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A fake British ship fought the real ship it was disguised as.

RMS Carmania, WWI
Credit: Chronicle/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
October 29, 2025

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Luxury ocean liners were at the height of their popularity at the beginning of the 20th century, and ships such as the RMS Mauretania attracted wealthy first-class travelers with lavish dining rooms, opulent lounges, and plush accommodations. When World War I struck, however, several ocean liners ended up being drafted into the war effort as hospitals, troop transport, and even battleships. Two of these converted ships met in battle — and, with one vessel disguised as the other and neither built for fighting, what followed was pretty awkward.

One of the involved ships was the SMS Cap Trafalgar, a German three-funnel passenger ship that was docked in Buenos Aires when the war broke out. Planning to use the ship to disrupt British trade in the region, the German navy outfitted it with guns and a crew of more than 300 soldiers. For a final touch, they removed one of the funnels and painted the remaining two to look like the two-funnel British ocean liner RMS Carmania. Meanwhile, the British navy armed the Carmania with its own wartime makeover — and a more militaristic all-gray paint job.

The Carmania was sent to Trindade, a small island off the coast of Brazil, to check on intelligence suggesting a German ship coaling facility. There, they found the German Cap Trafalgar that was posing as the Carmania — suddenly a much less effective disguise.

The ensuing battle was sloppy: Crews on both ships had no way to coordinate with one another like they would on a real warship, so gunners just fired whenever they saw a target. Both ships were badly damaged, but Britain’s Carmania ultimately prevailed when the Cap Trafalgar fled and sank.

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The RMS Mauretania’s speed rivals that of modern cruise ships.

One of the most storied ships from the golden age of luxury ocean liners was the RMS Mauretania, which held the record for the fastest trip across the Atlantic for more than 20 years. Its service speed was 25 knots, or just under 29 miles per hour. By comparison, Royal Caribbean cruise ships have speeds up to 20 knots, and Holland America’s fastest vessel reaches speeds up to 22.5 knots. Granted, some passenger liners have traveled much faster than the Mauretania ever did — the SS United States hit more than 35 knots in 1952 — but compared to the typical ship, the century-old Mauretania’s speed still feels quite modern.

Phone numbers used to start with letters.

Woman dialing phone
Credit: Harold M. Lambert/ Archive Photos via Getty Images
Author Bess Lovejoy
October 29, 2025

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Long before everyone’s phone fit in their pocket, phone numbers began with letters — specifically, the first two letters of the telephone exchange name. These exchange names, sometimes drawn from local neighborhoods or landmarks, served as mnemonics to help people — operators and callers alike — remember and route phone numbers. 

For example, the Ricardos’ phone number on I Love Lucy was MU 5-9975. “MU” was for Murray Hill, which evoked a familiar locality and was used for the whole east side of Manhattan’s telephone exchange. When an exchange name was written out, the first two letters were usually capitalized, as in, “MUrray Hill 5-9975.” The corresponding digits for “M” and “U” on the telephone dial were 6 and 8, so the operator could reach the Ricardos at 68 5-9975.

The first phones were connected to one another with wires, but as the number of phones grew, that became less practical, so phones were connected to telephone exchanges — those central switchboards you may remember from movies. When you dialed a number, you were actually dialing the exchange first, and they would connect your phone line to the person you were trying to call. Each exchange handled calls in a particular region or neighborhood. Referring to your phone number by the exchange name simplified things — “CEntral 6-0123,” “MArket 7032,” or “ENglewood 3-1234” were common formats. (Some phone numbers only had six digits, or even five in small locales.)

However, as cities and telecommunications systems expanded, this scheme began to strain. Exchange names and letter prefixes limited the number of combinations available. With the advent of automatic dialing (which required every line to have a unique, machine-readable number), long-distance direct dialing, and the need for more capacity, the industry eventually shifted to phone numbers with digits only in the mid-20th century.

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People protested the switch to numbers-only dialing.

