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Town planning was an Olympic sport.

  • Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York
Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

February 5, 2026

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Nowadays, we tune in to the Olympic Games to see feats of athleticism, from daring ski jumps to stunning gymnastic routines. But athletics is a narrower focus than in some previous years. From 1912 to 1948, the International Olympic Committee granted medals in five creative events, each with their own subcategories. This is how, from 1928 to 1948, you could take home the gold in something traditionally thought of as a desk job: town planning.

Olympic architecture competitions began in 1912, and the committee split the category into town planning and architectural design in 1928, although there was a pretty significant overlap between the two. While medals for architectural design were awarded primarily for buildings, the town planning subcategory left room for other municipal projects such as parks. Fittingly, many winners in both categories were projects related to athletics; every single gold medal winner across both categories was some kind of arena or sports facility, although that was not part of the criteria for entry. 

The only medal the United States won in the town planning category was a silver medal in 1936 to Charles Downing Lay for an ambitious earlier design for Marine Park in Brooklyn. (It’s currently the borough’s largest park, but the original plans would have made it even larger than Manhattan’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park combined.) The victory was heavily overshadowed by its setting in Nazi Germany; that year’s gold medal, judged by a panel composed mostly of German judges, went to two German brothers who designed Reichssportfeld, a venue used for the Berlin Games.

In 1952, the arts competitions were scrapped and replaced with noncompetitive cultural programs such as performances and festivals. Many historians attribute this to how difficult it was to determine who was an amateur artist and who was professional, since it affected their eligibility for the Games. It might be pure coincidence that the committee president that year had entered the literary competition twice without taking home a medal.

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There was a firefighting competition at the Olympics.

While firefighting wasn’t an official Olympic sport in 1900, to the casual event attendee, it may as well have been. The 1900 Paris Games were absolutely chaotic — they were the second-ever modern Olympic Games, wrapped up in the 1900 Paris Exposition, and generally poorly planned. Competitions were spread out over five whole months, and, because a different planning committee had usurped the International Olympic Committee, events weren’t consistently billed as official Olympic events. As a result, more traditional Olympic sports such as cycling and rowing were billed alongside contests in cannon shooting, line-fishing, and, yes, firefighting.

The first Black senator was Hiram Revels of Mississippi in 1870.

  • Portrait of Hiram R. Revels
Portrait of Hiram R. Revels
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Author Michael Nordine

January 21, 2025

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On February 3, 1870, the 15th Amendment prohibited states from disenfranchising voters “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Twenty-two days later, Mississippi politician and minister Hiram Rhodes Revels put that declaration into practice by taking the oath of office to become the first Black senator in United States history. Wendell Phillips, a civil rights activist, marked the occasion by nicknaming Revels “the 15th Amendment in flesh and blood.” 

During the Civil War, which ended in 1865, Revels served as a chaplain and helped organize two regiments of the United States Colored Troops (USCT). Senators weren’t elected by popular vote until 1913, meaning that Revels, like all his colleagues, was elected by the state Legislature. The vote was 81-15. Revels’ term was short, as the seat he was appointed to had been vacant since the Civil War and was set to expire a year later on March 3, 1871, but his public service didn’t end there. He became Mississippi secretary of state in December 1872 and was praised throughout his career as a political moderate and gifted orator.

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“Senator” comes from a Latin word meaning “old man.”

In what might be interpreted as an example of nominative determinism, the word “senator” comes from the Latin word senex, which usually means “old man” (though it can also mean “old woman” or “old people” in general). The word has been in use in English for more than 800 years. In fact, the average age of a U.S. senator was 65.3 years in 2023, and all but 64 senators in U.S. history have been men. Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia became the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate in 1922, albeit only for a day, and Hattie Caraway of Arkansas was the first woman to become a senator via a normal election in 1931.

Thomas Edison proposed to his second wife in Morse code.

  • Thomas Edison and Mina Miller
Thomas Edison and Mina Miller
Credit: Library of Congress/ Corbis Historical via Getty Images
Author Michael Nordine

January 27, 2026

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Some proposals are more memorable than others. Take, for instance, Thomas Edison’s second marriage, which began in an appropriately scientific manner when the inventor proposed to Mina Miller via Morse code — and she said “yes” in the same way. The two used Morse code to speak in secret even in the presence of others, and it’s believed that he tapped the proposal on her hand. 

