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Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth name was Michael.

  • Martin Luther King Jr., age 6
Martin Luther King Jr., age 6
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Author Michael Nordine

January 7, 2025

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Some of America’s most famous names weren’t birth names. Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III, John Wayne was originally Marion Robert Morrison, and Martin Luther King Jr. was Michael King Jr. until he was 5 years old. The change was prompted by his father, Reverend Michael King. In 1934, King Sr. attended the Fifth Baptist World Congress in Berlin. In response to the rise of Nazism, the BWA put out a fierce proclamation condemning all racial discrimination and oppression.

The elder King traveled throughout Germany during his stay, learning more about the German theologian Martin Luther in the process. Born in the town of Eisleben in 1483, Luther began the Protestant Reformation when he posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of a castle church in 1517. Reverend King was so inspired by the reformer that he changed both his own name and that of his son, though the younger King’s birth certificate wasn’t officially amended until July 23, 1957, when he was 28 years old.

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Martin Luther King Jr. was a devoted “Star Trek” fan.

One fateful Friday in 1967, Nichelle Nichols made one of the toughest choices of her career: resigning from Star Trek. The actress, who played Uhura on the groundbreaking sci-fi series, delivered the news personally to series creator Gene Roddenberry, who urged her to take the weekend to reconsider. She agreed, and was at an event in Beverly Hills that same weekend when one of the organizers told her an admirer of the show wanted to meet her. It was Martin Luther King Jr., who introduced himself as her biggest fan and explained that Star Trek was the only TV show he and his wife allowed their children to stay up late to watch. When she told him she was leaving the show, he was taken aback. “This is the future,” he said of Star Trek. “[Roddenberry] has established us as we should be seen… When we see you, we see ourselves, and we see ourselves as intelligent and beautiful and proud.” The following Monday, Nichols returned to Roddenberry’s office and told him she was staying.

Four U.S. presidents never had a vice president.

  • U.S. presidents
U.S. presidents
Credit: benoitb, wynnter/ iStock, IanDagnall Computing/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

July 17, 2024

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A president without a vice president is like a captain without a first mate, but some U.S. presidents — four, to be precise — have nevertheless had to serve without one. They were John Tyler (1841-1845), Millard Fillmore (1850-1853), Andrew Johnson (1865-1869), and Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885), all of whom ascended to the presidency when their predecessors died in office. Because the 25th Amendment didn’t lay out an official process for naming a new VP in such an event until 1967, those four commanders in chief simply went without one. All four failed to win reelection; some even failed to secure their party’s nomination and therefore never had the chance to select a running mate.

That, however, is not the norm. Nearly one-third of all U.S. presidents formerly served as vice president, including eight who took office after the death of a former president. When a president’s two terms are up, the veep is often considered the party favorite for the next election — a precedent set by John Adams, the country’s first vice president, who was elected its second president after George Washington left office. It doesn’t always work out, however. A number of VPs have unsuccessfully run for president, including John Breckinridge in 1860 and Al Gore in 2000. 

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One president was never elected president or vice president.

While it’s true that several vice presidents who later held the top job were never technically elected president, they were at least elected VP as part of the presidential ticket. Not Gerald Ford, who had perhaps the most roundabout path to the Oval Office of any commander in chief. He became VP on December 6, 1973, less than two months after his predecessor, Spiro Agnew, resigned amid a tax evasion scandal, and he ascended to the presidency upon Richard Nixon’s own resignation just nine months later. After serving the remaining two years of what would have been Nixon’s full second term, Ford lost his reelection bid to Jimmy Carter in 1976 — in part, many believe, because of his decision to pardon Nixon.

The weekend was created so workers would stop taking ‘sick’ days on Monday.

  • Workers celebrate “Saint Monday”
Workers celebrate "Saint Monday"
Credit: Historic Images/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Nicole Villeneuve

January 8, 2026

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In Britain and other parts of Europe, the first day of the workweek used to be known as “Saint Monday,” and not for the reasons you might expect. Workers often treated Monday as an unofficial holiday. Sunday was their one sanctioned day off, and though it was meant as a day of religious observance, for many people it also became a time to let loose after a long workweek. Come Monday, many workers simply didn’t show up, using the day to recover — or to continue imbibing. The day became known as “Saint Monday,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to religious holidays. 

