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Ferdinand Magellan did not actually circumnavigate the globe.

  • Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet, 1519
Ferdinand Magellan's fleet, 1519
Credit: North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine

March 4, 2026

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For more than 500 years, Ferdinand Magellan has been famous for being the first person to circumnavigate the globe — which is a bit odd, given that he didn’t actually do so. Though Magellan did lead the expedition that made it around the world in three years, the Portuguese explorer died in the Philippines before the journey’s end. 

Magellan set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain, on September 20, 1519, in search of a new route to the East Indies (present-day Indonesia). Within a couple of years, he found himself on Mactan Island in the Philippines after completing about three-quarters of his epic journey. There, he was killed by a poison arrow during a skirmish on April 27, 1521, after angering the Indigenous peoples, in part due to his attempts to spread Christianity to the Filipino island.

Magellan originally set sail with about 260 sailors, many of whom died before him, and those who survived the events of Mactan Island continued the expedition without him. Only 18 of them made it back to Sanlúcar de Barrameda on September 9, 1522. So who actually deserves credit for being the first to circumnavigate the globe? Some historians single out Juan Sebastián Elcano, who led the expedition back to Spain after Magellan’s death, making him one of the 18 men to complete the full journey. 

Others name Enrique of Malacca, a Malay man whom Magellan captured in the East Indies in 1511. Enrique traveled with the crew from the East Indies to Europe, around Africa, and then on the expedition to circumnavigate the world, traveling west around South America. When the crew returned to the East Indies, he was near his homeland. If he made it back home, he may have been the first person to circumnavigate the globe.

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Magellan named the Pacific Ocean.

Magellan wasn’t the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean (that would be Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa), but he did give the ocean its name. The Portuguese explorer reached the world’s largest body of water in 1520 and dubbed it “Mar Pacifico,” which is Portuguese for “peaceful sea.” He arrived there via what’s now called the Strait of Magellan, a 350-mile passage through Chile that connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Balboa beat Magellan to the Pacific by seven years after crossing the Isthmus of Panama; he named his discovery the “South Sea,” but the name didn’t stick. 

Wealthy Brits used to hire hermits to live on their estate grounds.

  • Ornamental hermit
Ornamental hermit
Credit: The Print Collector/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

September 4, 2024

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Here’s a job title you won’t see on LinkedIn: “ornamental hermit.” The position was part of a strange trend that lasted roughly 100 years and saw English landowners hiring people to live in seclusion on their estates, often in the gardens, with byzantine rules governing their behavior. The practice is believed to have emerged around 1727 and ended just over a century later in 1830. Horticultural norms were in flux at the time, and some homeowners rejected the geometric designs of the past in favor of a more wild and natural approach. It would seem that nothing was considered more wild than an actual person, especially one forbidden from speaking, cutting their hair, trimming their nails, or wearing shoes.

Garden hermits were expected to do all this for a period of several months or years, and were generally paid handsomely before returning to the outside world. During their residency, they lived in hermitages, small structures that were as important in form as they were in function: In addition to providing a humble place to live, hermitages were meant to draw one’s eye to the landscape. Decorative hermits eventually fell out of fashion, but even today we have something similar adorning our yards: the humble garden gnome.

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Some garden gnomes have traveled the world.

Despite being stationary objects confined to, well, gardens, some garden gnomes have traveled the world. It’s believed that the first person to bring one on a far-flung excursion was Henry Sunderland, who brought a gnome named Charlie with him to the South Pole in 1977 and kicked off a trend that continues to this day. There are now several famous garden gnomes whose owners have documented their travels online, though not all of the ornaments have gone of their own volition. The Gnome Liberation Front is known to “borrow” gnomes from unsuspecting yards and photograph them in new locations, though they do sometimes return them once the fun is over.

Potatoes were once banned because they were linked to witchcraft.

