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The Bluetooth symbol was inspired by Old Norse runes.

Harald Blauzahn Gormsson
Credit: BTEU/AUSMUM/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine
July 9, 2025

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Unless you’re well versed in Scandinavian history, you’ve probably never heard of Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, who ruled Denmark and Norway in the 10th century. His moniker is likely familiar, however, as it inspired the wireless technology of the same name. Despite “Bluetooth” being intended as only a temporary code name before the technology was unveiled in 1998, according to the official Bluetooth website, the name “caught on fast and before it could be changed, it spread throughout the industry, becoming synonymous with short-range wireless technology.” (The temporary name was originally supposed to be replaced with either RadioWire or PAN, short for Personal Area Networking, both far less distinct.)

The iconic symbol, meanwhile, is a combination of the two runes that form Bluetooth’s initials: Hagall (ᚼ) and Bjarkan (ᛒ). He received his nickname from a dead tooth that appeared a dark gray-blue color. In addition to his unique dental feature, the Viking king is best remembered for converting Danes to Christianity and unifying the tribes of Denmark in the 10th century. His name is written as Harald Blåtand Gormsen in Danish and inscribed as ᚼᛅᚱᛅᛚᛏᚱ ᛬ ᚴᚢᚾᚢᚴᛦ in the Jelling stones, two runic stones that have been called “Denmark’s birth certificate” and are considered a national symbol.

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Four days of the week are named after Norse gods.

The names Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday all have etymological origins in Norse mythology. Tuesday is named after Týr, the god of war and justice; Wednesday honors Odin, the “allfather” of the entire pantheon; Thursday received its name from Thor, the hammer-wielding god of thunder; and Friday is named after Frigg, the goddess of love and fertility. In Old Norse, these would be spelled Tysdagr, Óðinsdagr, Þórsdagr, and Frjádagr, respectively. The other three days of the week are named after Saturn (Saturday), the sun (Sunday), and the moon (Monday).

Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky were all pseudonyms.

Portraits of Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky
Credit: (L-R) © PhotoQuest—Archive Photos/Getty Images; © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images—Hulton Archive/Getty Images; © The Print Collector/Heritage Images—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Author Michael Nordine
October 7, 2026

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You’ve probably never heard of Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lev Davidovich Bronstein — except you actually have. Those three men are known to the world as Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, respectively. 

All three Soviet leaders used pseudonyms dating back to their time as revolutionaries, when they often found themselves on the wrong side of the law — which, after Russia’s October Revolution, was no longer the law. But you can’t go back to being Norma Jeane Mortenson once everyone thinks your real name is Marilyn Monroe, and so the troika lived the rest of their lives under their assumed names.

Stalin adopted his moniker, which means “Man of Steel,” in 1912 (beating Superman to the punch by well over two decades). Lenin’s etymology is less definitive, with different theories suggesting it might have been inspired by the Lena River, the name printed on a fake passport he received when he fled the country, or even a reference to a Leo Tolstoy novel featuring a character with the last name Olenin. Trotsky, meanwhile, is said to have made a spur-of-the-moment decision and adopted the name of the head jailer at the Odessa prison where he was incarcerated for two years.

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Lenin’s body is on display in Moscow.

When Lenin died on January 21, 1924, the decision to preserve his body had already been made by the Soviet upper brass, and his remains have been on display as an enduring symbol of communism ever since. Lenin’s Mausoleum is free and open to the public in Moscow’s Red Square, though security is extremely strict. The exact science that goes into preserving the body is a secret known only to the anatomists, surgeons, and biochemists known as the “Mausoleum group” at Moscow’s Center for Scientific Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies. Having been to the tomb, your humble correspondent can confirm that it’s as eerie and fascinating as it sounds.

Men used to believe mustaches filtered germs.

Vintage photograph of a Victorian gentleman
Credit: © duncan1890—E+/Getty Images
Author Michael Nordine
October 7, 2026

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Victorian doctors had what they considered a good reason for prescribing beards: They believed that facial hair, including mustaches, served as a natural barrier against germs and illness. The idea would appear to make sense at first glance: If whiskers can make cold weather a bit more bearable, surely they could protect against the foul air that, at the time, was believed to cause most disease. 

Indeed, one doctor wrote in the Edinburgh Medical Journal in 1861 that “the moustache is emphatically nature’s simple respirator, while the hair covering the jaws and throat is intended to afford warmth and protection.” By the late 19th century, however, the miasma, or foul air, theory fell out of favor, and the medical community accepted that “wee beasties,” as microbes were known in the U.K., are responsible for most infectious diseases.

Unfortunately for those of us who do sport facial hair, it seems to have the opposite effect when it comes to shielding us from illness. According to a study in Behavioral Ecology, “hair on the face and body are potential localized breeding sites for disease-carrying ectoparasites.” Meanwhile, Bav Shergill of the British Association of Dermatologists told the Guardian that “facial hair is more likely to trap bacteria and food” and “there is actually more chance of infection with a beard than a clean-shaven face.” The things we do for fashion.

