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The first words spoken on the telephone were, “Mr. Watson, come here.”

  • Telephone circa 1876
Telephone circa 1876
Dorling Kindersley via Getty Images
Author Adam Levine
August 2, 2023

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The first phone call ever made was short, simple, and to the point. On March 10, 1876, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, uttered the first message ever transmitted over the phone: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” Bell’s history-making call was to his assistant, the mechanic Thomas Watson, and it wasn’t exactly long-distance; Watson was sitting by a receiver just a few rooms away. But when Watson came into the room and informed Bell that he had heard each word clearly and distinctly, it proved to both men that this groundbreaking new technology was a success.

The power of his innovation was immediately apparent to Bell. In a letter to his father recounting the event, the inventor predicted that “the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water or gas — and friends converse with each other without leaving home.” Bell’s vision, of course, proved remarkably prescient. His short phone call to Watson marked the beginning of a technology that quickly transformed the world. Though that first phone call was between two people in the same house, the telephone soon allowed people to speak to each other from separate homes, separate cities, and, by 1927, separate continents.

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Alexander Graham Bell’s mother and wife were deaf.

Alexander Graham Bell is famous for inventing the telephone, but much of his life was dedicated to another field entirely: the education of deaf people. Both Bell’s mother and wife were deaf, and his father was a speech therapist for deaf people. Before inventing the telephone, Bell worked as a teacher in several schools for the deaf, and later in life he dedicated a part of the fortune he had amassed from inventing the telephone to continue his advocacy for Deaf education. He became the first president of the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf and is even credited with connecting Helen Keller with her teacher Anne Sullivan. However, Bell’s approach to Deaf education prioritized oralism, a method that emphasized teaching deaf people to speak and read lips without the aid of sign language. Today, oralism is widely considered outdated and even detrimental, and Bell’s role in promoting it has made him a controversial figure in the Deaf community.

Some WWII brides made their wedding dresses out of parachutes.

  • WWII wedding photo
WWII wedding photo
Credit: ZUMA Press Inc/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd
June 6, 2024

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In the years during and immediately following World War II, it was not uncommon for brides to wear wedding dresses crafted from repurposed parachutes. While a lot of wartime ingenuity was a result of limited resources and rationing, in many cases, the reason behind parachute dresses was more sentimental. One 1947 wedding dress that’s now in the Smithsonian’s collection was made from a nylon parachute that aided one Major Claude Hensinger in his escape from a bomber plane that caught fire; the parachute not only deposited him safely on the ground, but also served as a pillow and blanket while he waited for rescue. When he returned to the U.S., he proposed to his girlfriend Ruth, suggesting she use the parachute that had saved his life to make her gown. The elegant dress was modeled after the one in the 1939 film Gone With the Wind; Ruth hired a seamstress to make the bodice, then ruched the strings of the parachute to make a gathered skirt and train.

Another dress acquired by the San Diego Air and Space Museum has a similar backstory: The parachute used to make it saved the life of groom Chuck Martin during a training flight on a bomber at the end of the war. His bride, Carolyn, altered it herself using the skills she learned in an eighth grade sewing class. A more elaborate dress in storage at the National Museum of the United States Air Force was made from strips of nine different parachutes used in combat. Of course, sometimes the parachute fabric (usually nylon) was simply what was available — but it still made for a good story. When two Holocaust survivors got married in 1946 at a displaced persons camp run by Allied forces in Celle, Germany, groom Ludwig Friedman purchased a parachute for fabric, and bride Lilly Lax hired a seamstress using her cigarette rations. The dress was worn by two more brides in similar camps afterward, and is now among the artifacts at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Cheetos were made from surplus war rations.

During World War II, the U.S. military was looking for any way to cut down on shipping costs for war rations. In 1943, a USDA scientist did what was previously thought impossible: dehydrating natural, fatty cheese, making it easier to send across the ocean. After the war, the military was left with a bunch of leftover dried food, which it offloaded to private companies. One of the corporations to take advantage of the processed food fire sale was Frito, now Frito-Lay. In 1948 it rolled out one of the most famous uses of dried cheese to date: Cheetos.

The president never had a red telephone during the Cold War.