  • Potatoes on the ground
Potatoes on the ground
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Author Michael Nordine

February 26, 2026

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People have historically behaved irrationally when they’re of the belief that witches are about. In addition to holding trials and inspiring plays by Arthur Miller, the denizens of the past once went so far as to ban the humble potato because they believed it was linked to witchcraft. 

Everyone’s favorite tuber originated in the Americas and wasn’t introduced to Europe until the late 16th century, at which time potatoes were looked upon with fear and suspicion. Botanists identified the tubers as members of the poisonous nightshade family, leading to their association with devil worship and witchcraft. (While potatoes belong to the same family as deadly nightshades, they do not contain the same toxins.) They also aren’t mentioned in the Bible, which some religious thinkers of the time interpreted as a sign they weren’t meant to be eaten.

All of that was enough for France’s Parliament to outlaw potatoes from 1748 until 1772, when King Louis XV overturned the ban. The king was persuaded by a medical officer by the name of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, who was fed little else during his time as a prisoner of war and found his confinement surprisingly tasty and nutritious. 

Elsewhere in food-related superstitions, Europeans spent centuries depriving themselves of tomatoes because they believed that tomatoes were poisonous. The pewter plates tomatoes were sometimes eaten on contained lead that was leached by the fruit, resulting in the misconception.

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Most accused witches weren’t burned at the stake.

Because it was a felony in England and the American colonies, witchcraft was punished by hanging, not burning. The majority of people falsely accused and executed during the Salem Witch Trials (1692-1693) were hanged. (In medieval Scotland, the bodies of people accused of being witches were burned, but not until after their sentence had been carried out.) 

The Mississippi River once flowed backward for several hours.

  • Mississippi River
Mississippi River
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Author Michael Nordine

March 9, 2026

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As a general rule, rivers flow forward (which is to say, downhill) rather than backward. The mighty Mississippi is no exception, and yet a February 7, 1812, earthquake near New Madrid, Missouri, was so severe that it caused enough tectonic uplift under the river that it flowed backward for several hours. It was the most violent in a series of tremors that began in December of the previous year. Known as the New Madrid Earthquake Sequence, the tremors were the most powerful seismic event east of the Rockies in U.S. history.

The magnitude is estimated to have been 8.6 on the Richter scale, which occurs only once every year or two. For comparison, there are millions of earthquakes that measure 2.5 or less every year, 350 measuring from 5.5 to 6.0 annually, 100 that measure 6.1 to 6.9, and just 10 to 15 that hit between 7.0 and 7.9. The 8.6 earthquake knocked people off their feet, created so much rolling in the earth that it induced nausea, and destroyed Little Prairie, Missouri. Ten lakes were formed, church bells rang 1,300 miles away in Boston, and President James Madison even felt it in the White House. 

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The most powerful earthquake in U.S. history occurred in Alaska.

California is known for its earthquakes, but the Golden State isn’t the one with the most seismic activity — that would be Alaska, and it isn’t even close. There were 2,242 earthquakes in the Last Frontier in 2025, compared to 416 in California; because of its population density, however, California does experience the most damaging earthquakes. The most powerful earthquake in U.S. history took place across south-central Alaska on March 27, 1964, measuring 9.2 on the Richter scale and lasting between four and five minutes. Only the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile was stronger.

Ben Franklin proposed something like daylight saving time as a joke.

  • Clocks marking time change
Clocks marking time change
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

February 26, 2026

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In most U.S. states, the clocks get set forward an hour on the second Sunday in March, making Monday morning arrive just a little too soon. While daylight saving time can seem like a cruel joke to groggy night owls, the concept is logical enough that even Benjamin Franklin suggested, albeit humorously, maximizing daylight by getting up earlier.

In 1784, when Franklin was living in Paris, he submitted a satirical letter to the Journal de Paris called “An Economical Project.” In it, he wrote that he was up late discussing ways to save money on lighting and went to bed around 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., before “[an] accidental sudden noise waked [sic] me about six in the morning, when I was surprised to find my room filled with light.”

