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J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the Oxford English Dictionary.

  • J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien
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Author Darren Orf

August 17, 2023

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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is the grandfather of modern fantasy; his books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings formed the foundation of the genre. But before the renowned writer and philologist crafted the world of Middle-earth, he spent some time working on another vital text, the Oxford English Dictionary. After being discharged from the British army due to illness, he got a job on staff at the OED from 1919 to 1920. During that time, he worked on words near the beginning of the “w” section, from “waggle” to “warlock.” (Tolkien might’ve been assigned this section because many “w” words, including “walnut,” “walrus,” and “wampum,” have difficult etymologies.) The famous author once said that he “learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life.”

Although Tolkien’s tenure at the preeminent dictionary was a short one, his influence on linguistic tome continued for years to come. In 1969, when an OED editor reached out to Tolkien for comment on the addition of the word “hobbit” to the dictionary, the author responded with a definition twice as long as the original — the dictionary printed Tolkien’s version almost verbatim.  The OED eventually added many more words from Tolkien’s famous high fantasy series — including gems such as “mithril,” “Orcish,” and “troll.” 

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The first English dictionary included only 3,000 words.

The first dictionary of modern English, A Table Alphabeticall, was published in 1604, just a handful of years after William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Containing only about 3,000 words with simple definitions and no references or word origins, the dictionary was the sole work of Robert Cawdrey, an English schoolmaster and clergyman. Cawdrey set out to provide a text where readers “may more easily and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere.” This dictionary was the first attempt to catalog words found in modern English, as opposed to Middle English, which preceded it. So many innovations occurred in the language in the 15th century — including pronunciation, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary — that it’s likely that Shakespeare would’ve had as tough a time reading Geoffrey Chaucer (who wrote The Canterbury Tales in Middle English) as we do today. Although Cawdrey’s work was a valiant first attempt, many English dictionaries have been written since, and the latest Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 170,000 words in total.

Paul Revere never actually shouted, “The British are coming!”

  • Paul Revere in Lexington
Paul Revere in Lexington
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Author Adam Levine

August 17, 2023

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In the popular imagination of many Americans, few aspects of the Revolutionary War are more iconic than the event that came to be known as “Paul Revere’s midnight ride.” On the evening of April 18, 1775, the Patriot leader rode from Boston to Lexington, Massachusetts, warning the rebelling colonists that British soldiers stationed in Boston were planning to march into the countryside surrounding Lexington and Concord. However, while Revere’s midnight ride was, in fact, a significant moment in the American Revolution, some details that found their way into the popular retelling have been subject to a bit of dramatic embellishment. Namely, Revere never actually shouted the now-legendary warning, “The British are coming!” In fact, if he had shouted this, it would have been detrimental to his mission.  

For one, at the time, colonists still considered themselves to be British subjects, and although they were rebelling against the British crown, American revolutionaries did not consider “the British” to be a separate, hostile nation. What’s more, as a known revolutionary agent riding through a region full of British troops, Revere needed to complete his ride with as much discretion as possible. His actual journey was one of secrecy and narrow escapes, including a clandestine boat ride across the Charles River, during which he narrowly avoided capture from a British patrol ship before continuing his covert ride by horseback on the other side of the river. Revere did deliver crucial warnings about the British military’s impending advance on Lexington, but these warnings were quietly given to revolutionaries at individual households along his route.

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Paul Revere was not the only rider sent out to spread the warning about British soldiers.

While Paul Revere has gone down in history as an American hero, he wasn’t the only person who went on a secret ride in the middle of the night to warn colonists about the British soldiers’ plan to advance. At the same time that Revere set out on his ride from Boston to Lexington, another man, William Dawes, also departed Boston with instructions to alert colonial militias of the mobilizing British troops. Revere and Dawes had the same destination, but the routes they took were different: Revere left Boston by secretly crossing the Charles River, while Dawes took the riskier land route out of the city, which required him to sneak through a British checkpoint. As Dawes rode toward Lexington, he alerted other riders of the British movement, and these riders in turn spread the message to yet more colonial militia members throughout the countryside surrounding Lexington. 

In 1973, Jimmy Carter reported seeing a UFO.