  • Teletype machine
Teletype machine
Credit: BTEU/TEKNISKA/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine
June 4, 2024

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Despite being an enduring symbol of the conflict between the United States and Soviet Union, there was never a red telephone on the U.S. president’s desk during the Cold War. While it’s true that a Moscow–Washington hotline was established in 1963 to, as the White House put it, “help reduce the risk of war occurring by accident or miscalculation,” it has never been red or even a phone. Instead, it was originally Teletype, which allowed encrypted messages to be sent between the two countries within minutes rather than hours. The system changed to fax machines (remember those?) in 1986 and has been a computer link for secure emails since 2008. 

All of this came about as a result of the Cuban missile crisis, a 13-day conflict widely considered the closest America and the Soviet Union ever came to starting a nuclear war — in part because of simple miscommunication. In order to reduce the risk of such a thing happening again, negotiators representing the two nations wrote a memo titled “Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link,” and signed it on June 20, 1963. As for how the image of a red phone entered our collective imagination in the first place, you can thank pop culture in general and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in particular. The red phone has appeared in many a spy novel, as well as a crucial scene in Kubrick’s Cold War satire.

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George Orwell coined the term “Cold War.”

Though it had been used before in other contexts, the term “Cold War” was first used in relation to the post-World War II nuclear threat by writer George Orwell. The 1984 and Animal Farm author wrote his essay “You and the Atom Bomb” in October 1945, just months after the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, warning of a world “which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.” As tended to be the case with Orwell, this prediction proved especially prescient. The term was further popularized by Walter Lippmann’s 1947 book The Cold War, and has been common parlance ever since. 

Napoleon was attacked (and defeated) by a horde of rabbits.

  • Emperor Napoleon I
Emperor Napoleon I
INTERFOTO/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine
July 25, 2023

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Napoleon Bonaparte is revered as one of the greatest military commanders of all time, but even he was helpless against the most fearsome foe of all: fluffy little bunnies. In one of history’s most shocking upsets, the emperor of the French was attacked — and defeated — by a horde of rabbits. The coup took place in July of 1807 as Napoleon and his coterie celebrated the Treaties of Tilsit, which brought a victorious end to the war between France and Russia, with a traditional rabbit hunt. Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, arranged the festivities with anywhere from a few hundred to 3,000 rabbits and expected them to behave as normal when they were uncaged on a field. Rather than run away, however, the bunnies began swarming Napoleon and his men. Though amusing at first, the situation quickly overwhelmed some of Europe’s foremost military strategists.

Reader, it was chaos. According to General Paul Charles François Adrien Henri Dieudonné Thiébault, “the intrepid rabbits turned the Emperor’s flank, attacked him frantically in the rear, refused to quit their hold, piled themselves up between his legs till they made him stagger, and forced the conqueror of conquerors, fairly exhausted, to retreat and leave them in possession of the field.” Having ceded this crucial territory, Napoleon retreated to his coach and thought the bunnies would show mercy. They did not. With what historian David Chandler has described as “a finer understanding of Napoleonic strategy than most of his generals,” they continued their siege until the coach fled the scene. The reason for the creatures’ aggression? Berthier bought tame rabbits from a farmer rather than trap wild ones and, because they hadn’t been fed that day, the hungry bunnies swarmed the men they assumed were there to feed them.

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Australia fought a “war” against emus — and lost.

Rabbits aren’t the only animals that have brought the leaders of a powerful nation to their knees. In 1932, Australia found itself in crisis when some 20,000 emus moved inland during their breeding season and disrupted farmers’ crops. After having their classification downgraded from “native species” to “vermin,” the ostrich-like birds became public enemy number one. The government sent in World War I veterans to assist the beleaguered farmers, and though they were outfitted with machine guns, they soon found themselves overwhelmed by their flightless foes.  “The machine-gunners’ dreams of point-blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated,” observed D.L. Serventy, an Australian ornithologist. “The Emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic. A crestfallen field force therefore withdrew from the combat area after about a month.” The birds were simply too much trouble to get rid of, and though they suffered heavy casualties, they emerged victorious and still thrive Down Under.

The ancient Egyptians had accurate pregnancy tests.

  • Bags of wheat
Bags of wheat
Credit: greg801/ iStock
Author Nicole Villeneuve
May 29, 2024

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For all of the advancements made in women’s reproductive health throughout history, the nature of pregnancy tests has remained rather primitive. The ancient Egyptians used a urine sample to test for pregnancy, much like our modern methods — only their tests also relied on barley and wheat seeds.

