A Great Dane named Juliana was awarded a medal during WWII.

Juliana the Great Dane

Author Nicole Villeneuve

February 6, 2024

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Animals have played pivotal roles on the front lines of many battles throughout history. Horses, elephants, and even dolphins have been employed for their strength, intelligence, and adaptability. During World War II, one brave animal stood out as a hero for using an unlikely defense tactic against the enemy: her urine. Juliana was the name of a Great Dane who had even greater instincts. In April 1941, amid the ongoing German bombing campaign known as the Blitz, explosives rained down across the U.K. When a bomb fell through the roof of the house where Juliana lived with her owner, the fast-acting pooch made her way over to the incendiary device and extinguished its flame by urinating on it. Juliana’s bravery earned her a medal from the Blue Cross, a U.K. animal welfare charity.

Juliana’s story came to light years later when a portrait of the plucky pup was found at a property belonging to a relative of Juliana’s owner — a plaque affixed to the painting told her unlikely tale. Elsewhere in the house, a Blue Cross Medal with the dog’s name was also discovered, and in an even more surprising turn, this one happened to be for a second heroic achievement. In 1944, three years after defusing a bomb, Juliana saved her owner’s life once again, when she managed to alert him to the fire that was tearing through his shoe shop. In 2013, the mementos were sold at auction for £1,100, or about $1,900 today.

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A bra company made vests for pigeons during WWII.

In the Second World War, pigeons were commonly used to help military forces communicate. Paratroopers carried the birds strapped to their chests, releasing them once they hit the ground. Often, the pigeons wore protective vests for the paradrop. These were form-fitting, lace-up garments that looked not unlike tiny corsets — a fitting resemblance, since the vests were made by a bra company. Maidenform produced some 28,500 pigeon vests for the U.S. Army. Breathable material was layered with a dense woven fabric to protect against potential damage from the bird’s claws, and the contoured shape ensured the bird’s head, neck, wing tips, tail, and feet were left uncovered. Maidenform’s vests weren’t the company’s only crucial contribution to the war effort: It also made parachutes.

Theaters used to hire audience members to clap, laugh, and cry.

Italian Opera House in Paris, 1800s

Author Timothy Ott

June 12, 2025

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A public performance can be stressful for the actor, singer, or orator tasked with delivering the goods, not to mention the behind-the-scenes author of the creative endeavor. So it should perhaps come as little surprise that audience members have long been employed to supply an outward show of support for those on stage. This concept goes at least as far back as the heyday of the ancient Greeks in the fourth century BCE, when playwright and poet Philemon was known to stockpile his audiences with enthusiastic allies to help win competitions.

The practice reached its peak in early-19th-century Paris opera houses, where theater administrators coordinated with organized groups of “claquers,” derived from the French term for clapping, to prod the bourgeois crowds into responding appropriately at key moments. Such arrangements would typically involve the claque leader examining a show’s script and conferring with the director and performers about optimal times to display emotion. The claquers would then disperse among an audience, with some members tasked with laughing loudly at jokes, others charged with weeping during tender scenes, and still others there to bellow heartily for an encore.

A claque leader could be well compensated (though underlings often received only free entry to a show), perpetuating a system in which these professionals held considerable influence over performers. In one example, the mother of an up-and-coming dancer declared that her daughter needed no “protection” from the hired hands in the audience, resulting in said dancer being embarrassed by the stony silence that followed her routine.

Although the claque may seem like a curious relic of the past, the practice was still going strong in Italian opera houses by the early 1960s, and in 2013, The New York Times profiled the well-oiled machinations of the claque-filled audiences of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. Just as the Greeks provided the building blocks of dramatic structure that endured through the ages, it seems their method for igniting a favorable audience reception and easing the anxieties of artists packed plenty of staying power as well.

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Television laugh tracks debuted in 1950.

Those who snicker at the concept of the claque may want to pause to consider how their own entertainment experiences were shaped by laugh tracks. Tracks of prerecorded laughter were first developed for radio programs in the late 1940s, before surfacing on the new medium of television with The Hank McCune Show in 1950. But the technology took a leap forward with the debut of the "Laff Box" in 1953, spurring the widespread use of prerecorded laughter to supplement studio audience reactions and convince viewers they were watching a surefire hit.

By the 1960s, most TV comedies had done away with studio audiences altogether in favor of the laugh track, and even animated fare such as The Jetsons featured canned laughter. Although this device began falling out of favor with the rise of new comedies such as 30 Rock and Arrested Development in the 2000s, the laugh track continues to be employed by traditional-style sitcoms, and still can be heard in its full-throated glory across the cable landscape by way of another TV innovation: the rerun.

