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Einstein never learned to drive.

German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa, circa 1931
Credit: © PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
September 30, 2026

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As you might imagine of the man whose name is synonymous with genius, Albert Einstein was a tad eccentric. In addition to sleeping at least 10 hours a night and not wearing socks, he also never learned to drive. 

This mostly came down to preference rather than inability, however. Born in 1879, six years before the first gas-powered automobile was invented and many decades before cars became commonplace, Einstein loved to walk. His daily constitutionals were important to him, and not just for physical fitness — like many people, Einstein used his walks to clear his mind and make sense of whatever advanced equation he was working on at the time.

Einstein was also an urbanite, having lived in Munich, Zurich, and Prague before settling in Princeton, New Jersey — which is to say that public transit was widely available throughout much of his life. That doesn’t mean he never got behind the wheel, however. During a visit to the Warner Bros. soundstage on February 3, 1931, Einstein “drove” a stationary car with his wife Elsa in front of a rear-projection screen displaying everything from Los Angeles and the Rocky Mountains to his native Germany. The footage, which was unearthed in 2017, is delightful.

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Einstein didn’t win the Nobel Prize for his theory of relativity.

Though it’s true that Einstein won the prestigious award in 1921, it wasn’t for the theory of relativity, his famous breakthrough that describes the interconnectedness of time, space, and gravity. Rather, the Nobel Foundation honored him “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect,” which occurs when a material absorbs electromagnetic radiation and then releases electrically charged particles. Initially discovered by German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz in 1887, the photoelectric effect was further studied by Einstein beginning in 1905, the same year he proposed his first theory of relativity.

People wore tiny perfume holders around their necks to survive bad city smells.

Medieval pomander
Credit: © Marco Di Benedetto/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
September 30, 2026

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The past probably didn’t smell as bad as we tend to think, but there are certainly exceptions. European cities, for example, tended to be quite, shall we say, fragrant in the Middle Ages. To combat this, as well as the prevailing belief at the time that disease was mainly spread via foul, toxic air, many people wore perfume holders around their necks. In addition to making for a more pleasant experience when walking the streets, this was also considered a medical defense mechanism. (Science has come a long way in the last couple of centuries.)

Known as a pomander, which is derived from the French term pomme d’ambre, meaning “apple of amber,” it was worn like a necklace and contained fragrant herbs and/or flowers — an early form of aromatherapy, you might say. House of the Dragon fans will recognize the practical accessory, as season 3 antagonist Ormund Hightower frequently made use of one to combat the foul odors of Westeros. 

Pomanders fell out of fashion in the 17th century, when advances in medical knowledge made it clear that they weren’t doing much of anything to prevent disease. Because what’s old is often new again, however, similar perfume pendants have made a return as a chic fashion statement.

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There’s a theme park devoted to ancient perfume.

Perfume dates back at least to the Bronze Age, when the enterprising people of Cyprus combined pine, bergamot, rosemary, and other herbs into scents that still smell pleasant 4,000 years later. We know this thanks to a local plant enthusiast by the name of Phylaktis Lazarou, who opened the Cyprus Perfumery Theme Park in 2018. Inside, visitors can smell fragrances recreated from ancient recipes found at archaeological sites. The park offers everything from 45-minute tours to longer experiences in which visitors can perform their own perfume experiments.

The first American alarm clock could ring only at 4 a.m.

Antique clock, circa 1900
Credit: DEA / G. NIMATALLAH/ De Agostini via Getty Images
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
May 22, 2025

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In 1787, clockmaker Levi Hutchins of Concord, New Hampshire, invented what may have been the world’s first working mechanical alarm clock, and was certainly the first in the United States. But despite Hutchins’ long career building and selling timepieces, this alarm clock wasn’t something he actually patented or sold. He just wanted to wake up at 4 a.m., and felt out of sorts if he slept any later. So he took the assembly from one of his clocks and added a small gear that would trigger a bell at that precise time. 

