with ear protectors of his own, later patented them, and turned them into a business.
Read more on WikipediaThe Greek scholar Eratosthenes knew that at noon on the summer solstice the Sun stood directly overhead in Syene, in southern Egypt. By measuring the angle of a shadow in Alexandria at the same time, he worked out the Earth’s circumference more than 2,000 years ago.
Read more on WikipediaThe famous armless statue of a goddess was found in pieces by a Greek farmer on the island of Milos in April 1820. Bought for France, it now stands in the Louvre, and no one knows for sure how its missing arms were posed.
Read more on WikipediaRobert Louis Stevenson started the pirate tale to amuse his young stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, building it around the idea of a secret treasure map. It first ran in weekly parts in a children’s magazine before it was published as a book.
Read more on WikipediaThe giant ape who climbed the Empire State Building was brought to life by Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion animation, using models roughly 14 to 18 inches high moved a tiny bit between each frame. King Kong premiered in New York in March 1933.
Read more on WikipediaRussian inventor Leon Theremin built an electronic instrument that a player controls by moving their hands near two antennas, one for pitch and one for volume. Patented in the United States in 1928, the theremin later gave many science-fiction films their eerie, wavering sound.
Read more on WikipediaLonnie Johnson, an engineer who worked on spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, came up with the idea for a powerful pump-action water gun while experimenting at home. First sold in 1990 and soon renamed the Super Soaker, it became one of the best-selling toys in the world.
Read more on WikipediaTardigrades, or water bears, are animals about half a millimetre long. In 2007 a European mission carried dried-out tardigrades into orbit and exposed them to the vacuum of space; many of them revived and even reproduced after returning to Earth.
Read more on WikipediaJohannes Vermeer’s famous painting is a “tronie”, the Dutch name for a study of a face or an imaginary figure rather than a portrait of a real sitter. No one knows who modeled for it; it hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
Read more on WikipediaRay Bradbury wrote the novella that grew into Fahrenheit 451 in the basement typing room of the library at UCLA, where he fed dimes into coin-operated typewriters. His story of a future where firemen burn books was published as a novel in 1953.
Read more on WikipediaEdwin S. Porter’s 12-minute western The Great Train Robbery was one of the first big hits of American film. It includes a famous shot of a bandit leader firing his pistol directly at the camera, which exhibitors could show at the start or the end of the film.
Read more on WikipediaThe two Voyager space probes launched in 1977 each carry a gold-plated record of sounds and music from Earth. Its playlist runs from Bach and Beethoven to Louis Armstrong and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”, a choice some of the selectors argued about at the time.
Read more on WikipediaDuPont chemist Stephanie Kwolek’s team was looking for a light but strong fiber to reinforce car tires when she developed a new polymer in 1965. It became Kevlar, now best known for protecting people in bulletproof vests and helmets.
Read more on WikipediaIn 1995 Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered 51 Pegasi b, a gas giant that whips around its star in about four days. It was the first planet found orbiting a Sun-like star, and it earned them the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Read more on WikipediaRembrandt finished his huge portrait of an Amsterdam militia company in 1642. For much of its life it was covered in dark varnish, which made the daytime scene look like night and gave it the nickname it still goes by.
Read more on WikipediaCharlotte Brontë’s novel was published in London on October 19, 1847, under the pen name Currer Bell. Her sisters Emily and Anne published their first novels the same way, as Ellis and Acton Bell.
Read more on WikipediaOne of the most quoted lines in film history is a misquote. In the 1942 classic, Ilsa asks the pianist Sam to play “As Time Goes By” for old times’ sake, and Rick later orders him to play it, but no one ever adds the word “again”.
Read more on WikipediaBobby “Boris” Pickett and Leonard Capizzi wrote the novelty song, with Pickett doing his best Boris Karloff impression. It was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the last two weeks of October 1962, right before Halloween.
Read more on WikipediaNew York mechanic Walter Hunt patented the safety pin in April 1849, a single piece of wire with a coiled spring and a clasp to cover the point. He sold the patent to W. R. Grace and Company for $400; the design is still in use today.
Read more on WikipediaWilliam Herschel spotted it with his homemade telescope in Bath, England, on March 13, 1781, and reported it as a comet. Other astronomers soon worked out its orbit, and it became the first planet discovered with a telescope.
Read more on WikipediaSalvador Dalí said the soft watches in The Persistence of Memory came from picturing a Camembert cheese melting in the sun. The famous painting is surprisingly small, about 24 by 33 centimeters, and hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Read more on WikipediaThe printer’s typescript of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel carried the title The Un-Dead. The name was changed at the last minute, and Dracula was published in London in May 1897.