When the phone company began phasing out lettered prefixes in favor of all-numeric dialing in the 1960s, not everyone welcomed the change. Many people felt that exchange names such as “PEnnsylvania,” “TRafalgar,” or “YUkon” added a sense of place and personality to the act of calling someone. Replacing them with just numbers, critics said, stripped away the literary charm of the phone system and made communication colder and more difficult. In San Francisco, a group calling itself the Anti-Digit Dialing League mounted a witty, if ultimately futile, campaign against what it called the “dehumanization” of the telephone system, and even filed lawsuits to stop the conversion. They were soon joined by the more grandly named Committee of Ten Million To Oppose All-Number Calling, which voiced similar complaints on a national scale. These groups knew that 736-5000 simply didn’t have the ring — or the romance — of “PEnnsylvania 6-5000,” the phone number for New York City’s Hotel Pennsylvania immortalized in the Glenn Miller song. But practicality eventually won out. As telephone networks expanded and automation advanced, the alphanumeric system simply couldn’t keep up with demand. The letters faded, and the digits took over.

The first world map to mention ‘America’ was published in 1507.

Waldseemüller map, 1507
Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Bess Lovejoy
October 29, 2025

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In 1507, a group of scholars in the small French town of Saint-Dié published a world map that changed how Europeans saw the globe — and gave “America” its name. Created by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller and scholar Matthias Ringmann, the map was the first to show the New World as a separate continent, surrounded by ocean, rather than as part of Asia.

The two men drew on Portuguese nautical data and letters attributed to Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci to create the map. Though it later emerged they were doctored, the letters appeared to argue that Vespucci had found an entirely new landmass, not the eastern edge of Asia, as Christopher Columbus believed. Waldseemüller and Ringmann agreed with this idea — and in an accompanying book, Cosmographiae Introductio, they proposed naming this “fourth part” of the world “America,” after Vespucci’s Latinized first name, Americus.

Though Waldseemüller later dropped the name from his maps, others embraced it. When cartographer Gerardus Mercator applied the name “America” to the entire Western Hemisphere in 1538, it quickly became standard.

Only one copy of Waldseemüller’s 1507 map survives today — discovered in a German castle in 1901 and now housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Sometimes called “America’s birth certificate,” it marks the moment when a new name — and a New World — entered the map of human understanding.

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No one knows for sure where the word “Asia” comes from.

No one knows exactly where the word “Asia” comes from. The name is ancient, and its meaning has been lost to time. The ancient Greeks used it to describe the lands east of their homeland, but they may have borrowed it from older sources. Some scholars link it to the Akkadian word asu, meaning “east” or “land of the rising sun.” Others point to Assuva or Asuwa, a region in western Anatolia first mentioned by the king of the Hittites in 1235 BCE. It could also come from a local name in what is now Turkey that gradually expanded to the territory of Asia Minor — eventually coming to describe an entire continent.

The test to become a Gettysburg battlefield guide has a 90% failure rate.

Camp David attendees listen to a tour guide during a trip to the Gettysburg National Military Park, 1978
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Author Michael Nordine
October 29, 2025

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What’s been called the “hardest test in history” takes years to study for and isn’t administered at a traditional place of higher learning. The reward for those who pass is not a degree but a job: as a tour guide at Gettysburg National Military Park, the site of the bloodiest battle in American history. The test’s failure rate is nearly 90%, which is especially brutal considering how rarely the test is even offered. The most recent exam was given in December 2024, more than seven years after the one before that. Civil War buffs are a different breed, though, and the Battle of Gettysburg, as the turning point of that conflict, has been endlessly studied.

The test entails about 180 different questions and three essays. Some aspirants move to or near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in order to be better prepared, and some lawyers who’ve taken it say it’s more difficult than the bar exam. The written test is followed by interviews, a weekend at the battlefield displaying the would-be guide’s knowledge, and finally a two-hour mock tour. The National Park Service caps the number of guides at about 150 and only offers the test as needed, meaning that prospective guides don’t even know when they’ll be taking it. In 2017, only nine of the 97 applicants passed the test.

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Gettysburg wasn’t the largest Civil War battle.

In terms of casualties, Gettysburg was far and away the deadliest battle of the Civil War: An estimated 51,112 soldiers lost their lives during the three-day period beginning on July 1, 1863. In terms of total soldiers overall, however, another conflict was even larger: the Battle of Fredericksburg, which took place in Virginia in December 1862 and involved more than 185,000 soldiers, compared to Gettysburg’s 160,000. Unlike the Battle of Gettysburg, Fredericksburg resulted in overwhelming defeat for the Union and strengthened the Confederacy’s position.