By the mid-19th century, taking Monday off work was a widely practiced custom, honored in tradition if not on any calendar or work schedule. At the same time, however, the rise of industry saw workplaces become more structured, and Saint Monday disrupted production. So employers, influenced by temperance groups and labor unions throughout Britain, tried a different approach: making time off a formality. Starting in the mid-1800s, workweeks were shortened, first by reducing Saturdays to half days. Employers hoped the change would satisfy workers and encourage them to reliably return to work on Monday. 

Leisure time indeed took on new meaning for the working class: Recreational travel, live music and theater, and sporting events — especially football (or soccer in the U.S.) — became Saturday fixtures. Still, the shift to a full two-day weekend didn’t happen overnight. In the U.K., it unfolded gradually after World War I, while in the U.S., the Ford Motor Company formalized a five-day workweek in 1926. By the 1940s, Saturdays and Sundays were firmly ingrained in society as the weekend we now know and love. 

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One of the longest labor strikes in U.S. history lasted 11 years.

In April 1954, more than 2,000 workers at the Kohler plumbing fixture factory in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, walked off the job. Backed by the United Auto Workers Local 833 union, the employees of Kohler, one of the city’s largest employers, were pushing for higher wages, stronger job protections, and formal union recognition. The plant initially shut down, but Kohler hired nonunion replacements and resumed production. The strike dragged on for more than a decade. The union organized nationwide boycotts of Kohler products, while tensions in town escalated. Picket lines sometimes turned violent, and the dispute even drew national attention thanks to a 1958 Senate inquiry. Although the walkout formally ended in the early 1960s, the fight wasn’t fully resolved until 1965, when new Kohler management agreed to higher wages and increased pension contributions, finally ending one of the longest labor battles in American history.

An officer from the Napoleonic Wars had his pension paid until 1951.

  • Lieutenant Nelson
Lieutenant Nelson
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

July 10, 2024

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Horatio Nelson is one of Great Britain’s most legendary war heroes. The Royal Navy vice admiral led several key victories during the Napoleonic Wars with France — including his final battle near Cape Trafalgar in Spain, where he died after being shot by a sniper. At the time, it was not unusual for the British government to grant perpetual pensions to the families of war heroes, and Nelson’s family was given £5,000 a year, upwards of £500,000 today. The practice ended in 1887, and most families receiving such pensions took a buyout offer soon after. But the pension reserved for the Earls Nelson (the family was given the title of earl in honor of the naval hero) didn’t end until 1951, with the death of the fifth earl. By the 1940s, most of the pension money was used to maintain the family estate, which the family wished to sell but was not able to since it had been purchased with public funds after Horatio’s death. So in 1947, the British Parliament voted to end the arrangement — the family wouldn’t receive a pension, but they’d be allowed to sell the property. 

It’s somewhat ironic that Nelson’s pension lasted the longest considering it wasn’t actually distributed to his descendants. His beloved daughter Horatia, his only child, was born out of wedlock to his mistress and lifelong love Emma Hamilton — and although he asked with his dying breath that Hamilton be taken care of, his pension went to his older brother William, who did not carry out his wishes. The pension passed down to William’s descendants, and Hamilton raised Horatia in poverty. Given this, one member of Parliament, Michael Foot, speculated that Horatio himself would have voted to end the pension. While discussing the bill in Parliament, he said: “This House, 140 years ago, behaved meanly towards the memory of Lady Hamilton, and when there is a vote [to end the pension], it will be a vote to wipe out the wrong which was done 140 years ago.”

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Horatio Nelson made up an elaborate backstory for his daughter.

Although they weren’t married in the eyes of the law, Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton wanted to raise their only child, Horatia, together. So they told an elaborate lie to lessen the scandal, claiming Horatia had been born several weeks before her actual birthday, a date when Hamilton was out of town, to give her an alibi. They claimed she was an orphan whose father had been a sailor and mother had died in childbirth. According to the story, Nelson and Hamilton raised the child as “godparents.” Nelson eventually claimed Horatia as his own just before her fifth birthday. He left a letter for her on his desk before his death, which he signed off with “receive, my dearest Horatia, the affectionate parental blessing of your father.” Although Hamilton continued to raise the child, she stubbornly maintained the fabricated backstory for the rest of her life.