Read more on WikipediaWorking on a tiny budget, the makers of John Carpenter’s Halloween bought a Star Trek Captain Kirk mask at a Hollywood Boulevard costume shop, widened the eye holes and spray-painted it a bluish white.
Read more on WikipediaGeorge Frideric Handel began setting Charles Jennens’s text on August 22, 1741, and finished the full score on September 14. The oratorio premiered in Dublin the following spring and is still performed every holiday season.
Read more on WikipediaThe putty was made in Cincinnati in the 1930s to wipe soot off wallpaper. After nursery school teacher Kay Zufall saw children playing with it, the McVicker family reworked it as a toy and sold it to schools in the mid-1950s.
Read more on WikipediaWeeks after discovering X-rays, Wilhelm Röntgen photographed the hand of his wife, Anna Bertha Ludwig, with her ring clearly visible. It was the first X-ray picture of a human body part, and it showed doctors how the rays could see inside the body.
Read more on WikipediaAndy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans is made of thirty-two separate canvases, one for every soup variety Campbell’s sold at the time. They were first shown in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, his first solo gallery show.
Read more on WikipediaJack Kerouac wrote the first draft of On the Road in three weeks in April 1951, typing it on a continuous scroll of taped-together tracing paper so he never had to stop to change sheets. The novel wasn’t published until 1957.
Read more on WikipediaSteven Spielberg shot E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in roughly chronological order so his young cast would give convincing emotional performances. By the time they filmed the goodbye scene, the children really were saying farewell to E.T.
Read more on WikipediaIn 1705 the young Johann Sebastian Bach traveled from Arnstadt to Lübeck, reportedly on foot, to hear the famous organist Dieterich Buxtehude. He was given four weeks’ leave but stayed away for about four months.
Read more on WikipediaNaval engineer Richard T. James saw a spring “step” downward after it was knocked off a shelf and turned the idea into a toy. At its first big store demonstration, at Gimbels in Philadelphia, the first 400 sold in 90 minutes.
Read more on WikipediaDmitri Mendeleev left gaps in his periodic table and, in 1871, described a missing element he called “eka-aluminium.” French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered it in 1875 and named it gallium.
Read more on WikipediaJames McNeill Whistler called his 1871 portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. Today it hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, in a frame Whistler designed himself.
Read more on WikipediaIn December 1922 his wife Hadley was taking his manuscripts to him in Switzerland when the suitcase holding them vanished at the Gare de Lyon station in Paris. It was never found.
Read more on WikipediaThe crew nicknamed the shark “Bruce,” after Steven Spielberg’s lawyer. Because the machines often failed at sea, Spielberg shot many scenes with the shark only hinted at, which added to the suspense.
Read more on WikipediaAntonio Vivaldi’s four violin concertos were published in Amsterdam in 1725 alongside four sonnets, one per season. No one knows for sure who wrote the poems, but they may have been Vivaldi’s own.
Read more on WikipediaJacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, Nevada, used copper rivets to strengthen the stress points of work pants. He asked his cloth supplier, Levi Strauss, to back a patent, which was granted on May 20, 1873.
Read more on WikipediaShe was born on July 5, 1996. Scientists at Scotland’s Roslin Institute made her from a cell taken from an adult sheep’s mammary gland, and named her after singer Dolly Parton.
Read more on WikipediaHokusai made it in late 1831 as the first of his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. About 1,000 woodblock copies were printed at first, perhaps 8,000 in all, and over a hundred first-edition impressions survive.
Read more on WikipediaCarlo Collodi’s tale began as a serial in an Italian children’s paper on July 7, 1881, and paused after Chapter 15. Readers and the editor wanted more, so he resumed it in 1882; the book came out in February 1883.
Read more on WikipediaPixar’s first feature opened in U.S. theaters on November 22, 1995. It was the first full-length film in which everything on screen was computer-animated.
Read more on WikipediaBelgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax patented the saxophone on June 28, 1846. Its sound comes from a single reed, like a clarinet’s, so it counts as a woodwind.
Read more on WikipediaIn 1947 Grace Hopper’s colleagues at Harvard found a moth stuck in a relay of the Mark II computer. They taped it into that day’s log. “Bug” already meant a fault, but the moth made the word famous in computing.
Read more on WikipediaDuring a solar eclipse in 1868, astronomers saw an unknown yellow line in the spectrum of sunlight. Chemist William Ramsay finally isolated helium on Earth in 1895, from a mineral called cleveite.
