Every New Year’s Eve, millions watch the Times Square ball drop. But the tradition’s origins have nothing to do with celebrating the new year. Discover how a nineteenth-century invention designed to help sailors navigate the oceans became one of the world’s most famous celebrations.
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Every New Year’s Eve, millions watch the Times Square ball drop. But the tradition’s origins have nothing to do with celebrating the new year. Discover how a nineteenth-century invention designed to help sailors navigate the oceans became one of the world’s most famous celebrations.
James Holman lost his sight in his twenties, crossed Siberia alone, attracted the suspicions of Imperial Russia, and was ordered back to Europe. Naturally, he responded by finding another route and circumnavigating the globe.
In 1917, the U.S. Navy built a wooden battleship in the middle of Manhattan. The USS Recruit had sailors, gun turrets, searchlights, and even dazzle camouflage. It also had absolutely no chance of floating. Somehow, it became a remarkable recruiting success.
A lost bet on the 1860 presidential election sent Edward Payson Weston walking from Boston to Washington—and unexpectedly made him famous. His peculiar journey helped launch a career in pedestrianism, the once-massive spectator sport in which thousands paid to watch professional walkers circle tracks for days.
In 1850, Jacques-Toussaint Benoît claimed he had invented wireless communication using paired snails, animal magnetism, and an elaborate brass contraption. The “snail telegraph” was scientifically hopeless—but its dream of instant global communication was oddly ahead of its time.
Explore 11 of the strangest Supreme Court cases involving tomatoes, stolen airplanes, baseball, homegrown wheat, nervous chickens, and other legal oddities.
On August 9, 1945, American scientists sent a handwritten warning to Japanese physicist Ryōkichi Sagane. Their delivery method was unusual: they attached it to instruments dropped by parachute during the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The letter survived. Unfortunately, the bomb arrived first.
Queen Victoria spread hemophilia through Europe’s royal families. DNA found the mutation—but where Victoria got the hemophilia gene remains a mystery.
Reginald Bray treated Britain’s postal regulations less like rules and more like a list of challenges. Over four decades, he mailed turnips, rabbit skulls, clothing, his dog—and even himself—while testing just how far the Post Office would go to deliver the seemingly undeliverable.
For more than three decades, Olympic medals were awarded for architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. Meet the poets, artists, architects—and one suspiciously successful Olympic founder—who competed for gold without breaking a sweat.
A real injury became a character trait, the “period” music was decades out of date, Chicago was often California, and the screenplay about con men wound up in a real dispute over who borrowed what. Here are the strange true stories behind The Sting.
William Henry Ireland wanted to impress his Shakespeare-obsessed father. One forged signature later, he had fabricated manuscripts, love letters, Shakespeare’s library, and an entirely new “lost” play that actually reached the London stage.
During WWII, the BBC kept “Deep in the Heart of Texas” off factory broadcasts because workers might stop working to clap along.
Meet the Smothers Brothers, whose CBS variety show mixed music, satire, politics, and censorship—and helped change American television.
Discover how Scott Joplin’s 1902 rag “The Entertainer” became a 1970s pop hit, plus surprising stories from the life of the King of Ragtime.