Franklin, who was the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack, noted that he consulted his almanac and was “astonished” to find that the sun “was to rise still earlier every day till towards the end of June.”

In the letter, Franklin calculated that Parisian families could save millions of pounds by waking up with the sun and swapping candlelight for sunlight. He jokingly suggested levying a tax on closed shutters, setting limits on candle purchases, and ringing all church bells right as the sun rises — switching to cannons if the bells proved ineffective.

Franklin did not, even as a joke, suggest changing the time, but his letter was still somewhat prophetic. Ultimately, when countries started implementing daylight saving time, the main argument for doing so was fuel savings.

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Ben Franklin added “self-evident” to the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, but Benjamin Franklin made critical edits to the document before it was presented to the Second Continental Congress for approval. In Jefferson’s first draft, he wrote, “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal.” When he passed it along for edits, Franklin changed “sacred” to “self-evident” — changing a spiritual argument into a rational one.

There was a lottery that gave you immunity from being arrested.

  • Queen Elizabeth I
Queen Elizabeth I
Credit: Archivist/ Adobe Stock
Author Michael Nordine

February 26, 2026

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Get-out-of-jail-free cards aren’t exclusive to Monopoly. When Queen Elizabeth I found herself in need of funds to pay off the debts incurred by her father Henry VIII’s reign, she began organizing England’s first national lottery in 1567. One of the prizes was arguably worth more than money: immunity from being arrested. 

Elizabeth had been reluctant to raise taxes on her subjects despite her plans of expanding England’s naval forces and overseas expeditions, so she turned to a lottery instead. She wrote in a letter to Sir John Spencer in 1567, “It is expedient to have somme persons appointed of good trust to receave suche particular sommes as our subjects shall of their owne free disposition be ready to deliver upon the said lotterie.”

For the price of 10 shillings (about 120 pounds today, high enough to be cost-prohibitive for many citizens in Elizabethan England), entrants were eligible for a top prize of 5,000 pounds (around 1.1 million pounds today). The top 11 winners received cash prizes, and anyone who entered received temporary immunity from arrest for all crimes other than felonies, piracy, and treason — though this protection was not always enforced. The winners of that first lottery have alas been lost to history, but one imagines they enjoyed their low-stakes crime spree as much as, if not more than, their cash prize.

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A lottery helped fund the Great Wall of China.

The Great Wall of China spans 13,171 miles and was built over a period of more than 2,000 years, which is another way of saying it wasn’t cheap. When the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) was working on it, they turned to a lottery system to help fund the project. Contestants didn’t simply buy a ticket, however. They played a keno-like game of chance known as “the white pigeon game,” named for the birds that carried results from one village to another. (In keno, players choose numbers ranging from one to 80 and hope that the numbers they selected are among the 20 that get drawn.) Other historical projects that were similarly funded (at least partially) include Roman roads, Ivy League schools, and the Continental Army.

The ancient Romans had central heating.

  • Roman hypocaust system
Roman hypocaust system
Credit: The Print Collector/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

August 28, 2024

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The ancient Roman people used many technologies that seem surprisingly modern — including hypocausts, a precursor to central heating that’s similar to today’s radiant floors. The technique was primarily used to heat public bathhouses, but it was also widely used in private homes, particularly villas, in chillier areas of the Roman Empire. Buildings heated with a hypocaust system were raised up on pillars, creating an empty space underneath. An external furnace called a praefurnium, which was often wood-burning, piped in hot air to the area. That air would warm the stone or tile floor above, known as a suspensura. The air would escape from the subfloor through flues (sometimes made of terra-cotta) running up through the walls of a home, providing extra heat on its way up. Sometimes the entire wall would be hollow.