According to The People’s Almanac, Hutchins said just having the idea for an alarm clock was the hard part, and “it was simplicity itself to arrange for the bell to sound at the predetermined hour.” Because the alarm was built directly into the mechanism of the clock, it wasn’t adjustable or snoozable — useful only for someone who wanted to wake at that exact wee hour of the morning every day. Notably, Hutchins did not live alone at the time — he shared a home with his brother Abel, and married just a couple of years later — so hopefully he kept the volume at a reasonable level, at least.

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The nine-minute snooze dates back to the first snooze button.

In 1956, General Electric-Telechron debuted the alarm clock feature that most of us still use today, whether we’re waking to a clock radio or relying on our phones: the snooze button. While in some cases you can adjust the interval, the standard snooze on alarm clocks and iPhones alike is nine minutes, which seems arbitrary but actually isn’t: The first snooze button was part of an analog clock, and the gear teeth wouldn’t line up to allow a 10-minute snooze. This technical limitation is long gone, but those early alarm clocks created the standard still used today.

Columbus said he saw mermaids.

Mermaid, vintage illustration from 1888
Credit: © Iconographic Archive/Alamy
Author Bess Lovejoy
September 23, 2026

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On January 9, 1493, as Christopher Columbus was sailing along the northern coast of Hispaniola (near what is now the Dominican Republic), his journal recorded an unusual sighting from the previous day. Near the mouth of what’s now the Yaque del Norte River, which Columbus named the Río del Oro, or “River of Gold,” he had seen three “mermaids” rise high out of the water. He was not entirely enchanted: The creatures, he observed, were “not so beautiful as they are painted,” though their faces appeared somewhat human. Columbus added that he had previously seen similar beings off the coast of West Africa.

Columbus’ original journal has been lost, but the account survives in a later copy made by Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas. Because the brief description doesn’t include any distinguishing anatomical details, it’s impossible to prove exactly what Columbus encountered. However, the “mermaids” are generally believed to have been manatees. If that’s true, the famous explorer’s account is the first written record of the animals in North America.

From a ship’s deck, a surfacing manatee might have seemed surprisingly humanlike. The slow-moving mammals have rounded heads, small eyes, and necks that allow them to turn their heads side to side. Their habit of rising upright in the water and looking around may have helped sailors fill in the rest of the picture. The resemblance even became embedded in scientific terminology: Manatees belong to the order Sirenia, named after the sirens of mythology.

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Ancient Greek sirens had feathers, not fishtails.

Today, “siren” is often treated as another word for “mermaid,” but the sirens of ancient Greek mythology were usually portrayed as part woman and part bird. Homer never described their physical appearance in The Odyssey, focusing instead on their irresistible singing, which lured sailors toward destruction. Ancient Greek artists filled in the blank by depicting sirens with women’s faces and birds’ bodies, wings, and taloned feet. Famously, Odysseus survived their song by having his crew plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to his ship’s mast. Over the centuries, the sea-associated sirens became conflated with fish-tailed mermaids — so thoroughly that variations of the word “siren” now mean “mermaid” in several languages.

The first rockets date back to 1232.

Incendiary arrows in China
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
May 15, 2025

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In the Middle Ages, China was a technology leader in explosives. Gunpowder was invented in China as early as the ninth century CE, and the Chinese were also the first to use it to propel weapons — the earliest known rockets. 

During the Battle of Kai-Keng (also called the Siege of Kaifeng) in 1232, Jin dynasty soldiers deployed simple, early rockets — fire arrows propelled with gunpowder — to defend themselves against Mongol invaders. To launch the arrows, soldiers used a tube capped on one end and filled with gunpowder, then attached to a stick for stability — basically a large bottle rocket. Once the tube was ignited, the fire, smoke, and gas that escaped out the open end propelled the tube and the stick toward a target.

Soon after finding themselves on the receiving end of fire arrows, the Mongols started developing rockets of their own. The idea soon spread to Europe, and with a growing number of inventors experimenting with rocketry, the technology continued to develop.

Though the Chinese fire arrows are often cited as the first example of rocketry, some earlier inventions used the same basic principle. In ancient Greece, one inventor launched a wooden pigeon using steam as a propellant. Throughout the next several centuries, similar experiments followed, including in China, where chemists developed firecrackers and other fireworks. 