It once rained golf balls in Florida.

Golf ball in a rain puddle
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Author Timothy Ott
October 29, 2025

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According to the Visit Florida website, the city of Punta Gorda “is a family-friendly getaway offering saltwater and freshwater adventures, waterfront shopping, award-winning cuisine, family-friendly attractions, and plenty of old-Florida charm.” Left unsaid is the possibility that visitors may find themselves running for cover amid a golf ball-infused rainstorm.

That apparently was the situation that unfurled in the area in the late hours of Labor Day in 1969. It had indeed rained that night, according to a local newspaper report, but instead of simply finding the usual poststorm moisture on lawns and trees, residents encountered “dozens and dozens” of golf balls “in the gutters, on the street, along the sidewalks, and at Punta Gorda Isles.” Local police did their civic duty of cleaning up the clutter, to the point where one even expressed exhaustion over the effort. Sadly, authorities failed in the ultimate task of determining just what caused this unusual accumulation of pockmarked white spheres.

Popular Mechanics offered one plausible explanation: The city regularly experiences waterspouts (essentially tornadoes over water), which could have sucked up a torrent of balls from a pond at a local golf course, before unloading them back to Earth in a rainstorm. It certainly makes sense from a scientific standpoint and provides another perspective to the “freshwater adventures” promised to tourists in this Gulf Coast locale.

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A shark once fell on a California golf course.

About the only thing more unlikely than a golf ball-infused rainstorm is the possibility of a live shark dropping from the sky. And yet, the proof was there for the viewing when a 2-foot-long leopard shark was discovered near the 12th tee at California's San Juan Hills Golf Club in October 2012. In this case, the probable cause was attributed to a large bird of prey plucking the shark from the nearby ocean before losing its grip, a theory supported by the puncture wounds found on the aquatic creature. But while no witnesses were able to confirm the circumstances of the shark's arrival, the story at least had a happy ending. Club employees were able to keep the fish alive by temporarily storing it in a salt water-filled bucket before returning it to the ocean, ensuring it could live out its life free of worries over errant chip shots and careless golf cart drivers.

Richard Nixon is the only U.S. president born on the West Coast.

Richard Nixon as a child
Credit: Bettmann Archive via Getty Images
Author Timothy Ott
October 29, 2025

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On January 9, 1913, Richard Milhous Nixon was born on his parents’ citrus farm in Yorba Linda, California, a location that became notable when, in 1968, he became the first — and to date, only — U.S. president born on the West Coast of the United States.

Considering that a total of 45 people have served in the nation’s highest office, it may seem odd that just one has come from the contiguous West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Then again, the United States is a country that began on the Eastern Seaboard and expanded westward, with California, Oregon, and Washington among the later entries to the nation, in 1850, 1859, and 1889, respectively. 

In fact, it took until 1860 for Americans to elect the first president from somewhere besides the original 13 states: Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln. The tide has tilted toward the Pacific in more recent decades, with eight of the past 16 presidents coming from states west of the Mississippi River. Still, a disproportionate overall share hail from traditional eastern strongholds, with 28 presidents born in the original 13 states and another seven in Ohio.

Despite Nixon’s rare geographic origins for a president, he isn’t the only one with ties to the western reaches of the country. Barack Obama was born and spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, before becoming a state and U.S. senator from Illinois. Herbert Hoover was born in Iowa but was sent to live with an uncle in Oregon at age 11, before attending Stanford University in California. And Ronald Reagan grew up in Illinois prior to establishing a Hollywood career and eventually becoming governor of the Golden State.

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One U.S. vice president won a Nobel Peace Prize and co-wrote a No. 1 pop song.

If the vice presidency is sometimes derided as a position of surprisingly minimal importance, then Charles G. Dawes, vice president to Calvin Coolidge, at least managed his most noteworthy accomplishments in other arenas. A prominent businessman, Dawes was tasked with devising a system to stabilize German reparations in the aftermath of World War I, for which he earned a Nobel Peace Prize during his tenure as VP. The financial guru was also a talented self-taught musician who had composed the instrumental "Melody in A Major" in 1911. Forty years later, songwriter Carl Sigman added lyrics to Dawes' wistful melody and retitled the song "It's All in the Game." Although multiple artists recorded the tune that year, a revamped version by Tommy Edwards shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1958, making Dawes the rare individual to be recognized for both solving an international crisis and implanting an earworm in the heads of the masses.

