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Abraham Lincoln and Ben Franklin are both in sports halls of fame.

  • Abraham Lincoln and Ben Franklin portraits
Abraham Lincoln and Ben Franklin portraits
Credit: US National Archives (left), Archive Images (right)/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Bennett Kleinman

November 29, 2023

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Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin aren’t just famous figures in American history — they were also accomplished athletes. Honest Abe has been honored by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, while Franklin earned a spot in the International Swimming Hall of Fame. 

Standing 6 feet, 4 inches tall, Lincoln was a formidable opponent in amateur wrestling. At age 19, he reportedly defended his stepbrother’s river barge by throwing potential hijackers overboard. In 1831, he wrestled and defeated Jack Armstrong, the leader of a local gang in New Salem, Illinois. While some reports claim the pair may have actually fought to a stalemate, the bout earned Lincoln respect and a reputation for being tough. Lincoln continued to wrestle while studying law, and legend has it that he amassed more than 300 victories during a 12-year period, losing just one time. Lincoln was honored with the National Wrestling Hall of Fame’s Outstanding American award in 1992.

Franklin, meanwhile, was posthumously inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1968. During his life, he was an avid swimmer and spent time teaching and coaching the sport in Europe and America. Franklin even proposed that all schools in Philadelphia institute swimming programs. As a scientist and experimenter, the founding father is also credited as an inventor or early adopter of many swimming-related innovations, including kites for kitesurfing, hand paddles, and flippers.

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Abraham Lincoln is the only U.S. president to receive a patent.

Of the 45 U.S. presidents, only Abraham Lincoln has received a patent. Lincoln was granted Patent No. 6469 on May 22, 1849, for a device to help lift boats over shoals. Lincoln spent his teenage years traveling aboard riverboats and was well aware of the difficulties associated with water navigation. He began work on the invention in 1848 between sessions of Congress, after an incident in which he found himself stranded on a sandbar while traveling by boat back to Illinois. Lincoln enlisted the aid of Springfield mechanic Walter Davis to create a scale model replica of the device, which is on display today at the Smithsonian Institution. While Lincoln’s creation was never manufactured, he took the replica with him back to Washington, D.C., where he hired a local attorney to help him patent the idea.

Many Greek and Roman statues were originally painted vibrant colors.

  • Statue of Artemis at the Louvre
Statue of Artemis at the Louvre
Credit: Wirestock, Inc/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Nicole Villeneuve

February 12, 2025

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Walk through a museum with ancient Greek and Roman artifacts and you’re likely to see the familiar gleam of white marble statues. It’s how our modern eyes have always seen these ancient artifacts, but originally, many of these statues were painted in bright, vivid colors. The decorative practice known as polychromy — meaning “many colors” in Greek — brought statues to life in vibrant detail, with intricately designed robes, lifelike eyes, and detailed jewelry. 

Artists didn’t just use paint to produce this effect: Bronze, copper, silver, and gold added shine, while gemstones and colored marbles created textured inlays. Over time, exposure to the elements — along with cleaning and restoration — stripped away most of the color and detail, leaving only faint traces behind. Though archaeologists and art historians have noted traces of pigmentation on excavated Greek and Roman antiquities since the 18th and 19th centuries, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the full, colorful scope of the past began to be understood. German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann led the charge, and today, his detailed analysis and meticulous plaster recreations have helped revive long-obscured details such as the goddess Artemis’ bright floral crown and blond hair.

It was once thought that Greek and Roman sculptors intentionally favored minimalism; the presumed preference for form over decoration was considered the height of classical beauty and influenced contemporary art and culture. While some historians question the accuracy of the research methods and even the colors used in modern reconstructions, the lost hues of antiquity nonetheless reframe long-held beliefs, and remind us that history is often a work in progress.

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It took 4,000 pounds of meat a day to feed the Giza pyramid builders.

Feeding the massive workforce that built Egypt’s pyramids was a colossal task in itself. Archaeological evidence suggests that upwards of 4,000 pounds of meat were required every day to sustain the tens of thousands of laborers. These workers, most likely skilled laborers and farmers recruited during the agricultural off-season, were housed in nearby villages; it was there that researchers uncovered more than 175,000 animal bones and fragments. Cattle, goats, and sheep were a key part of the daily feast, along with beer and grains. The research, shared by the University of Michigan’s Richard Redding in 2013, indicates that a central authority likely managed the Giza settlement, while others coordinated a large-scale livestock supply chain — an impressive feat for the time, not unlike every other aspect of the pyramids.

