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The richest shipwreck ever holds around $18 billion in treasure.

  • San José ship, 1708
San José ship, 1708
Credit: The Picture Art Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

October 9, 2025

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When the San José first set sail in 1698, it probably wasn’t expecting to be making headlines three centuries later. The 64-gun galleon belonging to the Spanish navy sank in 1708’s Battle of Barú, but that wasn’t the end of its story. Long known as the “holy grail” of shipwrecks, the San José met its watery end off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia, with 200 tons of gold and emeralds aboard. It’s presumed to be worth as much as $18 billion, which explains why several different entities have laid claim to the shipwreck since its discovery in the 1980s.

That includes Spain (who launched it), Colombia (near whose coast it now resides), the American salvage company that found it, and Indigenous groups in South America whose people originally mined the treasure in Bolivia. Court battles over the riches have been held in Colombia, the United States, and even the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. The case is unlikely to be settled anytime soon, with at least one expert, Colombian maritime archaeologist Juan Guillermo Martín, suggesting a novel solution: Leave the San José and its treasure undisturbed at the bottom of the ocean.

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It took more than 70 years to find the Titanic.

Despite being out of sight for more than seven decades after it sank during its maiden voyage, the Titanic has never truly been out of mind. The tragedy has compelled people for well over a century now, inspiring countless books, movies, and other works of art. Even more significant, perhaps, is the fact that it did all this before the ship was found. After several failed attempts, the Titanic was discovered on September 1, 1985, during an expedition led by oceanographers Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel. What they found ran counter to conventional wisdom, as most believed the ship had sunk in one piece, not two. The two main parts were found nearly 400 miles southwest of Newfoundland and lie about a third of a mile from each other. They were found at a depth of 12,500 feet in a part of the ocean known as the midnight zone, due to the fact that it receives no sunlight.

Baby Ruth bars weren’t officially named after the baseball player.

  • Grover Cleveland with his daughter Ruth
Grover Cleveland with his daughter Ruth
Credit: CBW/ Alamy Stock
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

October 9, 2025

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It’s easy to assume that Baby Ruth candy bars were named for the famed baseball player George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr. Indeed, even the Great Bambino assumed as much at the time. After all, the nougaty confection debuted in 1921, after the ballplayer became a household name. But according to the official, legal explanation of the moniker, Baby Ruth bars were named after a different Ruth altogether: the daughter of former U.S. President Grover Cleveland.

When the confection first hit the market, its low price tag (5 cents, half the cost of similar candy bars) made it an instant hit for the Curtiss Candy Company — as did its connection with the famous Yankee slugger. It was so successful, the Sultan of Swat decided to get into the candy business himself. He founded the George H. Ruth Candy Company and developed the Ruth’s Home Run bar featuring his likeness on the wrapper.

Curtiss Candy Company took the ballplayer to court, alleging that its candy was not named after Babe Ruth, and the athlete was taking advantage of the success of Baby Ruth with his competing candy. In a deposition, Curtiss founder Otto Schnering claimed the bars were named after Ruth “Baby Ruth” Cleveland, who was born between her father’s two terms as president. Her birth sparked a national obsession, but she died of diphtheria in 1904 at just 12 years old. Schnering admitted that he hoped Babe Ruth’s notoriety would help with merchandising.

The court ruled in favor of Curtiss, but many in the American public still aren’t convinced. Popular fact-checking site Snopes.com even considers the claim that the candy bar was named after Ruth Cleveland to be patently false, pointing out that the candy company has made some suspicious claims about the origin of the Baby Ruth name. For instance, it claimed that Ruth Cleveland visited the Curtiss factory, but Curtiss was founded in 1916, 12 years after her death. 

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Candy bars were advertised as hearty lunches.

When Hershey’s milk chocolate bars launched in 1900, there weren’t a lot of grab-and-go meal options available. Milton Hershey developed the candy to fill this void — specifically for long train rides — and advertised it as “more sustaining than meat.”

Chocolate bars ran with this marketing angle for the next few decades. Knickerbocker Chocolate Company described its Sportsman’s Chocolate Bracer as “two flat cakes of delicious eating chocolate, which can be eaten straight or between two slices of buttered bread in the form of a sandwich.” Candy bars called Chicken Dinner and Chicken Bone were named not because they contained chicken, but to evoke the sense of a satisfying meal. Curtiss made similar claims about Baby Ruth, which was advertised as both an “energy bar” and “a complete luncheon for 5 cents.”