Details of the method were found on a papyrus scroll dating to around 1350 BCE. Potential mothers were advised to urinate on bags containing wheat and barley, and according to the theory, if the grains sprouted shortly after, it indicated pregnancy. A 1963 study reproduced the test and found it successfully diagnosed pregnancy in about 70% of expectant mothers. While the ancient Egyptians believed the test worked because of the life-generating power of childbearing, it’s more likely that the heightened levels of estrogen in urine during pregnancy helped stimulate the seeds’ growth. 

The seed method endured for an impressively lengthy period. Variations of the test were found in Greek and Roman medicine, Middle Eastern practices during the Middle Ages, and as recently as 1699 in a book of German folklore. The ancient pregnancy test also observed which type of grain grew first. “If the barley grows, she will get a boy child,” the text of the papyrus stated, according to one translation. “If the emmer [wheat] grows, she will get a girl child.” This prediction, however, did not hold up to modern tests for accuracy. 

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Live frogs were used for pregnancy tests in the mid-20th century.

Expectant mothers have relied on some rather unconventional pregnancy testing methods throughout history. One test involved the Xenopus laevis, or African clawed frog, and it was used more recently than you might expect. In the late 1920s, British scientist Lancelot Hogben began experimenting with injecting female species of the frog with urine. If injected with a pregnant woman's urine, the amphibian produced eggs within about 12 hours as a result of a human hormone now known as human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) — the same hormone that detects pregnancy in modern tests. Similar tests had previously been done on animals such as rabbits and mice, but the frog test, known as the Hogben test, was favored for its humanity to the animal. (Because the frog secreted its eggs on the outside, it did not have to be dissected during tests.) From 1930 up until the 1960s, thousands of African clawed frogs were exported for pregnancy testing throughout the world, before the method was replaced by immunochemical test kits in 1968.

The Olympics used to have medals for painting and literature.

  • Walter Winans in 1903
Walter Winans in 1903
The Print Collector / Alamy Stock Photo
Author Bennett Kleinman
July 25, 2023

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At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, the perfect brushstroke was just as likely to win a medal as the quickest sprint. That year, Pierre de Coubertin — co-founder of the International Olympic Committee — introduced a series of Olympic events in the fields of painting, literature, music, architecture, and sculpture, with the rule that all creations must be sports-themed. Though many of the newly eligible competitors lacked the physical prowess of traditional Olympians, some excelled at both the athletic and the artistic. American marksman Walter Winans not only won a silver medal for sharpshooting at the 1912 Games, but he also took home gold for his 20-inch-tall sculpture of a horse-drawn chariot, titled “An American Trotter.”

In future Olympiads, the artistic events focused on even more niche disciplines. By the 1928 Amsterdam Games, architecture was subcategorized into design and town planning, while literature was divided into lyrical, dramatic, and epic works. After a hiatus during World War II, the arts returned as official Olympic events one final time at the 1948 London Games. It was there that 73-year-old John Copley won a silver medal for his engraving titled “Polo Players,” becoming the oldest Olympic medalist in history. Unfortunately for these more right-brained Olympians, new IOC president Avery Brundage led a campaign to remove the creative events from the official Olympic program, relegating the arts to exhibition status by the 1952 Games. All 151 artistic Olympic medals that had been awarded between 1912 and 1948 were stricken from the official record books.

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Winners received a silver medal at the first modern Olympics.

Gold medals have become synonymous with victory, but the inaugural modern Olympics honored champions with silver. At the 1896 Athens Games, winners received a silver medal, an olive branch, and a diploma, while runners-up were awarded a medal made of bronze and copper. Those early medals depicted Zeus on their obverse side and the Acropolis on the back. It wasn’t until the 1904 St. Louis Games that the medals broke down into gold, silver, and bronze as we know them today. However, referring to first-place medals as “gold” might be misleading even now: In terms of chemical composition, Olympic “gold” medals are actually 92.5% silver and contain only about 6 grams of gold. Second-place medals, however, are almost entirely silver, whereas bronze medals are composed of 95% copper and 5% zinc.

The letter “J” wasn’t added to the alphabet until after Shakespeare.