In WWI, France started to build a fake Paris to confuse German bombers.

  • Gare de l’Est in Paris
Gare de l'Est in Paris
Bill Perry/ Shutterstock
Author Darren Orf

November 30, 2023

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Just after noon on August 30, 1914, about a month into World War I, a biplane marked with the German iron cross under its wings flew 6,000 feet above France’s capital city. Soon, to the surprise of Parisians below, four explosions rocked the city as the German pilot dropped bombs, by hand, in the world’s first aerial raid on a national capital. As an increasing number of attacks came from German planes (as well as the first wartime Zeppelins), Parisians decided to take drastic action. In late 1917, engineers commissioned by the French government began creating a fake Paris just outside the capital in an effort to fool the German air force. 

The project was led by Fernand Jacopozzi, who famously illuminated the Eiffel Tower and Champs-Élysées years later. One of the first re-creations was the Gare de l’Est railway station, which was a victim of Germany’s first bombing raid four years prior. Jacopozzi used creative electrical lighting and wooden boards on a conveyor belt to even simulate moving trains. He also crafted factory rooftops, fabricated from painted canvas, to simulate the manufacturing center of France’s war effort. However, by November 1918, the war was over, and the faux city was never completed, nor did it ever divert any German ordnance. Still, the idea proved to be a good one: Decades later during the Second World War, the U.S. employed Hollywood set designers to create fake West Coast neighborhoods to camouflage military factories from Japanese air raids. 

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Mapmakers sometimes insert fake streets to catch plagiarists.

Cartography is a meticulous and time-consuming process, so it’s only reasonable that mapmakers would want to leave behind a hidden watermark of sorts to protect their work. Many cartographers have included fictitious streets (and sometimes entire towns) in their maps as a way to trick copycats. These are known broadly as “trap streets” — the idea being, if another map copies your fake street, you’ve “trapped” them with copyright infringement. One of the first known instances of trap streets occurred in the 1980s when the publisher of a Los Angeles guidebook admitted to sprinkling in nonexistent streets in its maps. As recently as 2009, Google Maps even displayed an entirely fictitious English town called “Argleton” in West Lancashire, which is actually just an empty field.

Gerald Ford was the first president to change his full name.

  • Baby Gerald Ford held by his mother
Baby Gerald Ford held by his mother
Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

February 12, 2025

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Gerald Ford will forever be in the history books as the 38th president of the United States, but he first entered the record books under a different name. He was born Leslie Lynch King Jr., making him the first president to completely change his name. He did so for a good reason: Ford’s father abused his mother, Dorothy Ayer Gardner, and even threatened to murder her and her infant son after Ford was born. Gardner separated from her husband a mere 16 days after her son’s birth, fleeing first to her sister’s home in Oak Park, Illinois, before settling with her parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Gardner married Gerald Rudolph Ford shortly before her son’s fourth birthday, and it wasn’t until he turned 13 that he found out Gerald wasn’t his biological father. Though he was never technically adopted, Ford formally changed his name to Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. when he was 22. William Jefferson Blythe — better known as Bill Clinton — similarly changed his name at the age of 15, though in his case he took his stepfather’s surname and kept his own first name.

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Ford didn’t have a vice president for the first four months of his presidency.

Gerald Ford took the oath of office on August 9, 1974, immediately following the resignation of President Richard Nixon amid the Watergate scandal. After considering Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush for the position of vice president, he nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be his VP on August 20. Rockefeller — the former governor of New York and a high-profile member of the ultra-wealthy Rockefeller family — accepted the position, despite claiming he was “just not built for standby equipment.” After a confirmation process that revealed financial information he probably would have preferred to keep secret, Rockefeller was confirmed by Congress on December 19, roughly four months after Ford took office. Rockefeller opted not to serve as Ford’s running mate in the 1976 election, claiming he “didn’t come down [to Washington] to get caught up in party squabbles, which only make it more difficult for the president in a very difficult time,” and was replaced by Bob Dole. Ford later said that not keeping Rockefeller was one of his biggest mistakes.