No one’s sure how Napoleon died.

  • Napoleon at St. Helena
Napoleon at St. Helena
Credit: Morphart Creation/ Shutterstock
Author Michael Nordine

May 7, 2024

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Napoleon Bonaparte died more than 200 years ago, and in all that time no one has been able to definitively establish how. We know he didn’t perish at the Battle of Waterloo, which is synonymous with his downfall but preceded his actual passing by six years. That calamitous defeat forced Napoleon to step down as emperor of the French for the second time and surrender to the British on July 15, 1815, leading to six years in exile on the island of St. Helena before his death on May 5, 1821. Just three weeks earlier, he reflected on his harsh treatment at the hands of the British, writing, “I die before my time, murdered by the English oligarchy and its assassin.” This has led to speculation among some that Napoleon was poisoned by his captors, a suspicion bolstered by the fact that locks of his hair tested positive for arsenic in 1961. But researchers have since chalked that up to the then-common practice of using arsenic to preserve bodies after death, and/or traces of hair powder containing arsenic.

The physicians who performed Napoleon’s autopsy in 1821 concluded that he had died, much less suspiciously, of stomach cancer exacerbated by bleeding ulcers. This stands to reason, as he was treated with a heavy dose of calomel — a compound thought to be medicinal at the time that actually contained mercury — the day before he died. Uncertainty remains, however, as do speculation and even conspiracy theories that have only added to the aura of France’s most legendary ruler. 

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A silent film made about Napoleon required three screens.

There are epics, and then there’s Napoléon. Directed by Abel Gance and released in 1927, the silent film is perhaps most famous for a triptych sequence that required three screens to properly project. Fearing that one screen simply wasn’t expansive enough to contain his vision, Gance — a pioneer of the silent era also revered for his movies J’accuse (1919) and La Roue (1923) — placed three cameras next to each other for the final climactic sequence. This technique was dubbed “polyvision” by French film critic Émile Vuillermoz and is partly responsible for Napoléon’s mystique. The other part is that the film has been hard to see for most of its nearly century-long existence. The original cut was four hours and 10 minutes long, while Gance’s own “version définitive” was nine hours and 22 minutes; the most recent restoration, which took 16 years to complete, is more than seven hours long.

A volcanic eruption indirectly led to the invention of the bicycle.

  • Draisine made by Karl Baron of Drais, 1817, wood engraving
Draisine made by Karl Baron of Drais, 1817, wood engraving
Credit: INTERFOTO/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Bess Lovejoy

October 1, 2025

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The bicycle may seem like a symbol of leisure or health today, but its roots lie in disaster. In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted with extraordinary force, blasting ash, gas, dust, and rock high into the atmosphere. (It’s now considered the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history.) The fallout dimmed the sun worldwide, lowering temperatures and devastating harvests. The following year became known as the “year without a summer” — snow fell in July in New England, crops withered in Europe, and famine spread.

The shortages were catastrophic for both people and animals. In Germany, where food prices soared, horses were slaughtered for meat or starved for lack of feed, primarily oats. This sudden scarcity of horsepower — the main mode of transport at the time — spurred a new line of thinking. If animals couldn’t be relied on for transportation, perhaps people could move themselves.

Enter Baron Karl von Drais, a German civil servant and amateur inventor. In 1817, he unveiled his Laufmaschine, or “running machine” — a simple two-wheeled wooden frame that riders straddled and propelled by pushing their feet along the ground. It could travel far faster than walking, even on muddy post-rain roads. Drais demonstrated it with a 50-kilometer ride (about 31 miles) over four hours that proved its practicality. Though it was mocked as a “dandy horse” and was even restricted in some cities, Drais’ design (also known as a “draisine”) encouraged the idea of human-powered transport. Over the decades, innovators added pedals, gears, and chains, transforming his running machine into the modern bicycle.

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Bicycles were once considered a feminist symbol.

In the 1890s, bicycles gave women more than wheels — they gave them freedom. Affordable and practical, bicycles offered women unprecedented mobility at a time when carriages were costly and often required male assistance. Riding a bike meant setting one’s own course, on one’s own schedule. As suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it, the bicycle inspired women’s “courage, self-respect, [and] self-reliance.” Her ally Susan B. Anthony was even bolder: “I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel … the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.” The act of cycling also changed what women wore. Heavy skirts and corsets were swapped for lighter outfits and, for some, bloomers — garments that scandalized traditionalists but made movement possible. To many, the sight of women pedaling alone down a city street embodied the “New Woman”: independent, mobile, and modern. Two wheels became a quiet revolution — rolling proof that women could chart their own path.