The two were wed on February 24, 1886, when she was 20 and he was 39; Edison had previously been married to Mary Stilwell from 1871 until her death in 1884. Miller became the stepmother of three children upon the nuptials, though it wasn’t an easy adjustment. Edison’s daughter Marion, who was only seven years her stepmother’s junior, described Miller as “too young to be a mother but too old to be a chum.” Edison and Miller went on to have three more children: Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore. (Edison’s affinity for Morse code didn’t end with his marriage proposal: Marion’s nickname was Dot, while her brother Thomas was known as Dash.) 

While falling in love with Miller, Edison referred to her as the “Belle of Akron” and once wrote in his diary, “Got thinking about Mina and came near to being run over by a street car.” She referred to herself as the “home executive” and was the legal owner of their house in order to protect it from potential seizure due to Edison’s debts. Their marriage lasted nearly half a century until Edison’s death in 1931.

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Edison believed his hearing loss helped him focus.

No one knows exactly what led to Edison’s hearing loss at age 12, though a series of childhood ear infections and even a potential bout of scarlet fever have been pointed to as potential causes. Edison himself shared a fanciful story in which a train conductor lifted him by the ears, whereupon, he said, “I felt something snap inside my head and the deafness started from that time and has progressed ever since …. Earache came first, then a little deafness, and this deafness increased until at the theatre I could hear only a few words now and then.” In any event, he believed that being completely deaf in one ear and mostly deaf in the other made it easier to concentrate on his work, claiming, “My deafness has not been a handicap, but a help to me.”

‘SOS’ doesn’t actually stand for anything.

  • Three-mast schooner
Three-mast schooner
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Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

August 8, 2024

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After more than a century of use as a maritime distress signal, “SOS” has become shorthand for just about any emergency. You may have heard that it stands for “save our ship” or “save our souls,” but that’s actually a backronym, or an acronym made up after the fact. The letters in “SOS” didn’t initially stand for anything; they were originally chosen because they form a sequence of Morse code that can be transmitted more quickly than others.

Morse code (named for Samuel Morse) is a way of transmitting phrases with light flashes or electrical pulses. Each letter and numeral has its own sequence of between one and five short bursts (known as “dots” or “dits”) and long bursts (“dashes” or “dahs”). In 1901, inventor Guglielmo Marconi created a radio transmitter that could send Morse code signals across the Atlantic, allowing ships to communicate with other vessels and land-based stations. British operators were already using “CQ,” or “seeking you,” as a signal to alert all stations, so Marconi’s wireless company recommended “CQD,” or “seeking you, distress,” as an emergency signal. Meanwhile, the United States usually used “NC,” the Germans used “SOE,” and Italians used “SSSDDD.” But the problem with all of these was that they required brief pauses between the letters.

Delegates at the 1906 International Radiotelegraph Conference suggested a simpler, more standardized distress call. The letters “S” and “O” — three dots and three dashes, respectively — are extremely simple and easy to understand without any spaces, so “SOS” could be transmitted on a quick, continuous loop. Most countries officially adopted the code in 1908 and, even though the U.S. was not among them, an American ship was the first to use the signal when its propeller snapped. “CQD” remained popular with the British even after other countries had adopted “SOS,” and when the RMS Titanic sank in 1912, it signaled for help with both “SOS” and “CQD.” By that time, the backronym had already taken hold. During the British government inquiry on the Titanic disaster, Attorney General Rufus Isaacs was under the impression that “SOS” stood for “save our souls.”

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The distress signal “mayday” comes from a French word.

In the 1920s, there was a lot of air traffic between England and France, and radio communication between pilots was spoken, not telegraphed. While “SOS” is very practical to transmit using Morse code, it can be easily garbled when said out loud — an “S” can sound like an “F” or even an “X.” The term “mayday,” coined in 1923, is a phonetic spelling of the French m'aidez, meaning “help me,” and was preferred for spoken communication. Although the observance of the May Day spring festival predates the “mayday” code by hundreds of years, it’s unrelated to the distress call.

