When New York’s elevated trains became an unbearable neighborhood nuisance, boardinghouse owner Mary Walton fought back with sand, ingenuity, and a patent. She also developed an early approach to controlling industrial smoke. Thomas Edison had fame and laboratories. Walton had a basement, a mechanical mind, and very little patience for noisy trains.
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The horror film Halloween used a cheap William Shatner mask, costing $2, due to its low budget. The modified mask became an iconic image of horror cinema, contributing to the film’s huge success, grossing $70m worldwide from a budget of $325,000. This made it the most profitable film featuring Shatner’s face.
Discover how Nikola Tesla’s high-frequency oscillator experiment provided an unexpected remedy for Mark Twain’s digestive issues.
Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant in 1903 to prove Tesla’s AC current was dangerous. source
Anatidaephobia is the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you. source
Black Ivory Coffee: Processed By Elephants The most expensive coffee in the world is made from elephant dung, and it’s called Black Ivory coffee. It costs $50 per cup, with coffee beans going for $1,000 for 1.1 pounds (0.5 kg). Purchase Black Ivory Coffee here and try it out for yourself. In comparison, Kopi Luwak…
The legend reveals the coffee origin is with Ethiopian shepherds who coffee’s energizing effects when they observed their goats behaving energetically after consuming coffee berries. This anecdote highlights the historical origins of coffee and its stimulating properties that have captivated people across cultures.
When Doctor Who’s Matt Smith uttered the line, “Bow ties are cool,” bow tie sales shot up 94% within one month. source
The Cotard Delusion is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost their blood or internal organs. Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality. In 1788, Charles Bonnet reported one of the earliest recorded cases of Cotard’s…
The typical office desk harbors 20,000 germs per square inch, 400 times more than the regularly cleaned toilet.
The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial life civilizations in the Milky Way. Designed by Frank Drake, he estimated between 1,000 and 100,000 civilizations could be in our galaxy.
The rise in popularity of LEGO bricks can be attributed to the amount of imagination a child can use to build something with the bricks. The bricks are so versatile that the LEGO Group has calculated that just six eight-stud bricks can be arranged in 915,103,765 different ways.
The word Yupik describes a family of five languages, spoken by residents of Siberia and Western Alaska. Each one of those languages is similar, but different—if two people from a different region met, one might not be able to understand the words spoken by the other, but because of the sentence structure and similar phonetic…
With just a handful of people remaining who know the Archi language, it is one of the world’s endangered languages. Learn about Archi and the efforts to preserve it.
A group of toads is called a knot. source