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras was terrified of beans.

  • Ripened fava bean
Ripened fava bean
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

November 29, 2023

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Pythagoras, the namesake of the Pythagorean theorem, was a highly influential early Greek philosopher, and a major inspiration for the likes of Aristotle and Plato. He was also a notorious hater of beans — specifically fava beans, also known as broad beans — and he strictly forbade his followers, the Pythagoreans, from coming into contact with them. Legend has it that a group of Pythagoreans (or in some versions, Pythagoras himself) was running from an enemy when they came upon a blooming fava field. Rather than step foot into the stalks, they turned to face their attackers. Most of them were killed.

Pythagoras didn’t leave any known, verifiable writing behind, and his followers were famously tight-lipped, so it can be difficult to know exactly why he hated these legumes. But according to works published after his death by Aristotle and others, there were several possible reasons. One was the bean’s supposed similarity to genitalia; according to his biographers, the philosopher associated beans closely with reproduction and the human soul. The fourth-century BCE philosopher Heraclides Ponticus quoted Pythagoras as saying, “Eating beans and eating the head of one’s parents are the same thing.” And Aristotle quoted him as saying that fava plants “are like the gates of Hades,” possibly related to the belief that souls literally emerged from the underworld through bean blossoms. The philosopher reportedly found the flatulence they caused distracting, too.

To be fair to Pythagoras, there may have been a very good reason to eschew beans. Eating raw fava beans or coming close to a blooming fava plant can cause severe illness and even death in a small number of people with a specific genetic disorder called favism. Scientists traced a type of this condition to the Mediterranean, which would include ancient Greece and other societies that approached the fava bean with caution, including Rome and Egypt.

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Fava beans are one of the oldest cultivated crops in the world.

Despite their sketchy reputation in the ancient Mediterranean, fava beans have been a staple crop for thousands of years. In what’s now northern Israel, researchers found some well-preserved (but slightly charred) domesticated fava beans and carbon-dated them to more than 10,000 years ago. That means that Neolithic people in the area may have farmed beans even before grains such as wheat and barley. 

In 1800, about 1 in 3 people lived in China.

  • Two men playing chess n China, 19th century
Two men playing chess n China, 19th century
Credit: Old Books Images/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

February 12, 2025

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There are around 8 billion people on Earth today, and 1.4 billion of them are in China, making the country home to around 17.5% of the global population. If that seems high, consider that at the turn of the 19th century, a whopping 1 in 3 people lived in China. 

Between 1700 and 1800, the population of China more than doubled. There are a few reasons for this. For one, the mortality rate went down, in part because China practiced widespread inoculation for diseases such as smallpox. Other medical technologies became more commonplace, too, including birthing techniques that reduced infant mortality.

At the same time, the global population in general was on a dramatic upswing, growing about 45% over the course of the 18th century. Still, the population growth in China far outpaced that in the rest of the world. By the year 1800, the population of China was about 300 million, and the worldwide population was, by some estimates, about 900 million (other estimates say 1 billion). That places roughly a third of Earth’s population in China at the start of the 19th century. 

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Smallpox immunization goes back to the 15th century.

For thousands of years, smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases circling the globe, and it’s now been eradicated due to widespread vaccination. And while the smallpox vaccine was technically invented at the end of the 18th century, the basic concept behind it — introducing a small amount of pathogen to guard against future infection — goes back to at least 1549. At the time, a small amount of the virus, taken from the sore of an infected person, would either be scratched into someone’s skin or inhaled through their nose. It seems gross, but it worked: The disease was less fatal in people who got smallpox after inoculation.

Apollo 12 left a piece of art on the moon.

  • Half-moon phase
Half-moon phase
Dead Street Productions/ iStock
Author Bennett Kleinman

November 29, 2023

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When Apollo 12 departed Kennedy Space Center on November 14, 1969, the spacecraft was carrying a tiny artwork titled “Moon Museum” — albeit unknowingly to the astronauts aboard. The piece was a ceramic tile measuring less than an inch, inscribed with designs from six contemporary artists. However, the idea was never sanctioned by NASA, and “Moon Museum” had to be smuggled into space.