  • President Jimmy Carter
President Jimmy Carter
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Author Michael Nordine

August 23, 2023

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In addition to having one of the most remarkable post-White House lives of any president, Jimmy Carter had one of the most interesting trajectories toward the Oval Office. That includes not only being a peanut farmer but also reporting seeing a UFO in 1973, at which time he was governor of Georgia and three years away from being elected to the nation’s highest office. The actual sighting took place in 1969, while Carter was visiting the Lions Club in Leary, Georgia. In his report, he wrote that “a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared. It didn’t have any solid substance to it, it was just a very peculiar looking light. None of us could understand what it was.”

An amateur astronomer with a strong knowledge of physics stemming from his time in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine program, Carter insisted that what he saw wasn’t Venus, as some skeptics suggested, and that 10 to 12 others witnessed it as well. He also vowed to encourage the government to release “every piece of information” about UFOs to the public if he were to become president, though he ultimately opted not to do so for fear that the information could have “defense implications” that might risk national security.

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The White House is considered extremely haunted.

Jimmy Carter is hardly the only commander in chief to have had a supernatural experience; the White House itself is notorious for being haunted. Harry Truman once heard three knocks on his bedroom door at 4 a.m. and wrote in a letter to his wife that “the damned place is haunted sure as shootin’.” (This was actually due to the deteriorating condition of the building before Truman ordered a gut renovation.) Many people also believe that Abraham Lincoln still resides in the building — even Winston Churchill thought he encountered Honest Abe. “Good evening, Mr. President,” he reportedly said. “You seem to have me at a disadvantage.” 

The fall of the Berlin Wall was partly due to a bureaucratic mistake.

  • Crowd at the Berlin Wall
Crowd at the Berlin Wall
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Author Michael Nordine

August 23, 2023

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The Berlin Wall stood for 28 years, separating East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. Had it not been for a bureaucratic mistake, it might have stood a little longer. Facing mounting pressure, East Germany announced on November 9, 1989, that its citizens could begin visiting the West, though the policy wasn’t meant to take immediate effect. Instead, it was supposed to be rolled out gradually and involve a visa application. However, that’s not what an unprepared politburo member named Günter Schabowski said when asked at a press conference that evening about the timeline for East Germans to begin their visits — his answer was “immediately, without delay.” 

Excited by the news, thousands of East Germans descended on the wall to both celebrate and make the crossing they’d been waiting so long for. This was especially overwhelming to Harald Jäger, a guard at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint. Receiving little in the way of helpful guidance from his superiors and faced with a growing crowd — to say nothing of the fact that he was waiting on results of a cancer test — he opened the gate. Other checkpoint guards did likewise, and this vital part of the Iron Curtain was finally torn down.

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The Berlin Wall actually consisted of two walls.

Perhaps because “Berlin Walls” didn’t sound as catchy, the fact that this physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain consisted of two separate barriers isn’t widely known. The two walls were separated by a 160-yard “death strip” that more than lived up to its name: Everything from floodlights and trip wires to dogs and guard towers could be found there, and the armed guards who patrolled it had shoot-to-kill orders. The intention wasn’t to keep people out but to keep East Germans in, as the vast majority of attempted crossings were from East to West rather than the other way around.

The first official presidential aircraft was nicknamed the “Sacred Cow.”

  • FDR’s “Sacred Cow” plane
FDR's "Sacred Cow" plane
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Author Adam Levine

August 23, 2023

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Today, the airplane carrying the U.S. president is known as Air Force One, but the original presidential aircraft had a slightly more colorful name: the Sacred Cow. The plane was specially designed for Franklin D. Roosevelt to meet the president’s increased needs for international travel during World War II. Though it was officially named the Flying White House, the White House press corps began calling the aircraft the “Sacred Cow,” a name inspired by the heavy security that was dedicated to keeping the plane and its VIP passengers safe. The Sacred Cow featured a conference room, windows made of bulletproof glass, and an elevator so that Roosevelt, who used a wheelchair, could easily board and deplane. For added convenience, the elevator even lifted the President directly into a private office on the plane. Although the aircraft had been customized for his personal use, Roosevelt ended up flying on the Sacred Cow just one time, when he used it in 1945 to fly to the Yalta Conference, a wartime meeting in Crimea during which Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin discussed the final stages of World War II and the future of the postwar world.

Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman, continued to use the Sacred Cow from 1945 to 1947, at which point the aircraft was reassigned for other functions before being officially retired in 1961. Notably, Truman was flying on the Sacred Cow when he signed the National Security Act of 1947, which established the Air Force as an official, independent department of the U.S. military — the Sacred Cow has even been called the “birthplace of the Air Force.” The call sign “Air Force One” was first used to identify the presidential airplane in 1953, and the term became the official designation in 1962.

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Air Force One is shadowed by a “Doomsday plane” in case of a nuclear attack.

In keeping with the emphasis on security that gave the original Sacred Cow its name, the modern-day presidential aircraft are outfitted with some seriously heavy-duty safety features, including armored windows and a radar-jamming system to evade potential missile attacks. On top of that, the president’s plane is trailed at all times by a second aircraft commonly referred to as the “Doomsday plane.” The Doomsday plane was introduced in 1973, during the Cold War, when a nuclear attack was considered a looming threat. The plane is designed to serve as a safe haven and command center for the president if such an attack were to occur. It’s capable of withstanding a nuclear blast, and it flies using analog controls since electronics are prone to disruption from the electromagnetic pulses emitted by nuclear explosions. The military keeps the full design of the Doomsday plane a closely guarded secret, however, and usually refuses to even discuss it publicly.

Thomas Edison wanted the Statue of Liberty to talk.

  • Statue of Liberty
Statue of Liberty
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Author Bennett Kleinman

August 29, 2023

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Thomas Edison revolutionized the audio world in 1878 when he obtained a patent for his latest invention, the phonograph. The audio player was designed for at-home use, but Edison also had larger-than-life plans for the product, in a very literal sense: He aspired to install a massive phonograph inside the Statue of Liberty to make Lady Liberty capable of speech. Edison revealed his intent to design a “monster disc” to produce audible messages, to make it sound as if the statue were uttering the words herself. He informed reporters that the phonograph could not only be used to alert ships during heavy fog, but also, if amplified properly, create a loud enough sound to produce words that could be heard as far as northern Manhattan and across New York Harbor. Despite Edison’s optimistic and ambitious ideas, the project never came to fruition, and the statue remained silent.

While Edison failed in making Lady Liberty talk, he succeeded on a much smaller scale by creating the first talking doll toy. In April 1890, Edison’s factory produced a set of 22-inch-tall dolls with miniature phonographs embedded in the torso. Some 500 were sold. Unfortunately, the dolls were returned in droves, as their fragile voice boxes were easily destroyed upon being played with. What’s more, the dolls sang songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” but the sound was eerie and distorted due to the rudimentary phonographic technology. The toy was a massive flop for Edison, though it inspired future generations of successful talking dolls.

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The Statue of Liberty was originally brown.

When French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi completed work on the Statue of Liberty in 1885, its copper exterior glimmered a lustrous brown color. However, after Lady Liberty’s arrival in New York Harbor, the statue was left exposed to the elements, and over the decades it evolved to its current seafoam green hue. This drastic physical transformation was due to copper corrosion, which happens to any copper material that’s exposed to weather over time. The copper reacted with oxygen, sulfuric acid, chloride, and other components of the surrounding air and water to undergo a gradual visual erosion that left it with the greenish color we recognize today. In 1906, newspapers ran stories about proposed projects to repaint the statue, though the idea led to public outcry among those who preferred the green hue. Fortunately for them, chemists believe the current color has stabilized, and the green patina even protects the statue’s metal against the surrounding elements.

The U.S. Army created a “Ghost Army” to deceive the Germans in WWII.

  • U.S. Army in battlefield
U.S. Army in battlefield
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Author Rachel Gresh

February 27, 2024

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At first glance, the base of the U.S. “Ghost Army” would have resembled a movie set, with artists painting dummy airplanes, actors reciting fake radio broadcasts, and soundtracks playing on repeat. But this was a real World War II military operation, officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. It had one mission: to trick German intelligence by any means necessary. The first of its kind, the 1,100-person covert unit was a mix of artists, radio broadcasters, sound engineers, actors, architects, and, of course, professional soldiers. This special unit staged no fewer than 22 deceptions in some of the most volatile areas of Europe between January 1944 and the end of the war in 1945. 