Maya Angelou was one of San Francisco’s first Black female streetcar conductors.

  • San Francisco cable car, 1957
San Francisco cable car, 1957
Credit: Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Author Bess Lovejoy

January 27, 2026

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As a teenager during World War II, Maya Angelou took a job that might seem unexpected for the future renowned author: working as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She was just 15 years old when she climbed onto the back platform of an electric streetcar in 1943, wearing a tailored blue uniform and a change belt, collecting fares and urging riders to move forward.

Angelou later described herself as San Francisco’s first Black streetcar conductor, including in her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. While the claim is often repeated, later research suggests the full picture is more complex. At least one Black man had been hired by the city’s transit system earlier, in 1941. And because employment records from the era were discarded long ago, it’s difficult to prove definitively that Angelou was the first Black female streetcar conductor. But she was certainly among the very first.

Getting the job took determination. After seeing an ad for female conductors placed by the Market Street Railway Company during the labor shortages of World War II, Angelou went to apply — and was repeatedly refused an application. Encouraged by her mother, Vivian Baxter, she returned day after day for about two weeks, arriving before the office staff and waiting them out. When she was finally allowed to apply, Angelou lied about her age, writing down 19. She also invented prior work experience, saying that she had been “companion and driver for Mrs. Annie Henderson (a White Lady) in Stamps, Arkansas.”

Angelou worked the job for roughly five months before returning to high school. To keep her daughter safe on predawn routes, Baxter reportedly followed the streetcar in her own car, a pistol on the seat beside her. Angelou later said the experience taught her something lasting: With persistence and courage, she could go anywhere.

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Audley Cole was the first Black man hired by the San Francisco transit system.

In 1941, Audley Cole became the first Black employee of San Francisco’s city-run transit system, the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni), after passing the civil service exam by leaving his race off the application. But getting hired was only the beginning. White operators refused to provide the training he needed to start work; 14 employees chose suspension rather than train him, and the operators’ union threatened a $100 fine against anyone who did. One white employee who tried to train Cole was beaten so badly he was hospitalized. For three months, Cole was effectively blocked from doing the job he had earned. With help from the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union and Muni’s general manager, he was finally trained by the head of the agency’s training department. Cole later pushed for fair treatment of Black employees, and within three years, nearly 100 Black workers were employed by San Francisco’s transit system.

Seven people have medaled in both Summer and Winter Olympic sports.

  • Clara Hughes, 2006 Torino Winter Olympics
Clara Hughes, 2006 Torino Winter Olympics
Credit: UPI/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

January 26, 2026

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Olympians train for years, sometimes their entire lives, to become the best of the best at what they do. And some athletes even manage to compete at that high level in more than one sport. Just a handful of people, seven in total, have managed to take home medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics, in entirely different events. These multitalented athletes switched between disciplines that were sometimes dramatically dissimilar — think going from running in the summer to bobsledding in winter.

The first athlete to medal in both the Summer and Winter Games was American boxer Eddie Eagan. He took home a gold medal at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Belgium, then continued to collect accolades in the sport, including a two-year undefeated world tour. His Winter Games gold medal, on the other hand, came almost by happenstance. A friend asked him to be on the 1932 United States bobsled team, and despite having never been in a bobsled before then, he was part of the four-man team that took home gold that year.

Eagan was joined in this rare feat by Norway’s Jacob Tullin Thams, who became the first-ever Olympic ski jump gold medalist in 1924 and then won his second medal as part of the Norwegian yachting team in 1936. In 1988, Germany’s Christa Luding-Rothenburger became the only athlete to medal in the Summer and Winter Olympics in the same year; she earned a gold and silver for speed skating in Calgary and a silver for track cycling in Seoul. (After 1992, the Games shifted to two years apart, so it’s a hard act to repeat.)

Other athletes to medal in both the Summer and Winter Olympics include Canadian Clara Hughes (cycling and speed skating), American Lauryn Williams (track and bobsled), and American Eddy Alvarez (baseball and speed skating). The most recent addition to the list is German athlete Alexandra Burghardt, who won a bronze medal in the 4 x 100-meter relay in 2024 after taking home silver in the two-woman bobsleigh in 2022.