Purple became the color of royalty because the dye was so expensive.

Cyrus the Great

Author Rachel Gresh

February 6, 2024

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In the 16th century BCE, a precious treasure emerged from the Mediterranean Sea: Murex brandaris, a type of sea snail. During the Bronze Age in the Phoenician city of Tyre (modern-day Lebanon), the sea snails were used to make Tyrian purple dye, also known as “Royal” or “Imperial” purple. To create the dye, a yellow fluid was extracted from the snails and exposed to light until it turned a brilliant shade of purple. The fabric dye became fashionable across Phoenicia because it was more vibrant and longer-lasting than existing dyes. However, it was also much more expensive to make. It took up to 12,000 mollusks to produce just 1 gram of dye, and Murex snails became worth their weight in gold.

At the time, 1 pound of Tyrian purple wool cost more than what most people made in a year, so the only members of society who could afford the color were nobility and royalty. Because of this, the hue became associated with wealth. It was later adopted by Persian rulers such as Cyrus the Great, as well as most of the ancient Roman emperors, including Julius Caesar, who donned a purple toga. In the Byzantine Empire, not only did rulers wear purple, but they also signed their documents with purple ink. It’s believed that the saying “born in the purple” (to denote a noble birth) originated in Byzantium, where children of high-ranking citizens wore purple. Although the color’s popularity dwindled after the fall of the Byzantine Empire (in 1453), it never entirely went out of style. Purple finally became widely available after British chemist William Henry Perkin invented the world’s first commercial synthetic dye in 1856, called “aniline purple,” later named “mauve.”

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Wearing purple was illegal in Elizabethan England unless you were royalty.

The purple hue has long been associated with the British monarchy. Even today, the coronation crown, St. Edward’s Crown, has a lavish purple velvet cap. But in Elizabethan England, you could be fined or even jailed just for wearing purple. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I issued several sets of “sumptuary laws” designed to regulate expenditures for commoners, often by limiting or banning luxurious items. In 1574, purple was at the top of the list. According to the statute, only the monarch and their family members were allowed to wear purple silk. Plenty of other costly fabrics were also limited, including red shades of velvet, which were reserved for nobility, and gold, silver, or pearl embroidery.

You could stream music by phone more than 100 years ago.

The Telharmonium

Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

June 5, 2025

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Synthesizer music has been around a lot longer than many realize. Look no further than the telharmonium: Patented back in 1897 by an American lawyer and inventor named Thaddeus Cahill, it not only created the first electrically generated music but was also a music streaming service nearly a hundred years ahead of its time.

The telharmonium was designed to turn the telephone — which had only recently been invented, in 1876 — into a music player. The instrument itself, comprising some 200 tons of machinery, used a series of dynamos to create electromagnetic impulses that were transmitted through phone lines and came out the telephone receiver as music — essentially a prototype of the synthesizer. When Cahill first demonstrated his invention to potential investors, he attached a horn to a telephone receiver so the sound could reach a room full of people. After officially debuting the telharmonium in 1906, he opened Telharmonic Hall in New York City, where a group of musicians created electrically generated tunes around the clock. Visitors could sit on a sofa and listen to music being created in the basement below through even more telephone receivers with attached horns, hidden within the decor.

Before long, the telharmonium’s music was streaming from telephone receivers in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and private homes across the United States. Users could pick up their phone and connect to the instrument to hear the eerie techno sounds being created by the telharmonium. The novel instrument even had famous fans, including Mark Twain.

But while the telharmonium was extremely popular, it was also wildly impractical. Each unit cost $200,000, which would be several million dollars today. It took two to four musicians to operate, and the special keyboards used to operate the machine were hard to get used to. And because it sometimes provided an accidental score for ordinary phone calls, AT&T wouldn’t work with Cahill for a wider broadcast. The Telharmonic Hall was closed before 1920, and no recordings of the instrument are known to exist.

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The Tetris theme is a 19th-century Russian folk song.

In 1985, 90 years after Thaddeus Cahill patented the telharmonium, Russian American engineer Alexey Pajitnov created the iconic arcade game Tetris. When the Game Boy version came out in 1989, its synthesized background music, arranged by 8-bit music pioneer Hirokazu Tanaka, was called “Type A” and became widely known as the “Tetris Song.” But the tune itself actually dates back to 19th-century Russia. It’s a Russian folk song called “Korobeiniki,” meaning “The Peddlers,” based on an 1861 poem that tells the story of a salesman’s tryst with a woman.