Benjamin Franklin created a new alphabet.

  • Benjamin Franklin writing
Benjamin Franklin writing
Credit: Realy Easy Star/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

May 7, 2024

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When he wasn’t busy experimenting with electricity or dismissing our national symbol as “a bird of bad moral character,” America’s most eclectic founding father had an even stranger pastime: creating a new alphabet. Benjamin Franklin began working on what he called a “Reformed Mode of Spelling” in 1768, envisioning his phonetic alphabet as “a more natural order” that consisted mainly of “sounds formed by the breath, with none or very little help of tongue, teeth, and lips; and produced chiefly in the windpipe.” He removed six consonants he considered superfluous — c, j, q, w, x, and y — while also adding two new vowels and four new consonants.

Under Franklin’s system, each letter could be pronounced only one way (hence why letters such as “c,” which have both “soft” and “hard” pronunciations, were removed). “Long” vowel sounds were achieved by simply using the letter twice in a row. This, he reasoned, would lead to fewer misspellings. Franklin tested his alphabet in a 1768 letter to Polly Stevenson, the daughter of his landlady in London, that ends with “ɥi am, mɥi diir frind, iurs afeks̸ɥnetli, B. Franklin” — “I am, my dear friend, yours affectionately, B. Franklin.” Given the fact that you’ve likely never read such a sentence before, you already know that the alphabet never caught on.

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Ben Franklin’s son was a loyalist during the Revolutionary War.

The American Civil War wasn’t the only U.S. conflict that pitted family members against one another, as the relationship between Benjamin Franklin and his son William reminds us. As the British-appointed governor of New Jersey, William Franklin implored the state Legislature to remain loyal to the British crown during the American Revolution, and achieve “peace, happiness, and a restoration of the public tranquility” rather than “anarchy, misery, and all the horrors of a civil war.” Born in 1730 to an unknown mother and raised by his father’s common-law wife Deborah Read, the younger Franklin was considered a capable governor and was encouraged to join the revolution. He refused, and after being placed under house arrest and removed from the governorship by the Continental Congress in January 1776, he was later imprisoned in Connecticut. He fought for the loyalists upon his release and, following the American victory, never reconciled with his father.

The Oregon Trail wagons weren’t for passengers.

  • Oxen pulling wagon
Oxen pulling wagon
Credit: RockingStock/ iStock
Author Michael Nordine

April 30, 2024

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It’s often thought that the Oregon Trail was made easier by the covered wagons that have become synonymous with the grueling journey, but that’s only partially true. Those wagons weren’t actually for people, who walked most or all of the trail’s 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon. Instead, they were for the supplies that hopeful settlers deemed necessary for the trek, pulled by mules and oxen. Indeed, people who were ferried by wagons had a habit of falling out, as the vehicles didn’t have springs and thus bounced around a lot; some folks were even run over by other wagons or trampled by beasts of burden after falling. As for those walking, many of the children didn’t have shoes.

So while we often romanticize that months-long journey as being emblematic of the “American Dream” and westward expansion, it was above all else a brutal quest that many did not survive. Contrary to popular belief, however, that has little to do with Indigenous peoples. Tribes such as the Pawnee and Shoshone were more likely to be trail guides or trading partners than hostile combatants, and fatigue and disease caused the vast majority of settlers’ deaths. When they circled the wagons at night, it wasn’t to keep Indigenous peoples out — it was to keep animals in.

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Only one-fifth of Oregon Trail travelers went to Oregon.

Given its name, you might reasonably assume that most travelers who braved the Oregon Trail settled in Oregon. Not so, as only one-fifth of the pioneers who risked life, limb, and dysentery in search of the 19th-century “American Dream” ended up in the Beaver State. The rest changed course in either Idaho or Wyoming en route to Utah and California. Approximately 70,000 Mormons made their pilgrimage to the former, and some 250,000 settlers headed to California — many of them in search of gold.

Synchronized swimming dates back to ancient Rome.

  • Synchronized swimming circa 1953
Synchronized swimming circa 1953
Credit: Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images
Author Bess Lovejoy

September 4, 2025

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When most people think of synchronized swimming, they picture Esther Williams’ glittering “aquamusicals” in the 1940s and ’50s, or the sport’s 1984 Olympic debut. But the idea of choreographed aquatic performance actually dates back nearly two millennia — to the flooded amphitheaters of ancient Rome.