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One of the fathers of aeronautics was a self-taught schoolteacher.

Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born in poverty in 1857 and lost most of his hearing to scarlet fever at age 9 or 10. He was then removed from school at age 14 — hardly a recipe for becoming a pioneer of aeronautics and rocketry. Yet at age 16, Tsiolkovsky started taking full advantage of the Chertkovskaya Library in Moscow, developing a passion for both science and science fiction. A few years later, he got his teaching credential and started teaching arithmetic and geometry in a small-town school, but continued doing experiments in his spare time. He even built a centrifuge to study the effects of different levels of gravity on chickens. In 1903, he published "Exploration of the World Space With Reaction Machines" in a scientific review, widely considered the first viable proposal for exploring space via rocket, including a foundational equation that’s still named for him. Today, he is widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern aeronautics and human spaceflight. 

Mother Teresa’s real name wasn’t Teresa.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta as a Loreto nun in India
Credit: © ARCHIVIO GBB/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
September 23, 2026

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Though the world knew her as Mother Teresa, the nun who would become a saint was known to her family of devout Albanian Catholics as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Born in 1910 in Skopje, then a part of the Ottoman Empire and now the capital of North Macedonia, she moved to Ireland at the age of 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto. Upon taking her vows in India, where she relocated in 1929, she took the name Teresa in honor of Thérèse de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries. Because a fellow nun had already done the same, Teresa opted for the Spanish spelling of the name. 

Mother Teresa is best known for founding the Missionaries of Charity, whose members devote themselves to serving the poor from all walks of life. Though founded in Calcutta in 1950, the congregation has since expanded to 139 countries around the world. Teresa suffered a decades-long crisis of faith, as do many spiritual leaders, but persisted in her charitable works. She died in 1997 at the age of 87 and was officially canonized as St. Teresa of Calcutta by Pope Francis in 2016.

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Mother Teresa’s father may have been poisoned by political adversaries.

The future Mother Teresa was just 8 years old when her father, Nikola Bojaxhiu, fell ill and died. Though never proved, it’s been widely speculated that he was poisoned by political adversaries who took issue with his campaigns for Albanian rights and his opposition to the formation of Yugoslavia. Gëzim Alpion, a professor at the University of Binghamton, told The Telegraph that Nikola was “killed because he was an Albanian patriot,” and suggested that “her father’s poisoning by Slavic nationalists in 1919 marked the beginning of Mother Teresa’s attempts to replace him with a divine father — Jesus — and the start of her lifelong doubts about the existence of God.” Teresa didn’t discuss her personal life, but her family strongly believed that Nikola had been poisoned.

Kids used to gather to watch giant blocks of ice being delivered.

Delivery man with a block of ice, c. 1930s
Credit: © H. ARMSTRONG ROBERTS—ClassicStock/Alamy
Author Bess Lovejoy
September 23, 2026

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Before electric refrigerators became standard kitchen equipment in the U.S., the arrival of the iceman was a familiar neighborhood event. Horse-drawn wagons carried huge blocks of ice through American streets, stopping wherever a household needed to replenish its icebox. The delivery was especially popular with children, who waited beside the wagon or followed it down the street in hopes of receiving cold chips broken from the larger blocks.

The ice had often started its journey months earlier. During the winter, crews cleared the snow from frozen lakes and ponds, scored the water’s surface into a grid, and used saws and pikes to separate the ice into blocks. These were packed into heavily insulated icehouses, then transported by railroad, barge, or wagon. Sawdust, once an unwanted byproduct of lumber mills, proved remarkably effective at slowing the ice’s melting.

Customers indicated how much ice they wanted by placing a numbered card in a window. The iceman would chop the requested amount from a larger block, grip it with iron tongs, and hoist it onto a shoulder protected by a thick leather or sheepskin pad. Once inside, he placed it in the household icebox, where the cold air helped preserve meat, dairy products, and produce. Because the ice continually melted, the delivery wagon soon had to return, much to the delight of local children.