  • Romeo and Juliet, 1879
Romeo and Juliet, 1879
IanDagnall Computing/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Bennett Kleinman
July 24, 2023

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It wasn’t until after the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) that the modern English alphabet welcomed “J” as its 26th and final letter. In fact, first-edition copies of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from 1597 were titled Romeo and Iuliet, as the letter “I” was often used as a written substitute for words with a “J” sound in English. In order to fully understand the letter’s origins, however, we need to go all the way back to ancient Roman times. 

In Roman numerals, a swash was sometimes used to denote the end of sequences — for instance, the number 13 often visually appeared in handwritten text as “XIIJ” instead of “XIII.” In classical Latin and in various European languages through the medieval era, the letter “I” was used as both a vowel and as a consonant, and the constant version of “I” morphed over the years and eventually began appearing as a “J” shape. In the late 15th century and early 16th century, a few scholars wrote treatises on grammar in which they suggested using “J” as the constant version of “I.”  In English, this change took hold in the early 17th century. A good illustration of this is the King James Bible, one of the first modern English texts to print “J” as a unique letter. The 1611 edition uses the consonant “I” in words such as “Iesus” and “Ioseph,” while the 1629 edition uses the letter “J,” paving the way for the eventual widespread inclusion of “J” in the English alphabet.

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Benjamin Franklin created a new alphabet without the letters C, J, Q, W, X, or Y.

Benjamin Franklin was one of America’s greatest inventors, and he even went so far as to develop an entirely new alphabet. He initially conceived of the concept in 1768, and eliminated six letters — C, J, Q, W, X, and Y — that he deemed redundant given the presence of other letters with similar sounds, such as “K” and “S.” In turn, Franklin concocted six entirely new letters to fill the gap, including one with a soft “O” sound and another that sounded like “sh.” While Franklin earned the support of lexicographer Noah Webster, the idea was ultimately abandoned. However, in 1906, another American statesman tried to revolutionize the alphabet. That person was Theodore Roosevelt. As President, Roosevelt attempted to establish a new American language that removed linguistic associations with British English. For example, words like “although” were shortened to “altho.” In the end, Roosevelt’s efforts were voted down by the House of Representatives, putting the idea to rest.

The “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” songwriters had never seen a baseball game.

  • Ebbets Field, circa 1950s
Ebbets Field, circa 1950s
Everett Collection Historical/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Nicole Villeneuve
July 24, 2023

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Along with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Happy Birthday,” “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is one of the most recognizable songs in American history. Written in 1908 by songwriter Jack Norworth and composer Albert Von Tilzer, the tune was one of many popular baseball songs that made waves at the time. But unlike those other onetime chart-toppers, the catchy song went on to become an intergenerational cultural fixture, traditionally played during the game’s seventh-inning stretch at stadiums across North America. You would think this legendary anthem for America’s pastime came from a diehard baseball fan, but the truth is that neither Norworth nor Von Tilzer had ever even been to a baseball game when they penned the tune.

The idea for the song came to Norworth not while he was sitting in the stands, but instead, of all places, on the New York City subway. According to legend, he was taking a trip across town in spring 1908 when he saw a subway advertisement for a New York Giants home game at Polo Grounds stadium in upper Manhattan. Inspiration struck the songwriter, and he quickly jotted some words on a scrap of paper. Von Tilzer completed the music shortly after, and on May 2, 1908, the pair registered the song with the U.S. Copyright Office. On the same day, an ad for the sheet music appeared in the entertainment trade paper the New York Clipper, and before the year was out, it was the No. 1 song on the pop charts. In 1940, Norworth finally attended a Brooklyn Dodgers game at Ebbets Field, where he was honored for his contributions to baseball. He claimed it was his first baseball game.

Despite its early success on the charts, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” doesn’t appear to have been played or performed at a Major League Game until the 1934 World Series. It was much more recently still, in 1971, when Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck caught legendary announcer Harry Caray singing the song to the entire stadium (possibly not realizing the public microphone was on nearby) that it became the essential singalong tradition that it remains today. 

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“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” has a feminist twist.

Although the chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is the best-known part of the song, the lyrics of the verses introduce protagonist Katie Casey, a young woman who is “baseball mad” and would rather be taken to a ballpark than be wined and dined by suitors. In 2013, George Boziwick of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts deduced that this outspoken, progressive character — a departure from the social norms of the time — was actually inspired by actress and suffragist Trixie Friganza. Lyricist Jack Norworth, then married to actress Louise Dresser, was believed to be having a short-lived affair with Friganza at the time; historians have also pointed out that an original edition of the sheet music featured Friganza’s picture. 