Roman rulers were obsessed with turning water into spectacle. Julius Caesar and his successors staged naumachiae — mock naval battles fought by prisoners in specially dug lakes or even within the Colosseum in Rome, which could be flooded for the occasion. These violent dramas overshadowed a quieter but no less dazzling aquatic art: an early forerunner of synchronized swimming.

The Roman poet Martial, writing in the first century CE, described a performance in which women portraying Nereids, or sea nymphs, dove and swam in formation across the Colosseum’s waters. Their bodies, likely nude to match the mythological roles, gleamed in torchlight as they created patterns on the waves — shapes of anchors, tridents, even ships with billowing sails. Martial was so enchanted that he suggested Thetis herself, queen of the sea nymphs, must have taught them their art.

These displays were more than entertainment; they showed off Rome’s engineering might through its ability to summon rivers into stone theaters, transforming the spaces into watery stages. Across the Roman Empire, smaller “Thetis-mimes” featured swimmers pantomiming mythic tales in waterproofed orchestra pits, a kind of water ballet that echoed through Europe centuries later in 19th-century “aqua dramas.”

Though early Christian leaders denounced these spectacles as indecent, their watery choreography survives in today’s sport. Modern synchronized swimming — now called artistic swimming — owes its roots not just to Hollywood glamour but also to ancient Rome, where the first water ballets shimmered beneath the torchlight of the Colosseum.

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The term “synchronized swimming” was coined at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair.

While the origins of the sport go back to the ancient world, its name can be traced to a summer spectacle at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. In the 1920s and ’30s, U.S. swim clubs were experimenting with “stunt swimming,” a style that emphasized floating patterns and group formations rather than speed. Katharine Curtis, a physical education instructor at the University of Chicago, added a key element: music. Using a gramophone by the poolside, she timed swimmers’ movements to a beat, calling the approach “rhythmic swimming.” 

When the 1934 world’s fair asked Curtis to stage a performance, she recruited 60 women to perform three times daily as the “Modern Mermaids,” accompanied by a 12-piece band. During one broadcast, radio announcer Norman Ross called the show “synchronized swimming” — a name that immediately caught on. 

Congress created a lottery to help fund the American Revolution.

  • United States lottery ticket, 1776
United States lottery ticket, 1776
Credit: PHAS/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Author Bennett Kleinman

October 1, 2025

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While America declaring independence was a gamble that paid off in spades, luck wasn’t always on the government’s side. Look no further than the time the First Continental Congress authorized a national lottery to fund the Revolutionary War effort — which didn’t exactly go as planned. 

The inspiration came, in part, from colonial lotteries that helped fund early settlements such as Jamestown and public works projects including streets and churches. This time, Congress hoped the proceeds from selling lottery tickets could be used to pay soldiers and manufacture munitions. 

On November 18, 1776, it enacted a national lottery with the goal of raising $1.5 million (roughly $105.5 million today) in Continental currency, a form of paper money that was issued the year before to help finance the war. However, this speculative currency lacked solid backing and quickly depreciated, losing a chunk of its value by the time the lottery began; it was rendered virtually worthless by the time it ceased circulation in 1781. Because of this, as well as some marketing and distribution issues, the lottery failed to attract much public interest.

The lottery was set to be held in four phases, with the first drawing planned for March 1, 1777. But mismanagement and poor ticket sales caused it to be delayed until May 27, 1778. By that time, only 36,000 of the 100,000 tickets — which cost $10 each — had been sold. This saddled the fledgling government with a net loss in excess of $72,000 as it still had to fund organizational costs and pay out the winner. 

The next drawing took place the following year, but the lottery quickly fizzled out after that. In the end, it generated less than $100,000 in funds for Congress to use as it saw fit — just 6.5% of the initial estimate. Having fallen short of its goal, the government instead relied on loans from France, donations from wealthy financiers, and other revenue sources to fund the war effort.

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Several Ivy League colleges were partially funded through lotteries.

Long before they came to rely on endowments, tuitions, and donations, most of the Ivy League colleges were funded through public lotteries. Harvard, for example, was founded in 1636 but struggled to find solid financial footing for more than a century, so in 1745, the Massachusetts General Assembly authorized a lottery to help fund the school. Additional lotteries were held in the 18th and 19th centuries to support dormitory construction. In 1746, the New York Provincial Assembly authorized a lottery “to advance learning,” leading to the formation of what is now Columbia University. Another 1755 lottery helped raise funds for the Academy of Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania. Other lotteries funded construction of several campus buildings at Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale. Of the eight Ivy League schools, only Cornell — founded in 1865 by philanthropist Ezra Cornell — didn’t rely on lottery funds for early financial support.

