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Mailboxes and mail slots were made mandatory in 1923.

  • Mailboxes on a country road
Mailboxes on a country road
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Author Nicole Villeneuve
February 6, 2024

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Before it was possible to have just about any item conceivable delivered to your door with the click of a button, getting the mail took much more effort. When the United States was founded, people had to travel to pick up their mail at a post office, a trip that, for some, could take a full day. By the early 1900s, mail was being delivered to both urban and rural homes by dutiful postal workers, but as communities embraced the new services, new challenges emerged. Rural residents repurposed old food containers and empty oil drums — sometimes still coated in residue — as mailboxes. City residents, meanwhile, didn’t always use receptacles, instead relying on the established routine of letter carriers making deliveries straight to their door; the postal workers would knock first, and wait for a response before handing the mail over. 

None of these solutions, however, was terribly convenient for the postal workers who delivered the mail. The Post Office Department (now the U.S. Postal Service) worked to set standards for mailboxes and encourage their use, and in 1923, it was officially mandated that every household have a mailbox or a letter slot. Certain criteria were put in place for mailboxes: They should be affordable but durable; they had to be easy to use, but also secure against theft; their size needed to accommodate a variety of deliverables; and they should have a flag or something similar to indicate mail was ready for collection. Postal workers benefited tangibly from the changes. Not only were the cleanliness and consistency of a mailbox more easily guaranteed, but valuable time was reclaimed. The Post Office estimated that mail carriers who were still knocking on doors lost approximately an hour and a half each day just waiting for someone to answer. 

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People once used the Postal Service to mail their kids to their grandparents.

On January 1, 1913, the United States introduced Parcel Post, a service allowing people to send packages through the mail more conveniently and at a lower cost than the existing private delivery services. It was an immediate success, allowing rural farmers and merchants to reach more customers than ever. It also courted some unexpected deliveries, when parents used Parcel Post to send their children to nearby relatives. One couple from Ohio made headlines just a few weeks after the service started by mailing their 8-month-old son to his grandmother a few miles away. Similar cases occurred throughout the year, until postal regulations changed to prohibit sending children through the mail. According to Postal Service historian Jenny Lynch, children being put in the mail was less a sign of parental negligence, and more an indication of just how much people trusted their local letter carriers.

Harriet Tubman had brain surgery without anesthesia.

  • Portrait of Harriet Tubman
Portrait of Harriet Tubman
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Author Michael Nordine
June 12, 2025

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Harriet Tubman’s life was remarkable, but it certainly wasn’t easy. Born into slavery as Araminta Ross, the future Underground Railroad conductor escaped the plantation in rural Maryland where she spent the first 27 years of her life, and adopted her mother’s first name along with her first husband’s last name. 

A watershed moment occurred in her childhood when an overseer threw a heavy metal weight at her after she refused to restrain a field hand who was attempting to escape the plantation. The effects of that injury lasted the rest of her life: headaches, seizures, difficulty sleeping, and visions that she believed came from God. To alleviate these symptoms, she underwent brain surgery late in life. Rather than receive anesthesia, she did something she’d seen Union soldiers do during the Civil War: bite down on a bullet and bear the pain.

The procedure wasn’t exactly planned in advance. While in Boston sometime in the late 1890s, Tubman “saw a great big building,” she recalled later, and upon learning it was a hospital, she simply walked inside and asked a doctor to “cut my head open.” Tubman’s account of the procedure is nothing if not vivid: “I just lay down like a lamb before a slaughter and he sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable… it hurt, of course; but I got up and put on my bonnet and started to walk home.” 

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Tubman helped plan a raid that liberated more than 700 people.

The number of enslaved people Tubman rescued is estimated to be about 70, a number based on her own words as well as extensive documentation. The figure has often been inflated by historians, however, most notably in an 1886 biography by Sarah Bradford that claimed Tubman had freed 300 people. But if you include people Tubman indirectly helped liberate, the number is much higher than even the exaggerated figures. As many as 700 enslaved people were emancipated during the Combahee Ferry Raid, a Civil War operation that Tubman helped lead under the command of Colonel James Montgomery. It took place on June 2, 1863, with the help of some 150 Black soldiers, and many of the freed men later joined the Union Army.

A blind engineer invented cruise control.