“Moon Museum” was the brainchild of concept artist Forrest Myers, who collaborated with artists Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, David Novros, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Chamberlain. Each artist sketched a unique image on the tile. Warhol signed his initials in the upper left, forming the shape of a phallic rocket; Rauschenberg drew a line next to it, and Novros created a black square in the upper right. From left to right on the bottom row, Myers added an interlocking drawing, Oldenburg sketched Mickey Mouse, and Chamberlain drew an image based on a circuitry diagram.

Myers tried to get NASA’s approval to stow “Moon Museum” aboard the Saturn V rocket, but was met with radio silence. He then contacted an anonymous NASA engineer known today as John F. to help smuggle the artwork into space. The employee responded two days before launch, stating, “YOUR [sic] ON A.O.K. ALL SYSTEMS GO.” It’s believed “Moon Museum” was covertly attached to the lunar module and deposited on the moon during landing, though it’s impossible to confirm without sending another mission back to check.

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NASA sent two golden phonograph records into space.

In 1977, NASA sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space, and each probe continues to explore the far reaches of the galaxy today. NASA included a “golden record” aboard each spacecraft — a gold-plated disc serving as a sort of time capsule in case the probe ever encountered extraterrestrial life. Each record contains 115 images depicting life on Earth, such as people eating and cars stuck in traffic. They also hold audio recordings of naturally occurring sounds such as waves and thunderclaps, as well as spoken greetings in various languages and classical music from different cultures. To ensure longevity, NASA made each record from gold-plated copper mixed with a pure sample of uranium-238, the latter of which has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. The cover of each record was then hand-etched with the inscription, “To the makers of music — all worlds, all times,” along with diagrams instructing how to play the record.

The Dutch and English spent years warring over nutmeg.

  • Gunung Api on the Banda Islands
Gunung Api on the Banda Islands
Credit: Universal History Archive/ Universal Image Group via Getty Images
Author Timothy Ott

February 6, 2025

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While nutmeg today is a common kitchen spice used to jazz up vegetables or top holiday favorites such as pumpkin pie and eggnog, it was once also highly valued for its medicinal properties and its alleged power to ward off the Black Plague. As such, the Banda Islands of Indonesia, which were flush with nutmeg trees, became a prime target of European business interests in the Late Middle Ages.

By the beginning of the 17th century, members of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) arranged what they thought were exclusive trade agreements with several Banda chiefs. However, many of the Banda continued dealing their valuable wares to other buyers, including those from the English East India Company (EIC). Although the Dutch mainly channeled their hostility over this toward the Banda instead of the EIC, the two European powers threatened each other until forging a treaty that ostensibly shared control of the islands in 1619. But the treaty failed to diffuse tensions, as the Dutch continued their aggressive behavior in the region, including a brutal massacre of much of the Indigenous population in 1621, while extorting extra funds from the English for protection and administration of the islands.

As the tensions boiled over, the “nutmeg wars,” as they are sometimes known, also produced an interesting geopolitical development that became far more relevant the following century. As part of the Treaty of Breda, which ended the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, the English agreed to officially transfer ownership of what remained of their holdings in the Banda Islands, while the Dutch ceded formal control of New Netherland, a little-used territory across the Atlantic Ocean that included modern-day New York City.

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A pig nearly started a war between the U.S. and Great Britain.

In the 1850s, a mix of American settlers and British employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company lived in an uneasy truce on San Juan Island, one of a string of islands that were disputed territory between Britain's Vancouver Island and the mainland U.S. That truce was shaken in June 1859 when an American farmer named Lyman Cutlar shot and killed a Hudson’s Bay-owned pig that had been rooting around his property.  Cutlar’s attempt to compensate the company was rebuffed, and after an angry mob threatened him with retribution, a U.S. Army garrison led by future Confederate officer George Edward Pickett was sent to San Juan Island to assert American authority. That, in turn, prompted the arrival of a pair of British warships, and then three more after additional American troops turned up. It required the negotiation capabilities of U.S. Army Commanding General Winfield Scott to de-escalate the situation that autumn. Thirteen years later, an independent arbitration commission awarded San Juan Island to the United States, ending the chances of a global conflict over farm animals in the area.