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Men used a special spoon to protect their mustaches while eating.

Eating is one of the most important considerations when it comes to facial hair, which has an unfortunate habit of capturing food en route to its final destination. To navigate this problem, a novel solution was proposed in the late 19th century: the mustache spoon. Inventor Ellen B.A. Mitcheson’s 1873 patent included a guard attached to the spoon so a man could consume soup and other liquids “without danger of soiling or disfiguring his mustache.” As mustaches became less common in the 20th century, alas, so did the mustache spoon.

Women had battleships built into their hair.

Illustration of the Belle Poule ship hairstyle
Credit: © Patrick Guenette/Alamy
Author Nicole Villeneuve
October 6, 2026

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What do you do when your country wins a naval battle? In 18th-century France, you apparently wore a ship on your head. In 1778, the French warship Belle Poule battled the British Arethusa, and the French victory inspired the rather unusual fashion statement of constructing a miniature version of the victorious vessel atop one’s head. 

The coiffure à la Belle Poule, or Belle Poule hairstyle, featured ship designs complete with masts and sails placed on top of the towering, powdered hairstyle that was popular among the French court and elite. French Queen Marie Antoinette reportedly had her hairdresser Léonard Autié and headdress maker Rose Bertin create an elaborate version of the warship in her hair; after the queen appeared with the statement piece at a ball, the style was reportedly copied more widely. 

The nautical theme also extended to more conventional fashion, with French women wearing maritime-inspired hats and clothing. Hairstyles, meanwhile, were inspired not only by naval victories, but also by other current events such as the Montgolfier brothers’ 1783 hot-air balloon experiments. The most elaborate styles remained largely upper-class attire, but fashion plates and etchings helped preserve a record of these increasingly outrageous creations and trends.

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The queen of England was once called the “talking hat.”

For a few minutes in May 1991, Queen Elizabeth II appeared as little more than a hat on television. During a ceremony hosted by U.S. President George H.W. Bush, a lectern had been prepared for the (considerably taller) president. When Elizabeth, who stood about 5 feet, 4 inches, stepped up to speak, the microphones blocked most of her face, leaving her large purple hat bobbing above the podium. The press quickly dubbed her the “talking hat.” The next day, the queen quipped to Congress, “I do hope you can see me today.” Protocol chief Joseph Verner Reed, who was responsible for the mix-up, later joked that “talking hat” would someday be in his obituary.

There was an onion craze on the stock market in the 1950s.

Floor traders at the Chicago Board of Trade
Credit: From Original Negative/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine
June 30, 2025

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You can buy and sell all sorts of commodities on the stock market, from gold and oil to soybeans and cattle. One thing you can’t trade, however, is the humble onion, and there’s a good reason for it: The vegetable was once the subject of a stock market scam. It took place in 1955, when onion futures became the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s most traded commodity and two investors saw a get-rich-quick scheme in the making. Sam Siegel and Vincent Kosuga bought 30 million pounds of onions, a full 98% of Chicago’s stock, as well as onion futures. They then set a plan in motion to short sell the vegetables, which is when investors buy a stock they think (and hope) will decrease in value, sell it on the open market, and then buy it again for the lower price. They then profit from the difference between the sale price and purchase price.

Siegel and Kosuga didn’t just think that onion prices would drop — they knew it. They flooded the market with their massive inventory, dropping the price from $2.75 a bag to just 10 cents a bag. They made millions but bankrupted countless farmers in the process, leading to congressional hearings and the 1958 passage of the Onion Futures Act, which made it illegal to trade the pungent allium on the stock market. To this day, onions are the only banned agricultural trading commodity in the United States — not that anyone’s tearing up over it.

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The London Stock Exchange was the largest stock exchange until World War I.

Founded in 1801, the London Stock Exchange is among the oldest in the world. It also used to be the largest in terms of market capitalization, a position it held until World War I. As it became clear that war was going to break out in Europe, a financial crisis forced the LSE to stay shut for five months beginning in July 1914. That crisis extended far beyond England, of course — around 50 countries experienced bank runs and stock market slumps. The New York Stock Exchange also closed for about four months, finally reopening on November 28, and eclipsed the LSE by the end of the war to become the world’s largest stock exchange. It still holds that title today, though London remains the biggest in Europe. 

Johnny Appleseed was a real person.

Drawing of Johnny Appleseed, 1862
Credit: Library of Congress/ Corbis Historical via Getty Images
Author Timothy Ott
June 30, 2025

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According to legend, Johnny Appleseed wandered the Midwestern frontier in the 1800s with a tin pot on his head and nothing on his feet, scattering apple seeds from a sack and winning over settlers and Indigenous peoples alike with his joie de vivre. It all sounds too far-fetched to be real, but unlike Paul Bunyan — another celebrated frontiersman said to have wielded his axe in a similar time and place — Johnny Appleseed’s legend is rooted in truth.