  • Ralph Teetor in a union leaders meeting
Ralph Teetor in a union leaders meeting
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
June 12, 2025

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Cruise control is now a standard feature in most cars, but the person who invented it never got to use it, as he was blind for most of his life. Ralph Teetor, who was part of a prominent family of Indiana engineers, lost his sight in one eye at age 5 after an accident with a knife. Less than a year later, he went blind in the other eye because of a rare condition called sympathetic ophthalmia, in which trauma to one eye causes damage to the other.

That didn’t stop Teetor from following in his family’s footsteps. He built and, despite his blindness, briefly drove a three-horsepower car when he was just 12, and went on to study mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania at a time when many universities wouldn’t consider a blind candidate. After returning home, he went to work for his family’s business, Perfect Circle, eventually becoming head engineer and then company president.

The idea for cruise control came to Teetor in the 1930s. According to one (potentially apocryphal) story, Teetor frequently rode with a friend who would speed up or slow down depending on whether someone was speaking, giving him the idea for a feature to control speed. But he may simply have been motivated by traffic safety concerns. In 1948, he filed his first patent for a speed control device, which he received two years later. Ever devoted to his craft, he tested the device by working the gas pedal from the floor while a driver handled the steering wheel. In Teetor’s first version of what he called the Speedostat, drivers still had to keep their foot on the gas pedal for the device to work — they’d just feel some pressure that reminded them to maintain speed — but he added a speed lock before selling it to vehicle manufacturers.

Chrysler was the first to introduce the Speedostat, which they marketed as “Auto-Pilot” on luxury vehicles in 1958. In 1959, both Chrysler and Cadillac offered it as an option on all models. But cruise control didn’t really take off until the 1970s gas crisis, when drivers were told to stick to lower speeds to save fuel.

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Louis Braille also developed a musical notation.

Louis Braille, who may have also experienced sympathetic ophthalmia, is widely known for inventing the writing system for visually impaired people that’s named for him. But Braille, who was an accomplished organist, adapted the system for musical notation, too. The system uses the same six-dot grid as the Braille alphabet, but different dot patterns represent different musical symbols, such as a note or rest. The top four dots are used to indicate the notes of an octave (pitch), while the bottom two are used to indicate the length of the note (rhythm). 

John Quincy Adams met both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

  • John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams
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Author Michael Nordine
June 12, 2025

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Abraham Lincoln was born a decade after George Washington died, which is to say that their only overlap comes on lists of the greatest U.S. presidents. At least one person met both of them, however: John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States. Adams was a 22-year-old law student when he met Washington in 1789 while visiting his father, then-Vice President John Adams, in New York. 

The younger Adams was an ardent admirer of the nation’s first president, so when Washington visited Newburyport, Massachusetts, later that year, Adams was chosen to write an address welcoming him to town, and met Washington a second time. After coming to admire a series of essays Adams had written under the pen name Marcellus, Washington later nominated him to be U.S. minister to the Netherlands.

Adams’ meeting with Lincoln came more than half a century later in 1847, when both men were serving in the House of Representatives. It was Lincoln’s sole term in Congress, 13 years before he was elected president in 1860. The meeting came shortly before Adams’ death in 1848. He collapsed after standing up and voting “nay” on a measure to honor veterans of the Mexican-American War, a conflict he vehemently opposed, and died two days later. His final words were, “This is the last of Earth. I am content.” Lincoln was present in the House chamber when Adams collapsed, and was even named to the committee in charge of the funeral, though he didn’t actually play a role in the arrangements.

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John Quincy Adams is the only person to serve in the House of Representatives after being president.

Most presidents retire from politics after leaving the White House, but not Adams. After losing his reelection bid to Andrew Jackson in the 1828 election, he grew bored of retirement and mounted another campaign — this time for Congress. Upon successfully running for the House of Representatives in Massachusetts, he became the first — and, to date, only — former U.S. president to serve in the lower chamber. Adams’ congressional tenure lasted from 1831 until his death in 1848 and was marked by a fierce opposition to the expansion of slavery. The only other former president to serve in Congress after his time as commander in chief is Andrew Johnson, whose 1875 tenure as senator was cut short by his death less than five months into his term.

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

  • Juliana the Great Dane
Juliana the Great Dane
Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix/ Alamy Stock Photo
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
Italian Opera House in Paris, 1800s
Credit: Historical/ Corbis Historical via Getty Images
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
Cyrus the Great
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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
The Telharmonium
Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/ Alamy Stock Photo
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.

In World War II, the U.S. had ships that made ice cream.