Ice delivery was wet, grueling work traditionally performed by men, although women took over some routes during World War I. As electric refrigerators spread through American homes, the neighborhood iceman gradually disappeared. But one trace of the profession remains: People still occasionally call the refrigerator an icebox, even though no one has to carry a dripping block through the kitchen anymore.

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A radio competition inspired a 3-ton ice block’s journey across the Sahara.

In 1959, the Norwegian insulation company Glassvatt accepted a challenge from Radio Luxembourg: to transport a block of ice from the Arctic Circle to the equator without refrigeration. Although the station soon withdrew its promised 100,000-franc cash prize (apparently the contest was not entirely serious), Glassvatt continued with the journey as an audacious publicity stunt. Workers fused ice from Norway’s Svartisen glacier into a 3-ton block and wrapped it in wood and glass-wool insulation. In 1959, a truck carried it approximately 7,456 miles through Europe and across the Sahara, where temperatures approached 122 degrees Fahrenheit. After 27 days, the expedition reached Gabon with nearly 90% of the ice intact.

For centuries, inns made strangers share beds.

Two children sleeping in bed, c. 1940s
Credit: © H. ARMSTRONG ROBERTS—ClassicStock/Alamy
Author Nicole Villeneuve
September 23, 2026

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When you book a hotel room, you expect the bed to be yours alone. Even a hostel, where you’re likely to share a room, gives you your own mattress. But a couple of centuries ago, travelers had very different expectations. Sharing a bed with a stranger was often part of the deal at inns. In Europe and colonial America in the 17th and 18th centuries, when space was tight and bedding scarce, two, three, or even more people who had never met might find themselves sleeping side by side.

Many historical travelers left detailed accounts of getting cozy with strangers. In colonial America, British merchant Robert Hunter Jr. recalled sleeping in a tavern room near Williamsburg, Virginia, with eight other people, including three men arguing over who should get the middle of their bed. 

Even two of America’s Founding Fathers once found themselves in a sharing situation. In 1776, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were traveling together when they stopped at a crowded New Jersey inn and found that only one bed was available. They shared the sleeping space, and Adams later recounted their amusing argument about whether to keep the window open.

Bed-sharing wasn’t limited to travel; members of large households also often slept several to a bed. That began to change in the late 18th and 19th centuries, as bedroom furniture became more accessible and hotels increasingly offered private rooms. Changing ideas about privacy, personal space, and hygiene also made sleeping alone more desirable, and gradually, what was once an ordinary occurrence became something most people today would not find tenable.

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Queen Elizabeth I reportedly never slept alone.

Queen Elizabeth I was famously unmarried, but she nonetheless rarely slept alone. Throughout her 44-year reign, from 1558 until 1603, the queen is said to have shared her bed with a trusted attendant at night. Bed-sharing was common in Elizabethan households, and for the monarch, a bedfellow could provide company at the end of the day — someone to talk to or to ask for advice. This arrangement was likely especially comforting to Elizabeth, who reportedly suffered from insomnia and was afraid of the dark.

Ohio’s abbreviation used to be just ‘O.’

Ohio welcome sign
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Author Timothy Ott
September 28, 2026

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With the 1831 publication of Table of the Post Offices in the United States, the Post Office Department acknowledged the population’s reluctance to completely spell out state names on mailing envelopes (such as the always-vexing “Massachusetts”) and for the first time unveiled a list of approved abbreviations. The list largely followed consistent guidelines: States with one-word names were abbreviated with their first and last letters (e.g., Connecticut became “Ct.”); states with two-word names were marked by their initials (New York became “N. Y.”); and territories were shortened to two letters with a “T” (Arkansas Territory became “Ar. T.”). But there were a few anomalies among the group: Alabama and Illinois were denoted by their first two letters (“Al.” and “Il.”); Michigan Territory retained its first three (“Mic. T.”); Missouri used a middle letter (“Mo.”) to avoid confusion with Mississippi (“Mi.”); and Ohio simply became “O.”