Read more on WikipediaSculptors had started on the huge marble block decades earlier, then stopped. It lay neglected in the cathedral workshop yard for years before Michelangelo worked on it from 1501 to 1504.
Read more on WikipediaWhile marking school exams, J. R. R. Tolkien found a blank page and, suddenly inspired, wrote the book’s first line about a hobbit living in a hole. The novel was published in September 1937.
Read more on WikipediaShe won Best Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind at the February 1940 ceremony, yet she had to sit at a segregated table at the side of the room.
Read more on WikipediaFrancis Scott Key’s 1814 poem was sung to a tune John Stafford Smith wrote for the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen’s club in London. Congress made it the national anthem only in 1931.
Read more on WikipediaA 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974. The register rang up 67 cents.
Read more on WikipediaEdmond Halley worked out that comets seen in 1531, 1607 and 1682 were one object and predicted it would return in 1758. He died in 1742; when it reappeared, it was named after him.
Read more on WikipediaEiffel, later famous for his Paris tower, and engineer Maurice Koechlin designed the iron framework that holds up the statue’s copper skin, which is only about 2.4 mm thick.
Read more on WikipediaDr. Seuss’s publisher, Bennett Cerf, bet him $50 that he couldn’t write a good children’s book using only 50 different words. The book came out in August 1960.
Read more on WikipediaFor Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney received an honorary award of one normal-sized and seven miniature statuettes, handed to him by Shirley Temple.
Read more on WikipediaQueen’s record company doubted a six-minute single would get airplay. London DJ Kenny Everett played it 14 times in two days, and it spent nine weeks at No. 1 in the UK.
Read more on WikipediaCollege students tossed empty pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company in Connecticut. Wham-O borrowed the name, with a new spelling, for its plastic flying disc.
Read more on WikipediaVenetia Burney, an English schoolgirl, suggested the name for the newly found planet. Her grandfather passed it on to astronomers, and it was adopted.
Read more on WikipediaMarcel Duchamp signed a porcelain urinal “R. Mutt” and submitted it to an art show in New York as Fountain, challenging what could count as art.
Read more on WikipediaCharles Dickens wrote the novella in the autumn of 1843 and it was published on December 19. The first printing sold out by Christmas Eve.
Read more on WikipediaIt was put up as an advertisement for a housing development in the hills. When the sign was repaired in 1949, the last four letters were removed.
Read more on WikipediaThe melody is traditionally credited to sisters Patty and Mildred Hill, who used it for “Good Morning to All,” a song for Patty’s kindergarten class. The birthday words first appeared in print with the tune in 1912.
Read more on WikipediaOtto Rohwedder’s bread-slicing machine was first used commercially by a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri, in July 1928.
Read more on WikipediaEdward Jenner took material from cowpox sores and gave it to a boy named James Phipps, who then resisted smallpox. The word vaccine comes from Jenner’s Latin name for cowpox, Variolae vaccinae.
Read more on WikipediaEdvard Munch made four versions of The Scream, two in paint and two in pastel, plus a lithograph print. One pastel version sold at auction in 2012 for about $120 million.
Read more on WikipediaScottish sailor Alexander Selkirk asked to be put ashore on an island off Chile, fearing his leaky ship would sink, and lived there alone for more than four years. His story is often cited as an inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel.
Read more on WikipediaAlfred Hitchcock shot the film in black and white, and Hershey’s chocolate syrup photographed better than stage blood.
Read more on WikipediaAfter his set at Wembley Stadium in London, he flew to New York on Concorde and went on to play the Philadelphia show the same day.
Read more on WikipediaAlexander Graham Bell’s patent application and Elisha Gray’s notice for a similar idea were both filed on February 14, 1876. Bell got the patent, and the dispute lasted for years.
Read more on WikipediaIn January 1610 his new telescope showed small points of light that moved around the planet. They were the first moons found orbiting another planet.
Read more on WikipediaInstead of painting into wet plaster, Leonardo da Vinci used tempera on a dry wall in Milan so he could work slowly. The paint did not bond well and started to deteriorate within decades.
Read more on WikipediaJ. K. Rowling’s agent spent about a year offering her first book to publishers, many of whom thought it too long, before Bloomsbury bought it. It came out in 1997 as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Read more on WikipediaNo studio could produce the effects he wanted, so Lucas founded Industrial Light & Magic in 1975. It went on to shape special effects across Hollywood.
Read more on WikipediaRain 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.
Read more on Wikipedia