Medieval cathedrals were painted in vibrant colors — not gray stone.

  • Canterbury Cathedral in Kent
Canterbury Cathedral in Kent
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Author Bess Lovejoy

January 8, 2026

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Walk into a medieval cathedral today and you’re likely to see pale stone, worn statues, and a restrained palette of beige and gray. But to medieval worshippers, these buildings would have looked very different. Cathedrals weren’t meant to be austere monuments — they were immersive spectacles, painted in a rainbow of colors and gilded from top to bottom.

Recent studies have made it clear that medieval churches were originally covered in vibrant pigments: reds, blues, ochres, greens, and gold. Exterior sculptures were painted to resemble living figures, while interiors were layered with murals, patterned columns, and richly colored vaults. Traces of this polychromy (the use of many colors) still survive at sites such as the Gothic cathedrals in Amiens and Chartres, and scientific analysis has confirmed pigment residues on cathedrals across Europe.

So why do these structures look so colorless now? Time played a role, as weathering, oxidation, and pollution gradually stripped paint from stone. But later human choices mattered even more. During the Reformation (the religious revolution of the 16th century), murals were deliberately painted over to fit new ideals. In the 18th and 19th centuries, restorers scraped paint from statues and walls to match modern tastes that prized “pure” stone. These decisions reshaped how the Middle Ages would be remembered.

Yet that preference for monochrome was never medieval. As historian Yvonne Seale has noted, medieval people thought about color differently than we do, and primarily in terms of expressions of clarity, brilliance, and spiritual “greatness.” Bold, saturated colors carried meaning. The deep blues used for the Virgin Mary’s cloak, for example, were meant to soak the senses and signal holiness.

Seen this way, gray stone cathedrals aren’t timeless relics — they’re artifacts of later centuries. The medieval world was anything but dull. Its churches were designed to dazzle, instruct, and envelop visitors in color, light, and meaning, from painted façades to stained glass that quite literally bathed worshippers in sacred hues.

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The Gothic style largely began with a French abbot’s vision.

The Gothic cathedral did not simply evolve: It was championed by one powerful individual. Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, near Paris, played a central role in shaping the new style in the early 12th century. As abbot of Saint-Denis — the burial church of French kings and a center of royal authority — Suger oversaw a dramatic rebuilding of the abbey’s eastern end in the 1140s. Using pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and innovative structural systems, he replaced heavy Romanesque walls with soaring spaces filled with stained glass. For Suger, light was not decorative but theological. He believed brilliance and color could draw worshippers’ minds upward, toward the divine. This vision mattered especially in cathedrals — churches that housed a bishop’s cathedra, or throne. In the Middle Ages, such buildings were known as ecclesia cathedralis, “churches of the throne,” and served as centers of spiritual authority. (Eventually the term was shortened to simply “cathedral.”) Suger’s glowing Saint-Denis abbey became a model for later cathedrals across France and England, demonstrating that architecture itself could teach, inspire, and embody sacred power.

Only one U.S. president was also a preacher.

  • Portrait of James A. Garfield
Portrait of James A. Garfield
Credit: Archive Pics/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

January 8, 2026

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Before being elected U.S. president, James A. Garfield held a number of varied roles: lawyer, canal worker, Civil War general, and preacher. To this day, he is the only president who was also an ordained minister. At age 18, Garfield was baptized as a Disciple of Christ, the same denomination as his parents; he began preaching while still a student at Hiram College, which was founded by the Disciples of Christ. Though he was never formally ordained, neither were most other Disciples of Christ preachers at the time. 

The subject of Garfield’s first sermon was “The First and Second Comings of Christ,” in which he drew parallels between the lives of Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte. He also presided over weddings, funerals, and other religious ceremonies throughout Northeast Ohio during his time as a preacher, which ended when he was elected to Congress in 1862. In addition to being the only sitting member of the House of Representatives to be elected president, Garfield also holds a less fortunate distinction: He was the second president to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln.

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Garfield developed an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem.