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Eddie Eagan was also an accomplished attorney.

File this under “leave something for the rest of us.” When Eddie Eagan won his first Olympic gold medal, he was a student at Yale University. He graduated from Harvard Law in 1922, then received a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. in jurisprudence in 1924 and 1928. He was starting private practice when he was tapped to join the bobsled team in 1932, and after taking home Olympic gold, he went on to serve as assistant United States district attorney before chairing several high-profile sports commissions. 

Marie Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive and will be for more than a millennium.

  • Marie Curie in lab
Marie Curie in lab
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Author Michael Nordine

August 8, 2024

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A lot has changed in the 90 years since Marie Curie’s death, but one thing that hasn’t is the status of her notebooks — they’re still radioactive. Not having the benefit of hindsight despite being one of the 20th century’s most pioneering scientists, Curie was known to store radioactive elements out in the open, in part because she enjoyed how they “looked like faint, fairy lights.” She even walked around her lab with them in her pockets. 

Consequently, her clothes, furniture, and even cookbooks are also radioactive, and will be for the next 1,500 years. In order to be as safe as possible with her remaining materials, France’s national library stores Curie’s notebooks in lead-lined boxes to this day, and anyone wishing to view her manuscripts must sign a waiver and wear protective gear. Her other personal items are stored with similar precautions at the Musée Curie (Curie Museum) in Paris. Curie herself died of aplastic anemia in 1934, likely due to her prolonged exposure to radiation. She didn’t know that she was essentially giving her own life in the pursuit of science, but her unwitting sacrifice has only added to her singular legacy.

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Marie Curie named one of the elements she discovered after her home country.

When Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, the Kingdom of Poland was still part of the Russian Empire. She left for France when she was 24 and spent most of her remaining life there, but the country she was born in never really left her. When she and her husband Pierre discovered polonium in July 1898, they named it in honor of Poland — not just because it was close to her heart, but because it wasn’t a sovereign state and she wanted to draw attention to this increasingly fraught issue. She eventually came to regret this decision, but not for the reason you might expect: Radium, which she discovered not long after, proved to be much more important to scientific research, and she wished she had saved the name for it.

One of the first White House pets was John Adams’ dog Satan.

  • White House, 1792
White House, 1792
Credit: PRISMA ARCHIVO/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Timothy Ott

August 1, 2024

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Although he was the second president of the United States, John Adams was the first to (briefly) live in the presidential residence now known as the White House. That means he and his wife, Abigail, inaugurated such White House traditions as the selection of furnishings, the hosting of official gatherings, and the introduction of presidential pets — one of whom answered to the moniker of Satan.

Despite the copious surviving correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, there exist few juicy details about this devilishly named dog for historians to sink their canines into. We do know that the pup shared the White House grounds with another mixed-breed named Juno (and possibly a third dog, named Mark). We can also deduce that Satan had to compete for the divided attention of the horse-loving president, who built the White House stables to house his carriage horses Cleopatra and Caesar. 

Though they were the first to bring animal residents to the White House, the Adamses were not the last presidential family to bestow their pets with unusual names. Later nonhuman occupants of the Pennsylvania Avenue mansion include Benjamin Harrison’s opossums Mr. Reciprocity and Mr. Protection; Rutherford B. Hayes’ cats Siam, Miss Pussy, and Piccolomini; and Theodore Roosevelt’s guinea pigs Admiral Dewey, Dr. Johnson, Bishop Doane, Fighting Bob Evans, and Father O’Grady. But as with other matters of American presidential history, it’s hard to top the standard set by George Washington, who blessed his dogs with such memorable names as Drunkard, Madame Moose, and Sweet Lips.

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A dog named Satan helped the Allies survive WWI’s Battle of Verdun.