The original winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon rode in a car for most of the race.

1904 Olympic runners
History and Art Collection Alamy Stock Photo
Author Bennett Kleinman
January 23, 2024

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The marathon at the 1904 St. Louis Games is one of the most unusual events in Olympic history, in no small part because it was initially won by an athlete who rode in a car for most of the race. That man was American Fred Lorz, who led the field of 32 runners right out of the gate. At the 9-mile mark, however, Lorz began suffering from terrible cramping, as the combination of sweltering heat and dirt being kicked up from the unpaved route made it difficult to breathe. It was then that Lorz opted to hitch a ride with a passing vehicle, which he rode in for 11 miles before hopping out to complete the race on foot in just under three hours.

Just as President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice was set to award Lorz his medal, a spectator accused him of cheating. Lorz admitted to riding in a car, claimed it was just a joke, and stated that he didn’t actually plan to accept the trophy. With Lorz disqualified, American Thomas Hicks emerged as the new winner, though he too ran an unconventional race. At various points throughout the marathon, Hicks was helped by his trainers, who fed the athlete a combination of poisonous strychnine, egg whites, and brandy in hopes of stimulating his body. The result was that Hicks began to hallucinate around the 20-mile mark, and he was eventually carried over the finish line by trainers with a time of 3:28:53 — still taking home the gold.

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The 1904 Olympics were originally meant to be held in Chicago.

The Olympic Games were held in the United States for the first time in 1904, although the event was initially meant to be in Chicago instead of St. Louis. That all changed when organizers of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair grew fearful that the Olympics would take attention away from their event, which was set to belatedly celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. In response, fair organizers announced plans to hold athletic events of their own in an effort to undermine the Chicago Games. Rather than risk a conflict, Olympic organizers moved the Games to St. Louis, where they ran concurrently alongside the St. Louis World’s Fair. Unfortunately, the 1904 Olympics were poorly attended by athletes and spectators alike, as St. Louis was more difficult to reach than Chicago. In fact, by some reports, only 62 of the 651 athletes that year hailed from outside of North America, which allowed U.S. competitors to dominate the lopsided field.

An early proposal for daylight saving time changed the clock eight times a year.

DST time change
Credit: RobertPetrovic/ iStock
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
February 27, 2024

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Every year, people in many parts of the world set their clocks forward an hour each spring at the beginning of daylight saving time (DST), and then back an hour in the fall. One of the first people to seriously advocate adjusting the clock seasonally was a British builder named William Willett, who had noticed that few people were out in the early morning light during the summer, and his golf games often ended early when the sky became dark. But his idea worked a little differently than the “spring forward” and “fall back” time changes many observe today.

In his 1907 self-published pamphlet “The Waste of Daylight,” Willett wrote, “The sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon, having already passed its western limit, when we reach home after the work of the day is over.” To maximize time spent during the daylight hours, he suggested changing the clocks at 2 a.m. on Sundays during the spring and fall — something we still do today. But, unlike today, the transition was to happen 20 minutes at a time over the course of four weeks, twice a year, for a total of eight time changes each year. And rather than an even hour, the time difference would be 80 minutes. Willett’s proposal was considered in the British House of Commons in 1908, but it was met with derision and soundly rejected. 

During World War I a decade later, many countries were looking for new ways to save money. Inspired by Willett’s original proposal, which had included estimated savings in electricity costs, Germany and Britain implemented “Summer Time” in 1916, changing the clocks just one hour twice a year. The United States followed suit, first observing daylight saving time on March 31, 1918.

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Daylight saving time used to be called “war time.”

The United States stopped observing DST at the end of World War I because farmers relied on early morning sunlight to do their jobs. But in 1942, just after the U.S. entered World War II, Congress instituted year-round DST hoping to save fuel, a change that was nicknamed “war time.” That was repealed in 1945 with the end of the war, and individual states were free to set their own time standards. After a chaotic couple of decades, the United States implemented universal DST in 1966, although states can still choose to opt out and stick with standard time year-round.