There are many proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, which states that a² + b² = c² when measuring the sides of a right triangle. But only one proof was developed by a president: the one that James A. Garfield came up with a few years before entering the Oval Office, while representing Ohio in the House of Representatives in 1876. Described as “really a very clever proof” by math historian William Dunham, the proof was published in the New England Journal of Education on April 1, 1876, and is unusual for being based on a trapezoid. 

The world’s longest-burning light bulb has been on since 1901.

  • Centennial Light, 2001
Centennial Light, 2001
Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc./ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

July 10, 2024

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Technology such as LED lighting has made light bulbs last longer than ever, but no modern bulb even comes close to the incandescent Centennial Light, which has been glowing inside a fire station in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1901. The light shines for 24 hours a day, though it has taken a few breaks here and there for power outages, renovations, and venue changes. It was first installed in a cart house — so named when fire hoses traveled on carts, not trucks — but moved to a large firehouse nearby soon after. In 1903, it moved again to a newly built station. It stayed there until 1976, when it moved to its present home in Livermore, California. At that point the bulb had been operational for 75 years, and had become a sensation; it even got a police and fire truck escort for the journey, which was slightly less than 2 miles.

Unsurprisingly, the bulb’s survival probably boils down to good craftsmanship. The thick glass was hand-blown, and the bulb has a thick, durable carbon filament, unlike the thin tungsten filaments that became standard later. That was all mounted by hand on a sturdy brass base. Additionally, it’s filled with nitrogen gas, which is gentler than the argon and krypton gas used in later incandescents. The second-longest-burning light bulb, located in Fort Worth, Texas, was made by the same company, Shelby Electric. The Centennial Bulb was hooked up to its own power source in 1976, and has lost power only once since then, for a little under 10 hours. Leaving it on 24/7 may have actually contributed to its longevity, since turning a bulb on and off frequently can damage the filament. The bulb also now burns at a steady 4 watts, much lower than its original 60 watts.

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Planned obsolescence started with light bulbs.

The Centennial Bulb’s lifespan is impressive, but there’s a reason few bulbs have come close. “Planned obsolescence” is the practice of designing products to need replacing. Today, we see it everywhere, especially in technology such as the latest smartphones, but it dates back about 100 years. In the mid-1920s, decades after the Centennial Light first switched on, an industry group called Phoebus engineered a 1,000-hour lifespan for incandescent bulbs so households would have to replace them more frequently. That money-making strategy became the standard from then on.

Giant, dinosaur-eating crocodiles used to roam the Sahara.

  • Sarcosuchus attacking a herd of dinosaurs
Sarcosuchus attacking a herd of dinosaurs
Credit: Stocktrek Images, Inc./ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

January 8, 2026

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Crocodilians, which include both alligators and crocodiles, are already a little scary, but prehistoric crocs were something else entirely. At the turn of the 21st century, a team led by paleontologist Paul Sereno made a massive discovery — and we mean that literally. In the Ténéré region of the Sahara Desert, they dug up half the skeleton of a Sarcosuchus imperator, a prehistoric crocodile. The full specimen would have measured 40 feet long and weighed 8 tons. They nicknamed their find “SuperCroc” and went on to discover the remains of four additional members of the species, all from around 110 million years ago.

While the S. imperator was first identified based on a partial skull in 1964, Sereno’s discovery, published in 2001, unleashed a flurry of fresh information about these giant creatures. Their tooth pattern was designed to take down some seriously big prey — their diet included large dinosaurs, perhaps even 20 feet long. Their eyes and noses were located on top of their heads, implying that they would sink into rivers and lie in wait before ambushing their prey. Like extant crocodilians, these creatures could keep growing throughout their lives; the biggest specimens were around 50 to 60 years old.These giant river-dwellers highlight how different the world looked in the early Cretaceous Period. Ténéré is a particularly dry area of the Sahara, a desert within a desert, but millions of years ago it was a tropical forest with rivers large enough for multiple SuperCrocs to lurk in. Luckily for the dinosaurs of the period, the predators’ large bodies meant they couldn’t travel very fast once they left the water.

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There used to be a much wider variety of crocodiles.