Before the invention of price tags, shoppers weren’t used to fixed prices.

  • John Wanamaker Building, Philadelphia
John Wanamaker Building, Philadelphia
Credit: dpa picture alliance/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

October 1, 2025

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If you’re shopping for goods in the Western world, you expect to see a price tag on most things, whether it’s a secondhand toaster at a garage sale or a can of beans at the supermarket. But clearly advertised prices are a relatively recent phenomenon, originating in the 1870s. Before then, haggling was the norm, with the major exception being stores run by Quakers, who believed charging different prices for different customers was morally wrong.

Philadelphia businessman John Wanamaker is widely credited with pioneering the price tag. He was a deeply religious man and, while he himself was Presbyterian, he agreed with the Quakers that transparent, clear, consistent pricing was a moral imperative. So when he created a clothing store called the Grand Depot in a converted railroad station, he clearly labeled the cost of each item on tags and in product guides. The business later became Wanamaker’s department store.

The grand opening of his store was just before the 1876 world’s fair in Philadelphia. Millions of people came to the city, and many of them visited Wanamaker’s, where they experienced not only price tags but also fixed prices for the first time. Those visitors, who saved a lot of time by avoiding haggling, went home and brought the groundbreaking idea of price tags with them.

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Airfare used to be set by the U.S. government.

Airlines were pioneers in dynamic pricing — it’s why a seat on an airplane has a wildly different fare from one day to the next. But before 1980, you didn’t need any kind of timing strategy to buy a plane ticket. That’s because rates, along with routes and safety standards, were set by the Civil Aeronautics Board, a federal agency. At first, the government oversight stabilized the industry and ensured that flights were available to less-popular destinations. But by the 1960s, ticket prices were high and airlines were having trouble establishing new routes. In 1978, Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act, which, among other things, forced airlines to be more competitive with their pricing. By 1986, Americans were paying around 25% less for airfare, but were already wrestling with pricing algorithms running on mainframe computers.

Galileo wrote horoscopes.

  • Astronomer Galileo Galilei
Astronomer Galileo Galilei
Credit: PRISMA ARCHIVO/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

April 30, 2024

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Galileo Galilei made some major scientific strides in his time, particularly in the field of astronomy. He discovered four of Jupiter’s moons and the stars of the Milky Way, and determined that the surface of Earth’s moon isn’t smooth. Most famously, he vehemently believed, as Nicolaus Copernicus proposed before him, that the Earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around — even as the Catholic Church labeled him a heretic for it. But despite his reputation as a skeptic, his cosmic beliefs included a little of what is now considered pseudoscience, too. To wit, he was one of Europe’s most sought-after astrologers in his time, and wrote horoscopes for Italy’s elite. Some of his astrological tools are even on display at the Galileo Museum in Florence, Italy.

Galileo, a Pisces, practiced judicial astrology, which concerns human circumstances rather than just natural phenomena; clients consulted him for guidance on illness, travel, love, and other major events. He also wrote birth charts, including for himself and his children. Before he was tried by the church for his belief in heliocentrism, he was investigated for telling his clients that the stars governed their fates — although the church didn’t pursue the matter very far. Galileo’s faith in the zodiac may sound surprising, but at the time, it wasn’t unusual for astronomers to practice this kind of cosmic divination. Some patrons would even judge whether a scientist was worthy of their support by their astrology skills. Indeed, other astronomers we hold in high esteem today, including Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and Copernicus, also studied astrology.

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Galileo tried to calculate the dimensions of hell.

In Renaissance Italy, there was significant academic interest in the literal dimensions of hell as it was described in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. When Galileo was 24 years old, Dante scholars were fiercely divided between two calculations made by two different Renaissance thinkers. Galileo, already a prominent mathematician by then, was invited by the Accademia Fiorentina (Florence Academy) to make his own estimation. He ultimately affirmed one of the previous results, but made a major error when calculating the thickness of hell’s domed roof. He multiplied the width and thickness by the same amount before realizing that buildings don’t scale that way. Later, Galileo published the square-cube law, which states that as an object increases in size, its volume gets larger than its surface area, meaning that supports need to grow disproportionately thicker than the rest of a structure. According to the law, there wouldn’t be a lot of Dante’s hell left if the roof were as thick as it needed to be.

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