  • U.S. sailors enjoying a tub of ice cream
U.S. sailors enjoying a tub of ice cream
Credit: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo
Author Timothy Ott
June 5, 2025

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The combination of Prohibition and improved freezing technology ignited a spike in ice cream consumption among Americans in the early 20th century, and cravings for the cold, sweet treat were no less keenly felt among those who served in the armed forces. Seeking to keep its personnel satiated, the U.S. Navy began installing ice cream makers on its ships, even rigging some vessels with full-blown soda fountains reminiscent of those found in a corner drugstore. But the Army took this idea one step further in the late stages of World War II, by deploying three ice cream barges with the purpose of delivering this delicious morale-booster throughout the Pacific Theater.

Known as a “BRL,” for “barge, refrigerated, large,” each concrete vessel measured 265 feet long by 48 feet wide and about 17.5 feet deep, and provided a refrigerated space of approximately 130,000 cubic feet. One of the three main compartments housed the ice cream-making room, which was capable of producing up to 500 gallons of the frosty stuff on a daily basis. With virtually all power aboard devoted to the cooling machinery, the BRLs lacked the ability to get anywhere by themselves, and as such were towed to far-flung areas of the Pacific for distribution of goods to other ships and stationed troops. 

To be clear, these barges weren’t simply giant floating ice cream parlors; they also had the capacity to store some 64 carloads of meat and around 20,000 cubic feet of fresh produce, eggs, and cheese. Of course, when it came to reclaiming a taste of luxury, the war-weary soldiers were far more likely to line up for scoops of chocolate and vanilla than for a banana. Those who were out of range of BRLs and auxiliary delivery ships didn’t have to worry about missing out, as the Army saw to it that troops on the Western Front and other crucial zones were duly stocked with the frozen treat. Some U.S. aviators even devised a creative way to enjoy their portions, as they left cans of prepared ice cream mixture in their B-17 bombers to be shaken and frozen amid the turbulence of high-altitude flights.

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Baskin-Robbins’ co-founder developed his first recipes while serving in the Navy in WWII.

It’s possible the U.S. military’s devotion to ice cream helped shape the course of dessert history for connoisseurs. While running a Navy PX store in the South Pacific island group now known as Vanuatu, Lieutenant Burt Baskin reportedly traded a jeep for an aircraft carrier’s ice cream freezer to store his creamy creations made from local fruits. Following the war, Baskin was encouraged to enter the ice cream business by his brother-in-law Irv Robbins, himself an Army veteran who already owned three ice cream stores in Southern California. The two joined forces by the late 1940s, and with the launch of their rebranded Baskin-Robbins enterprise in 1953, the country came to love the duo’s ever-rotating carousel of “31 flavors” that reflected Baskin’s early kitchen experiments in that remote Navy outpost.

There was a goldfish-swallowing craze in the 1930s.

  • Swallowing a goldfish
Swallowing a goldfish
Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine
February 2, 2024

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Goldfish aren’t exactly the best-treated pets — did you know, for instance, that they shouldn’t be kept in bowls? But at least they no longer have to contend with the goldfish-swallowing craze of 1939. It began, like so many bad ideas, with a dorm room bet. After boasting to his friends that he had once consumed a live fish, Harvard freshman Lothrop Withington Jr. was told to put his money where his mouth was and do it again for $10. He did so on March 3 with at least one reporter and an ill-fated 3-inch goldfish present, remarking that “the scales caught a bit on my throat as it went down.”

The event was picked up by LIFE magazine, which kicked off the craze among college students nationwide. Marie Hensen of the University of Missouri School of Journalism was among the first women known to have joined in on the strange trend, and a number of records were set and just as quickly broken. A student at the University of Pennsylvania swallowed 25 fish, an MIT student claimed the “new world’s record for piscine deglutition” by downing 42, and Joseph Deliberato of Clark University is said to have bested them all by swallowing 89 innocent goldies in one session. The trend began to die down after the Animal Rescue League stepped in and Massachusetts state Senator George Krapf filed a bill “to preserve the fish from cruel and wanton consumption.” 

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Fish can feel pain.

Though it’s been debated for decades, fish can indeed feel pain. “It’s likely different from what humans feel,” Penn State University biologist Victoria Braithwaite told Smithsonian Magazine, “but it is still a kind of pain.” Fish welfare has often been dismissed, even relative to that of other animals, on the dual basis of their importance to human consumption and the assumption that they can neither suffer nor feel pain. Yet they have nerve endings called nociceptors that alert them to damaging stimuli, release opioids in response to pain, and react positively to painkillers after being injured — all of which are good reasons not to swallow them whole.

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