Pushing heat through the floors and walls helped keep Roman baths comfortable, preventing sudden temperature changes when entering or leaving warm water. Some rooms were simply heated with no water at all, designed for sauna-like dry sweating. But hypocausts also heated the water itself as it entered the facility. As the water dropped down from the aqueduct, it would immediately pass over a furnace chamber before being piped into the facility. As the water cooled, it could be used for tepid or cold baths in the complex. Hypocausts have been around for at least as long as Roman baths themselves; the technology may have been borrowed from the ancient Greeks and improved upon. This ancient heating system can be seen today at various surviving Roman baths, including the Stabian Baths in Pompeii, built around 125 BCE. 

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Ancient Pompeians had great teeth.

The ancient people of Pompeii had great hygiene, and not just because of their toasty bathing complexes. In 2015, scientists used advanced imaging techniques to study bodies of victims of the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which had been preserved with plaster in the 19th century. They found impeccably healthy pearly whites, even by today’s standards. Researchers partially credit Pompeians’ low-sugar, veggie-rich diet. The volcanic environment also gave their water excessively high levels of fluorine — something that was generally detrimental to their health, but may have had a hand in their oral hygiene.

Amman, Jordan, was once called Philadelphia.

  • Temple of Hercules ruins, Amman, Jordan
Temple of Hercules ruins, Amman, Jordan
Credit: Pavel Kašák/ Adobe Stock
Author Michael Nordine

February 26, 2026

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There’s more than one city of brotherly love. Long before the Liberty Bell or cheesesteaks, Amman, Jordan, was known as Philadelphia, which comes from the Greek words phileo (“love”) and adelphos (“brother”). As one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world — there’s evidence that people have lived there since the Neolithic Period — Amman has, unsurprisingly, been known by many names. Its current moniker derives from the ancient kingdom of Ammon, whose capital it was. The city was known as Rabat ʿAmmān, with Rabat meaning either “capital” or “king’s quarters.” 

After occupying the city during his reign over the Ptolemaic Kingdom (283-246 BCE), Ptolemy II Philadelphus humbly renamed the city after himself; Amman regained its older, and current, name thanks to the Rashidun Caliphate in the seventh century CE. By the time Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was founded in 1682, the name hadn’t been in use in Jordan for nearly 1,000 years. Today, there are also Philadelphias in Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, and Tennessee, but only the one in Pennsylvania has Gritty.

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A restaurant in Philadelphia sells a $140 cheesesteak.

Lots of places in Philly claim to have the best cheesesteak — Pat’s and Geno’s are the most famous (especially since they’re across-the-street rivals) — but only one has the most expensive. That would be Barclay Prime, whose pricey menu features a $140 cheesesteak. The full list of ingredients includes hand-cut wagyu, black truffle, foie gras, fried onions, and Cooper Sharp on a freshly baked sesame roll; it also comes with half a bottle of champagne, which probably isn’t the alcoholic beverage most Philadelphians would pair with a cheesesteak. 

‘Mitochondrial Eve’ is the common ancestor of all humans.

  • Ancient cave wall drawing
Ancient cave wall drawing
Credit: GAS-photo/ Shutterstock
Author Michael Nordine

August 27, 2024

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If you were to trace all our family trees as far into the past as possible, you’d find we’re all related — albeit extremely distantly. The common female ancestor from whom all humans are descended is Mitochondrial Eve, and scientists believe she lived in Africa some 200,000 years ago. Recent research may have narrowed down that location to an oasis in the Kalahari Desert, making it the “ancestral homeland of all humans alive today,” according to the researchers. Eve is technically known as Mitochondrial-Most Recent Common Ancestor, or mt-Eve and mt-MRCA for short, and her lesser-known male counterpart is known as Y-chromosomal Adam. He’s also believed to have lived in Africa, around 150,000 to 300,000 years ago.

The idea of a common ancestor has led to the misconception that Mitochondrial Eve was the first female human, which isn’t correct. Rather, she was the most recent common ancestor to whom every living person can trace their genealogy. Every human on the planet carries the Eve gene, including 147 people and fetuses from the original 1987 study. That study wasn’t the first to hypothesize a common ancestor, but the researchers behind it did coin the term Mitochondrial Eve.