When the U.S. Post Office released updated lists in 1874 and 1943 to account for the country’s expansion, it did away with abbreviations for Ohio and other states with short names. Then, in mid-1963, the department established new two- to four-letter abbreviations for all states — with the exception of Ohio, Iowa, and Utah — to fit the templates of new mail processing equipment. When the four-letter designations were still found to be too long, the Post Office shortened them one more time in October 1963 to a consistent two letters, and Ohio, Iowa, and Utah became “OH,” “IA,” and “UT.” And that’s where things stand today. The only state abbreviation that has changed since 1963 is Nebraska’s; originally given the two-letter abbreviation of “NB,” the Cornhusker State was rebranded as “NE” in 1969 to avoid confusion with the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

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The Post Office introduced a mascot to promote the use of ZIP codes.

When mail services struggled to keep pace with America’s booming population after World War II, the Post Office Department sought to streamline the process by dividing the country into regions marked by five-digit Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) codes. However, the department had taken note of the recent pushback against the introduction of area codes for the telephone, so it introduced a cartoon mailman named Mr. Zip to help persuade the public to add these five numbers to outgoing mail. Mr. Zip was initially featured on Post Office promotional materials, mail trucks, and buttons worn by carriers; he also appeared in a 1967 PSA alongside a band that performed ZIP code-themed songs and skits. When ZIP code usage continued to lag, he found his way onto kids’ lunch boxes, a board game, and into a Dick Tracy cartoon. It’s unclear just how effective Mr. Zip was as a pitchman, but the relentless promotional push led to nearly 100% of Americans adopting the ZIP code by the late 1970s, and allowed the Postal Service to ease the smiling mailman into retirement in 1983.

The CIA trained ravens to drop bugging devices on windowsills.

A common raven
Credit: © J.C.Salvadores/stock.adobe.com
Author Bess Lovejoy
September 16, 2026

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Most spies don’t work for peanuts, but a few of the CIA’s Cold War recruits worked for morsels of “crow salad.” The agency experimented with some unconventional operatives during the era, including dolphins, cats, pigeons, and, yes, ravens. The raven program grew out of research by Animal Behavior Enterprises, a company whose founders had studied under behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. When they weren’t teaching chickens to play baseball or pigs to vacuum at their I.Q. Zoo in Arkansas, the company’s trainers developed animal acts for the U.S. government.

Ravens were particularly promising recruits. They were intelligent, strong enough to carry small packages, and capable of working independently. According to the CIA’s declassified Operator’s Manual: Avian Delivery System, a raven could be trained to take a package in its beak, fly to a specified ledge or windowsill, deposit the package, and return to its cage. Handlers guided a raven by projecting a pulsing red laser onto the target; once the bird had deposited its cargo, a special recall lamp beckoned it back.

The CIA envisioned ravens delivering listening devices disguised as ordinary debris, such as a piece of roofing slate. Trainers also taught the birds to press cameras against windows and take snaps of the rooms inside. The birds were trained with “crow salad” — specifically, a mixture of meat, canned corn, whole wheat bread, cottage cheese, and other ingredients.

A raven in the program did succeed (sort of) at its mission at least once, somewhere in Europe. But although the bird left the eavesdropping device on the designated windowsill, the machine failed to pick up the intended target’s conversation. The CIA eventually abandoned its animal experiments around 1975, but not because the birds were bad — the raven had performed its part of the operation perfectly.

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The U.S. Army considered turning mosquitoes into intruder alarms.

Birds and mammals weren’t the only creatures considered for Cold War service. Researchers at the U.S. Army’s Limited Warfare Laboratory explored whether the sensory abilities of arthropods could reveal the presence of clandestine intruders. Bedbugs, ticks, lice, and mosquitoes were among the creepy-crawly candidates tapped for the task. Lice proved unhelpful, since they simply crawled around randomly during an early test. A species of mosquito showed more promise: It usually rested until a potential host approached, then took flight. Researchers thought that this reaction might be detected electronically, allowing mosquitoes to function as miniature alarms warning soldiers that someone was approaching in the dark. The concept apparently never advanced beyond the experimental stage.

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