Though there are few established facts from his lifetime, historians believe Johnny Appleseed was born John Chapman in Massachusetts a few months before the opening shots of the American Revolution, and he relocated to Western Pennsylvania in the 1790s. By the early 1800s, he was living a nomadic life throughout Ohio that consisted of planting nurseries, trading seeds and saplings with settlers, and preaching the word of the New Church, a Christian denomination inspired by the writings of Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg. 

Along the way, he picked up his famous nickname, while making an impression on communities with his alleged refusal to harm other living creatures and his strange garb; witnesses claimed he wore a cloth sack with holes cut out for his arms and head. After moving into Indiana in the 1830s, Chapman died from what was most likely pneumonia around Fort Wayne in 1845.

The combination of the unusual lifestyle and clear eccentricities made Chapman’s story ripe for exaggeration. W.D. Haley’s article “Johnny Appleseed: A Pioneer Hero” in the November 1871 edition of Harper’s Monthly Magazine championed him as a kinder and gentler frontiersman who easily bridged the worlds of the Natives and settlers, while poems such as Lydia Maria Child’s “Apple-Seed John” from 1881 painted its subject as a saintly figure who walked the earth solely to grow food for the good of humankind. By the time Disney included a segment on Johnny Appleseed in 1948’s Melody Time, the image of the barefoot, tin pot-hatted do-gooder was here to stay.

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Johnny Appleseed's apples were mostly grown for hard cider.

Among the seedier elements of Johnny Appleseed's story that were whitewashed for general audiences is the fact that his crops were primarily grown for alcoholic cider instead of eating. This was partly due to the biological nature of apple seeds: Many trees grown from seedlings will produce inedible apples, as opposed to the juicy varieties we enjoy today that spring from the horticultural process of grafting. There were also nutritional benefits to drinking cider, as sanitary drinking water was often absent from frontier life. However, even in Appleseed's heyday there was a temperance movement afoot that sought to dissuade farmers from turning their wares into alcoholic cider. Not surprisingly, this pressure worked to only limited effect, and yet the widespread hard cider craze perpetuated by Appleseed's dealings fizzled out in the years after his death, as the combination of a vanishing frontier and the influx of German immigrants helped point drinking-inclined Americans toward beer instead.

Only two Americans have been generals in three different wars.

Winfield Scott (left) and Douglas MacArthur (right)
Credit: (left) GL Archive/ Alamy Stock Photo; (right) Bettmann via Getty Images
Author Michael Nordine
June 18, 2025

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Not for nothing was Winfield Scott known as the Grand Old Man of the Army. He spent more than half a century in the U.S. military, and was so committed to proper decorum that he also earned the nickname “Old Fuss and Feathers.” Along with Douglas MacArthur after him, he holds the distinction of being a U.S. general in three different wars. Scott’s tenure included the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War, while MacArthur served in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War.

Scott was in his 70s by the time the Civil War broke out, but still served as the commanding general for the Union Army during the first seven months of the conflict; he also clashed with Abraham Lincoln on several issues, including the overall strategy for the war. Old Fuss and Feathers later sent a copy of his memoirs to Ulysses S. Grant with the inscription, “From the oldest to the greatest general.” Eighty years later, on December 18, 1944, MacArthur achieved the five-star rank of General of the Army — a title only four others, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, have held.

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Douglas MacArthur received 18 different medals.

As one of the most distinguished generals in United States history, MacArthur had quite the list of medals. He received 18 honors, including the highest of them all: the Medal of Honor, for which he was nominated three times and finally received for his World War II service in the Philippines. That distinction ran in the family, as his father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., received it during the Civil War. (The only other father and son to be similarly honored were Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt Jr.) MacArthur’s ribbon rack also included three Distinguished Service Crosses (the Army’s second-highest honor), five Army Distinguished Service Medals, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, seven Silver Stars, the Distinguished Flying Cross, a Bronze Star, an Air Medal, and two Purple Hearts.

Artists painted with a pigment literally ground from Egyptian mummies.

Tomb of Memnon from the 20th dynasty in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt
Credit: © Abrill_—iStock/Getty Images
Author Bess Lovejoy
October 6, 2026

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Among the many indignities inflicted upon ancient Egyptian mummies, being squeezed from a tube onto an artist’s palette may be one of the strangest. For centuries, European artists used a brown pigment known as “mummy brown” or “Egyptian brown,” made by grinding up material taken from mummified human and animal remains.