Before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event — the one that wiped out most dinosaurs — Earth was home to all kinds of crocodiles that looked very different from one another. Many of them were given rather goofy nicknames by the scientists who discovered them. For example, there’s PancakeCroc, with its distinct flat head, and DuckCroc, with a beaklike snout. Several varieties of crocodile galloped. Some were even herbivores. The crocodilians we have today, which vary little from species to species, were just the ones that survived, and unfortunately, that did not include the tiny, short-snooted Simosuchus clarki, which one paleontologist described as having “the proportions of a lap dog.”

Mussolini tried to straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa — and failed.

  • The Duomo and Leaning Tower of Pisa
The Duomo and Leaning Tower of Pisa
Credit: Ian Dagnall/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

January 8, 2026

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The Leaning Tower of Pisa, originally the bell tower to a medieval cathedral complex, is one of Italy’s most recognizable landmarks. But fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who came to power in 1922, thought it made the country look bad, so he tried to straighten the tower in 1934. The results were disastrous — not only did his plan fail, but it destabilized the structure and made the tower bend even lower.

Construction on the Tower of Pisa started in 1173, and after the first story was completed, the builders noticed that the foundation had settled unevenly. After a century-long pause, construction resumed, and engineers tried to compensate by making the walls slightly taller on the leaning side. The extra weight on that side made it sink even further. Adding the tower’s seven massive bells didn’t help, either.

By 1817, the tower had tilted a few degrees. Then in 1838, an architect attempted to excavate the base of the tower and inadvertently added as much as half a degree to the lean. So the tilt was quite pronounced and only getting worse by the time Mussolini’s engineers got to it. They drilled 361 holes in the ground around the foundation and injected 80 tons of grout into them, attempting to push the structure upright. Instead, the added weight further destabilized the soft soil, causing the tower to move another half an inch in the wrong direction. Mussolini made no further attempts to straighten the landmark, and he was deposed in 1943.

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The Eiffel Tower was supposed to be temporary.

Today, the Eiffel Tower is one of the world’s most popular tourist attractions, but when it was constructed for the 1889 International Exposition in Paris, its creator Gustave Eiffel received only a 20-year land use permit. To safeguard his project, Eiffel demonstrated its usefulness in radio transmission, which won a 70-year extension. Over time, the structure proved to be not only a practical asset but also a cultural landmark and tourist attraction, giving the city little reason to remove it. Today, around 7 million people a year visit the tower, and it certainly seems here to stay.

Every member of LBJ’s family had the initials LBJ (even the dog).

  • Johnson family portrait
Johnson family portrait
Credit: Everett Collection Historical/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

July 10, 2024

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If you think the Kardashians’ insistence on giving every member of the family a first name starting with the letter “K” is a bit much, wait until you hear about the 36th president of the United States. One assumes it was a coincidence that Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife Claudia, better known as Lady Bird, both ended up with the initials LBJ, but it was certainly intentional to have both their daughters and one of their many dogs continue the trend. Lynda Bird Johnson was born on March 19, 1944, and Luci Baines Johnson followed on July 2, 1947. The final LBJ, Little Beagle Johnson, was a free spirit with a habit of running away.

In addition to being a quirky family tradition, this affinity for initials seems to have been a political move on LBJ’s part. He instructed one of his congressional assistants to refer to him by his initials long before his Oval Office tenure, telling the aide, “FDR–LBJ, FDR–LBJ. Do you get it? What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.” Johnson, whose “Great Society” program was inspired by the New Deal, greatly admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it’s hard to fault his political instincts given that LBJ became vice president thanks to another president with famous three-letter initials: JFK.

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A trip to the bathroom saved LBJ’s life during World War II.

A year and a half after becoming a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, Johnson was called to active duty in the days following Pearl Harbor. His only bombing run followed on June 9, 1942, and he might not have survived were it not for a fortuitously timed bathroom break. Originally meant to take an observer’s seat on a B-26 known as the “Wabash Cannonball,” LBJ excused himself to use the restroom and ended up boarding another bomber instead. His plane, nicknamed the “Heckling Hare,” landed safely, whereas the Cannonball was shot down in New Guinea with no survivors. The Heckling Hare almost didn’t land safely either, however, as its electrical generator failed in midair and the crew barely made it back to base. LBJ received a Silver Star from General Douglas MacArthur for his actions, greatly boosting his political career.

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