Pinned back by German troops during the lengthy siege of Verdun in 1916, the Allied soldiers that held down the traditional French stronghold were surely praying for divine intervention from their guardian angels. What they got instead was Satan, a military dog trained to zigzag through the flying bullets while shouldering a contraption that held two passenger pigeons. Although he was shot in the leg, and his handler was killed while exhorting him to continue, Satan managed to stagger to safety behind the Allied line. From there, the French commander affixed messages with information about the German position to each of the pigeons, one of which managed to evade the gunfire to reach headquarters and spur the arrival of reinforcements. It’s unknown what happened to this particular Satan, but he is credited with having a hand (paw?) in helping the Allies attain a hard-fought victory.

Pope Pius II wrote a bestselling erotic novel.

  • “The Tale of Two Lovers”
"The Tale of Two Lovers"
Credit: Heritage Images/ Hulton Archive via Getty Images
Author Michael Nordine

January 26, 2026

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You’ve probably never read The Tale of Two Lovers, but a lot of people in the 15th century did. Little did they know that the immensely popular erotic novel’s author, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, would later be known by a different name: Pope Pius II. He assumed the papacy on August 19, 1458, and served until his death almost exactly six years later on August 14 or 15, 1464. Historia de duobus amantibus, as the novel is known in the original Latin, was published in 1444, more than a decade before he became pope, and tells of a sordid affair between a married woman named Lucretia and a man named Euryalus, who serves the duke of Austria; some scholars believe it drew inspiration from the real-life romance between Kaspar Schlick, chancellor of Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, and the daughter of Mariano Sozzini, the future pope’s law teacher at Italy’s University of Siena.

Among the first epistolary novels ever written, The Tale of Two Lovers is largely presented as a series of letters between the two main characters. Pius II was a prolific writer in general, having written about history and geography in addition to being made imperial poet laureate by Frederick III of Austria in 1442; much of his poetry was also erotic. Pius II is remembered as a skilled orator, as well, and many of his speeches are still preserved. As pope, he’s best known for attempting to unite Europe against the invading Turks.

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The pope plays Wordle.

Upon his election in May 2025, Pope Leo XIV instantly became a historic figure. He is the first American pope, the first from the Order of St. Augustine, the first Peruvian citizen to become pope, and quite possibly the first to play Wordle. The word-guessing game, a New York Times product played by millions every day, lends itself to personalized strategy. Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Prevost, has an unorthodox approach: “I use a different word for Wordle every day, so there’s no set starting word,” he said during a Q&A with the National Catholic Youth Conference in 2025. His affinity for the game was first revealed by his brother John Prevost shortly after the papal election. In that same interview, Prevost also revealed that Leo XIV had just finished watching Conclave, the 2024 drama about a papal election, before he was chosen as pope.

Thirty-nine baseball Hall of Famers served in World War II.

  • Joe DiMaggio (right)
Joe DiMaggio (right)
Credit: RBM Vintage Images/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Michael Nordine

August 1, 2024

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They don’t call it the Greatest Generation for nothing. Of the hundreds of ballplayers who have been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, 39 belong to an extra-special class: those who served in the military during World War II. That list includes such all-time greats as Yogi Berra (Navy), Ted Williams (Marines), Jackie Robinson (Army), and Joe DiMaggio (Army), all of whom put up some of the most impressive numbers in baseball history despite losing several years of their careers while on active duty. Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, did so after attaining the rank of second lieutenant as part of the 761st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion — a segregated unit whose motto was “Come Out Fighting.” Like baseball, the military did not officially desegregate until after the war.

Anyone who’s seen A League of Their Own knows that World War II led to another massive change in the sport: the creation of women’s leagues, most notably the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Active in the Midwest between 1943 and 1954, the league consisted of 15 teams whose players were themselves inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988.

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Joe DiMaggio wasn’t inducted into the Hall of Fame on his first try.

When referring to superlative athletes, we often call them “first-ballot Hall of Famers,” meaning players so exceptional that they’re guaranteed to be inducted in their first year of eligibility. And while Joe DiMaggio is likely to be found on any list of the greatest ballplayers of all time, he wasn’t actually a first-ballot inductee. Or second, for that matter. DiMaggio made it to Cooperstown on his third ballot after retirement, receiving 88.8% of the vote (the minimum requirement being 75%) in 1955. 

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