Homo sapiens has been on Earth for only 0.0067% of its existence.

Human skull in museum
Credit: Vladislav Gajic/ Shutterstock
Author Michael Nordine
April 30, 2024

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Though humans have been the planet’s dominant species for some 50,000 years, our reign is a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. Homo sapiens (Latin for “wise man”) has been on Earth for only 0.0067% of its existence, an infinitesimally small amount of time that emphasizes both how insignificant and how impressive a species we are. Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago, at which point several other types of humans were still extant, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo naledi, Homo luzonensis, and Homo erectus. Though our ancestors are known to have coexisted with Neanderthals and Denisovans, it’s possible they never encountered the other early humans.

There are a number of theories seeking to explain why we survived and our predecessors didn’t, including superior brainpower and dumb luck, plus a newer theory suggesting that our interpersonal skills and dependence on one another helped us succeed where others failed. (Perhaps the secret really was the friends we made along the way.) We haven’t been here the longest — that would be Homo erectus, whose 1.5 million years on the planet is a record among humans that we sapiens won’t surpass for some 1.2 million years — but we have left the most sizable footprint. Whether that ends up being a good thing may be for the next species to decide.

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A day on Earth used to be much, much shorter.

When our humble planet first formed 4.6 billion years ago, a day was just six hours long. The amount of time it took the Earth to rotate on its axis increased to 21.9 hours by 620 million years ago, and today it’s 24 hours. It hasn’t stopped getting longer, either: A century from now, a day will be 1.7 milliseconds longer due to the moon’s gravitational pull slowing Earth’s rotation ever so slightly. As our only natural satellite drifts 1.5 inches away from us each year, a process known as lunar recession, the tides it creates in our oceans slow Earth’s spin.

Jack-o’-lanterns come from an Irish legend.

Boy carving jack-o’-lantern
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Author Kevin McCaffrey
October 25, 2023

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The jack-o’-lantern has its roots in Irish lore — specifically, the legend of a man called “Stingy Jack,” who tried to trick the devil and suffered the consequences. There are many versions of the tale, but the gist is that Jack invited the devil for a drink but balked when it came time to pay, and asked the devil to transform into a coin he could use for payment. The devil went along with this, but Stingy Jack kept the coin for himself, putting it next to a silver cross in his pocket to keep the devil from reverting to his original form. Jack’s next move was to free the devil if he agreed not to bother Jack for a year and not to take his soul when he died. A year later, Jack once again tricked the devil, this time getting him to agree to leave Jack alone for 10 years.

After Jack died, God wouldn’t allow the trickster into heaven, and the devil, honoring his deal, wouldn’t take Jack into hell, either. The devil sent Jack away with only a burning coal from the fiery underworld to light his way. A ghostly Jack placed the coal in a carved-out turnip lantern, sentenced to roam the Earth for eternity. The Irish referred to the specter as “Jack of the Lantern,” and eventually, “Jack o’ lantern.” People even began carving out lanterns to mimic the story. The first jack-o’-lanterns were made by carving out turnips, beets, and potatoes and illuminating them with a candle. These date back at least to 1640, when author Sam Howell referenced “a turnip cut like Death’s head with a candle in’t.” Pumpkins aren’t native to Ireland, so the tradition as we know it didn’t come about until Irish immigrants brought the legend to the United States, where pumpkins had been introduced to Europeans by Indigenous people in the Americas.

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Halloween comes from an ancient pagan holiday.

Halloween has its roots in an ancient Celtic holiday called Samhain, traditionally celebrated in Ireland and Scotland on the night of October 31 each year. It was believed that on that night, the separation between the living world and the world of the dead broke down, allowing for interaction with the Celtic “Otherworld,” the realm of the spirits. Traditional Samhain celebrations centered around fire: The hearth was lit while the harvest was gathered, and it was left to burn out on its own. If the hearth was put out by hand, it was thought to anger the gods. Afterward, a bonfire was held to honor the dead, and people would take flame from the fire to relight the hearth at home. Celebrants would also dress up in costumes and disguises during Samhain so that evil spirits returning to Earth would not be able to recognize them. Hollowed-out root vegetables with candles inside, a precursor to jack-o’-lanterns, were used in part to scare off evil spirits, as well as to guide the way home after the Samhain celebration. 

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