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The Bible never specifies what the forbidden fruit was.

Though we tend to think that it was an apple eaten by Adam and Eve, the Bible never actually specifies what kind of fruit is on the tree of forbidden knowledge in the Garden of Eden. This has led to much speculation among believers, scholars, and others, with figs, grapes, pomegranates, and citrons all suggested as candidates. The apple emerged as the common consensus because its Latin name is malum, which is also the word for evil — a linguistic quirk that apparently seemed too poignant to ignore. Nothing in the original text suggests this is anything more than an etymological coincidence, but the association has stuck.

It once rained meat in Kentucky.

  • “Welcome to Kentucky” road sign
"Welcome to Kentucky" road sign
Credit: © marekuliasz—iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus
Author Bess Lovejoy

February 26, 2026

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March 3, 1876, was a cloudless day in Olympia Springs, Kentucky. Late that morning, a resident named Rebecca Crouch was out in her yard making soap when a strange kind of snow began to fall. At least, that’s how she described some of the pieces drifting down: about the size of snowflakes, only they weren’t white. They were red, and they looked like meat — beef, she thought. 

According to a New York Times report shortly afterward, “Mr. Harrison Gill, whose veracity is unquestionable … visited the locality the next day, and says he saw particles of meat sticking to the fences and scattered over the ground.” The paper also noted that “two gentlemen, who tasted the meat, express the opinion that it was either mutton or venison.”

The first scientific analysis came three months later, when a water treatment specialist named Leopold Brandeis examined specimens preserved in glycerine. He declared that “the Kentucky ‘wonder’ is no more or less than nostoc.” Nostoc — also known as star jelly or witch’s butter — is a type of cyanobacteria that swells into green, jellylike masses after a rain. But the theory had problems: The mystery material wasn’t green, and it hadn’t been raining, and it didn’t explain why it looked and tasted like meat. 

While the circumstances remain mysterious, the leading scientific theory today is that the Kentucky meat shower was the result of projectile vulture vomit. Vultures are common in Kentucky and are known to disgorge their stomach contents when spooked. 

Writing in an 1876 edition of the Louisville Medical News, chemist L.D. Kastenbine explained: “The only plausible theory explanatory of this anomalous shower appears to me to be … the disgorgement of some vultures that were sailing over the spot, and from their immense height, the particles were scattered by the then prevailing wind over the ground. The variety of tissue discovered — muscular, connective, fatty, structureless, etc. — can be explained only by this theory.”

Whatever really fell from the Kentucky sky that day, the event now sits firmly in the canon of classic weird facts. It’s been celebrated in books and podcasts, and even marked with a festival featuring a mystery meat chili cook-off.

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The Kentucky meat shower is not the only event of its kind.

Guinness World Records cites the 1876 Kentucky event as the largest meat shower known to have occurred — but it’s not the only time food mysteriously fell from the sky. In 1841, putrid globs of what looked like muscle and fatty tissue showered a Tennessee farm; in 1867, hazelnuts pelted Dublin; and in 1894, tiny jellyfish were found on the streets of Bath, England. Other storms have dropped everything from half-germinated Judas Tree seeds in Italy to live mussels in Germany. Fish and frog rains, meanwhile, are so common that ichthyologist E.W. Gudger, writing in the early 20th century, proposed four explanations, ranging from migrating or stranded animals to estivating species awakened by rain. His most enduring theory — that waterspouts or tornadoes can lift small creatures and carry them miles — remains the leading scientific answer. Meteorologists point out that the updrafts capable of forming golf ball-sized hail could easily loft small fish into the clouds. Yet many events stubbornly resist explanation, especially long-lasting “rains” of stones, which have been documented for centuries and sometimes during calm weather. As with the Kentucky meat shower, these curiosities sit at the edge of science, where folklore, anomaly, and natural mystery blur together.

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