World War I helped popularize the modern bra.

  • Women workers during WWI
Women workers during WWI
Credit: CBW/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Fran Hoepfner
July 24, 2023

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For nearly 400 years, women in Western Europe and North America were expected to wear corsets beneath their clothing — restrictive, binding bustiers that cinched at the waist and opened toward the chest to accentuate the natural curves of the body. This all changed around the First World War, when a shortage of metal, the dominant material in corsets, led to a redistribution of resources as well as a cultural shift. Steel went toward planes and tanks and other military equipment, and American women went to work in factories to contribute to the war effort. Hard labor, however, could not be performed in a corset — indeed almost nothing could be performed in a corset, barring sitting and standing. These women needed something breathable, loose, and functional.

Enter Caresse Crosby, a young debutant who, in lieu of wearing a corset, opted to sew together two handkerchiefs ahead of a social ball, debuting the first “modern bra” on the dance floor. She patented the first-ever “backless brassiere,” which she later sold to the Warner Brothers Corset Company. From there, the modern bra took off in a variety of styles and functionalities. In the postwar era, the bandeau bra — a cylindrical, cupless garment not unlike a modern bralette — was popular under slim-fitting 1920s dresses. Soon after, the cupped bra took shape with its infamous pointed cups and letter-based sizing. The variable styles allowed women the chance to express themselves and move their bodies freely, though the relief of taking off a bra at the end of the day is universal and timeless.

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No one knows the exact origin of cup sizing.

Prior to the letter-based cup sizing system, bras were fashioned with flexible bands and cups to fit nearly any type of chest, with sizing options in “full,” “average,” and “small.” The origin of cup sizing — A, B, C, and up — is disputed, occurring sometime in the mid-1930s. Some historians credit William and Ida Rosenthal, the founders of Maidenform, while others credit S.H. Camp and Company for popularizing the system. The Warner Brothers Corset Company also claims to have used cup sizes since 1935. Though the precise origin remains unknown, the lettered sizing system is still the industry standard going on a century later.

Around 21 human species have lived on Earth.

  • Human evolution skulls
Human evolution skulls
Photo credit: DonSmith/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Darren Orf
June 12, 2023

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Each one of the billions of people living on Earth today belongs to the same species: Homo sapiens. But we weren’t always the only humans. The Smithsonian Institute estimates that some 21 different human species have roamed the Earth (though the number varies due to conflicting definitions of what is “human”). Many of those species are in the genus Homo, which has only one surviving species today (that’s us). The list of hominids also includes other species considered by most scientists to be early humans, such as the Australopithecus afarensis, a member of the genus Australopithecus.

The first humans in the same genus as Homo sapiens were Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Homo erectus, and evidence suggests they coexisted in East Africa some 1.9 million years ago. This kind of cohabitation was a familiar fixture of human evolution. When Homo sapiens first appeared around 300,000 years ago, our ancestors lived among many other now-extinct human cousins. Modern humans famously fraternized with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other populations. Homo sapiens also shared the planet with lesser-known species such as Homo floresiensis, Homo naledi, Homo luzonensis, and the straggling survivors of Homo erectus. But because some of these groups lived in remote communities, it’s possible that modern humans never even laid eyes on them. Scientists theorize that our ancestors wiped out many of these human species (Neanderthals were the last to fall, beginning to go extinct around 40,000 years ago) by demonstrating superior strategizing and cooperation skills. Our ancestors’ social intelligence helped them rise to the top of the food chain, and the population grew exponentially. Today, modern humans stand alone in the genus Homo, but we only have ourselves to blame. 

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

The lifetime of a planet is long, measured in several billions of years, but many species are lucky if they even make it beyond a couple million. Homo sapiens are a relatively young group, first appearing on the scene some 300,000 years ago, which means we’ve only been around for 0.0067% of Earth’s history. Because humans have such a low genetic diversity compared to other primates, scientists estimate that Homo sapiens likely grew from only 10,000 breeding pairs — but we’ve been busy ever since. The human population reached the 1 billion mark in 1804 and 8 billion in November 2022. 

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