The Ghost Army operated near the front lines. They set up dummy artillery on Omaha Beach following D-Day, erected dozens of fake tanks to inflate troop numbers during sieges, and helped draw German forces away from General George Patton’s troops during the Battle of the Bulge. Sometimes, the con artists took their acting talents into local bars and cafés, spouting off inaccurate information for German spies to take back to their commanders. Loudspeaker broadcasts of military drills and rumbling tanks (which could be heard from 15 miles away) gave the illusion of massive numbers of troops. The army’s deception skills allowed them to mimic forces of 40,000 men, misleading German intel. By some estimates, these ploys saved the lives of up to 30,000 American troops. However, it wasn’t until recently that these heroic efforts were brought to light. Military records of the Ghost Army weren’t declassified until the mid-1990s, and it wasn’t until 2022 that the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for their role in the Allied victory.

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A group of Allied POWs escaped by making a “Trojan horse.”

A successful Allied prisoner-of-war escape during World War II was rare. Of the 170,000 POWs from the U.K., fewer than 1,200 escaped German camps. Three of these escapees were British officers Oliver Philpot, Eric Williams, and Michael Codner, who became famous after their “Wooden Horse” escape from Stalag Luft III (a Nazi-run POW camp in Poland) in 1943. Their disguise wasn’t as grand as the mythologized horse from Greek legend, but it worked all the same. They used a wooden vaulting horse (for gymnastics) placed alongside a perimeter fence to hide their tunnel. Two men hid inside the vault and dug all day until it was time to remove the vault and cover the entrance to the hole. Incredibly, the plan worked, and the trio escaped under the fence and made their way to neutral Sweden, surviving the journey using maps, a compass, and forged papers. A few years later, the heroic story was recounted in the 1949 book and subsequent 1950 film The Wooden Horse.

Hurricanes used to only be named after women.

  • Hurricane the Atlantic
Hurricane the Atlantic
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Author Kerry Hinton

August 7, 2024

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Before the 20th century, there was no uniform method for naming hurricanes in the U.S., though some other parts of the world saw creative naming conventions. Residents of the West Indies, for example, named hurricanes after patron saints. And 19th-century British meteorologist Clement Wragge used characters from Greek and Roman mythology, as well as the last names of his political enemies, for typhoons in the Pacific Ocean. He also began a tradition that eventually made its way across the Atlantic: using women’s names for hurricanes.

Until the 1940s, hurricanes in the U.S. were generally referred to simply by the year and/or place they occurred, such as the “Great Miami Hurricane of 1926.” That changed during World War II, when Navy and Air Force meteorologists began to name the tropical storms they tracked after their girlfriends and wives for easier reference. For a time, the U.S. military also experimented with naming storms after its phonetic alphabet — Able, Baker, Charlie, and so on — but this was replaced with a system thought to be less confusing and easier for the public to remember. In 1954, the National Weather Bureau chose to use women’s names as the standard for hurricanes; that year saw Alice, Barbara, Carol, and others. 

But why women’s names, specifically? The decision was partially inspired by the trend that began during the war, though it was also rooted in sexist stereotypes about the temperamental nature of women. The practice continued in the U.S. until the 1970s, when members of the women’s movement spoke out against the negative characterization of women that pervaded every facet of society, including storm-naming. In 1979, the National Weather Service and the World Meteorological Association changed the naming convention to include an even split of women’s and men’s names, using six groups of 26 names that rotate annually. 

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The hurricane scale may need a Category 6.

The National Weather Service currently uses the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to classify hurricanes on a scale of 1 to 5, based on wind speed. (Other factors, including storm surge, rainfall flooding, and tornadoes, aren’t taken into account.) But the increasing risks posed by ever-stronger storms has led some members of the scientific community to suggest expanding the scale to include a Category 6. Atmospheric scientists note that the rise in global temperatures due to climate change has increased the ferocity, unpredictability, and spread of tropical storms. Warmer air contains more moisture, which could lead to an increase of up to 20% in precipitation and higher storm surges by the end of the 21st century. A Category 4 storm has winds of 130 to 156 mph, while Category 5 has winds of 157 mph or higher. Between 2014 and 2024, five storms have exceeded wind speeds over 192 mph, demonstrating the potential need for additional classifications as the strength of storms increases. 

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