Ancient Romans celebrated a fertility holiday on February 15.

  • Roman priests on Lupercalia
Roman priests on Lupercalia
Credit: GL Archive/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

February 6, 2025

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It’s often speculated that Valentine’s Day has its roots in the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, and it’s not hard to see why. Lupercalia was observed on February 15, and involved fertility rituals — albeit along with animal sacrifice and ritual whipping. Yet the link between this pagan festival and the Christian feast day that morphed into our modern ode to love and romance is murky, and indeed may be little more than coincidence.

At its peak, Lupercalia — which dates back to at least the sixth century BCE, predating Christianity by centuries — was a really wild time. A group of nude Roman priests kicked off the events in Lupercal Cave at the bottom of Palatine Hill with the sacrifice of a dog and at least one goat. They painted themselves in the blood and wiped it off their skin with milk-soaked wool, then cut strips of goat hide and whipped women on the hands with them to promote fertility.

As time went on, Lupercalia mellowed out, and the nudity dramatically subsided. Yet it was still too much for Pope Gelasius I, who forbade participation in the festival at the end of the fifth century CE. One common theory is that he supplanted the pagan festival with St. Valentine’s Day, also known as the Feast of St. Valentine, though recent historians have shed doubt on that claim. For one thing, St. Valentine, a third-century Christian martyr, had no connection to love or romance. In fact, the holiday didn’t get its modern association until Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a poem linking St. Valentine’s Day and mating season in the 14th century, some 900 years after the holiday was established.

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Conversation hearts used to have much longer messages.

Tiny boxes of candy hearts emblazoned with short phrases such as “BE MINE” and “LOVE YOU” are ubiquitous on Valentine’s Day. But when these now-iconic candies first hit the market, they were a little bigger and a lot wordier. Necco started selling the chalky confections in 1847, and in 1866 devised a way to print letters on them in vegetable ink. The early drafts were not as catchy, and included such phrases as “Married in white, you have chosen right,” “Married in pink, he’ll take to drink,” and the extra-lengthy “How long shall I have to wait? Please be considerate.”

In the “dancing plague” of 1518, hundreds of people danced uncontrollably for two months.

  • Dancing mania
Dancing mania
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Author Bennett Kleinman

November 29, 2023

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The phrase “dance the night away” took on a more literal meaning back in 1518, when as many as 400 people were struck by a “dancing plague” in the city of Strasbourg in modern France. The epidemic began in July with a single woman known as Frau Troffea, who spontaneously began boogying away in the middle of the street. She danced alone and continuously for an entire week before several dozen others found themselves overcome by the urge to dance as well. By month’s end, the number had grown to several hundred. The mysterious dancing eventually waned, and Strasbourg returned to normalcy in September.

Authorities were concerned by this inexplicable rise in dance fever, though ill-informed physicians attributed the ailment to “hot blood” and suggested people simply needed to dance until they no longer felt the urge. As the weeks went on, several dancers collapsed from exhaustion, and some suffered fatal heart attacks. Locals sought answers, and some feared they had been cursed by St. Vitus, the patron saint of dance. Many modern historians posit that stress, coupled with the rise of new and untreated diseases such as syphilis, likely induced this mass hysteria. There had been numerous reported outbreaks of “dancing plagues” around the Holy Roman Empire in the preceding 500 years, including a significant one in 1374. Another theory points to a fungus known as ergot, sometimes found on bread. The fungus causes convulsions if consumed, and may have been responsible for the uncontrollable dancing as well as other instances of mass panic.

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A Tanzanian boarding school suffered a laughter epidemic in 1962.

Laughter really can be contagious, as attendees of a girls’ boarding school in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) discovered in 1962. In January of that year, three students at a school in the town of Kashasha began laughing hysterically out of nowhere. The epidemic soon spread to other students, as individuals suffered laughing fits that lasted anywhere from a few hours to 16 days. With doctors unable to explain the phenomenon and students unable to focus, the school temporarily closed in March, though the issue only grew from there. The girls returned home and “infected” those communities, and entire towns were suddenly overcome with insatiable laughter. Fourteen schools closed throughout the country, with each wave of laughter lasting for around a month. In the end, there were thankfully no fatalities, though more than 1,000 people were affected by this mysterious event.

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