Although mummy brown is sometimes presented as a 19th-century novelty in Europe, its history stretches back centuries further. Some accounts of mummy pigment date to the 12th century CE, although its use as an oil paint pigment began around the end of the 16th century. Recipes varied, but some called for mummy material — including flesh, bones, wrappings, or substances scraped from inside the body — to be ground with a nut oil. The resulting warm, translucent brown was particularly useful for painting shadows, flesh tones, and glazes.

Part of the pigment’s color probably came from the dark substances used during embalming. These were long assumed to include large quantities of bitumen, also known as pitch — an oily, black petroleum product that oozed up from the earth in some parts of the Middle East, and whose name in Arabic, mūmiyā, gave us the term “mummy.” While many mummies did contain bitumen, other resins, fats, waxes, and materials used for mummification also darkened with age and likely added depth to the pigment.

Mummy brown became especially fashionable among European artists in the 18th and 19th centuries, although some may not have realized exactly what it contained. According to the writer Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones (Kipling’s uncle) was so horrified to learn the truth in 1881 that he ceremonially buried his tube in the garden. Growing respect for mummies’ archaeological and cultural value, dwindling supplies, and the pigment’s unpredictable quality eventually brought the product to an end in the 20th century. Paints sold as mummy brown today merely imitate its earthy color — no ancient Egyptians required.

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Mummies were once sold as medicine.

Long before European artists painted with mummies, patients swallowed them. The practice grew partly from confusion over the word mumia, which referred to bitumen, the naturally occurring petroleum product once prized for its supposed healing properties. Because many Egyptian mummies were blackened and believed to contain bitumen, people began attributing the same medicinal powers to the bodies themselves. By the 12th century, powdered mummy was being sold in Europe as a treatment for bruises, bleeding, and numerous other ailments. Demand eventually inspired counterfeiters to pass off recently deceased people as ancient mummies. Suspicions that mummy medicine could spread plague helped discredit the medicine, although its use lingered into the 18th century.

Early movie theaters hired people to explain what was happening onscreen.

Movie theater audience, 1924
Credit: © TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
September 30, 2026

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Before they were a ubiquitous facet of everyday life, movies — and movie theaters — were a novelty that few people fully understood as a storytelling medium. And when something is difficult to understand, the best option is usually to bring in someone who can explain it. That’s what movie theaters did in the early 20th century: They hired lecturers to guide viewers through the action onscreen, which, in addition to being silent, often lacked intertitles to provide context. 

The lecturer would stand off to the side of the screen, explain what was happening, and even provide dialogue and/or sound effects — a kind of bridge between this new form of entertainment and magic lantern shows, which projected still images while a narrator told the accompanying story.

Despite being popular in the United States as well as France and Germany, these lecturers were phased out in the early 1920s. As audiences grew used to intertitles as a storytelling device and live music became more prominent, there was little need for them — and even less when 1927’s The Jazz Singer ushered in the “talkie” era by being the first feature-length film with fully synchronized dialogue.

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Movies used to be projected on a highly flammable material.

The vast majority of films are projected digitally these days, which is a cheaper, more convenient method than the one it replaced: actual film stock. Cellulose acetate, aka “safety film,” dominated for more than half a century beginning in the 1950s, replacing the highly flammable — and visually spectacular — nitrate. Unstable and combustible, nitrate continues to burn even when doused with water.

The founder of Fender didn’t know how to play guitar.

Fender Stratocaster
Credit: Jesse Wild/Guitarist Magazine/ Future via Getty Images
Author Michael Nordine
June 18, 2025

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Just because Leo Fender founded one of the most famous guitar companies in the world doesn’t mean he could play the instrument himself. His own musical ability didn’t extend beyond a few piano lessons and a little bit of saxophone; according to some, he couldn’t even tune a guitar. His prowess for creating instruments was rooted in a passion for electronics, and he opened a radio repair store in 1938 when he was 29 years old. Eight years later, Fender Manufacturing (later the Fender Electric Instrument Co.) was born, though it seems that building guitars never inspired the founder to pick one up and play the first few notes of “Stairway to Heaven.”

Described as “a strange man in a way” by business partner Dan Randall, Fender had “a fetish for machinery,” as Randall put it. It was clearly successful: The Stratocaster, introduced in 1954, has sold millions of units and been played by such legendary guitarists as Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly, Eddie Van Halen, George Harrison, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Kurt Cobain, just to name a few. It remains practically synonymous with the electric guitar — even though its namesake couldn’t play.

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The guitar solo in “Stairway to Heaven” was improvised.

Jimmy Page’s 50-second display of pure virtuosity during Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” has been voted the best guitar solo of all time, a bravura composition courtesy of his 1959 Fender Telecaster — only it was hardly composed at all. “The solo sounds constructed — and it is, sort of, but purely of the moment,” Page told Rolling Stone in 2008. “For me, a solo is something where you just fly, but within the context of the song.” He recorded three takes of the solo, all three of which were different from one another, and chose the one he liked the most for the album.

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