It isn’t often that a duck, rooster and sheep get this much attention. In September 1783, King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette (see: The Truth About Marie Antoinette’s Cake)- along with 130,000 curious French citizens – stood in the Palace of Versailles’ courtyard to witness a demonstration of a modern marvel. After months of tests, two well-to-do paper […]
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In this week’s “best of” our YouTube channel, we look at a variety of topics, including, the rare genetic condition that slowly encases some people in a prison of bone, why the Queen of England doesn’t need a passport, if aspartame is really bad for you, what is actually in juicy fruit gum, why we use the term “gay” for […]
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The 19th amendment to the United States Constitution, which was the result of many decades of hard work and lobbying from tireless suffragists who battled on both the state and national fronts, prohibits any US citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of their sex. Nearly a half century before this Constitutional amendment was ratified on […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Even if you’ve never heard of Otis Blackwell, you’ve almost certainly heard his music—he was one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century. Here’s the story of the most famous songwriter most people have never heard of. TIGHT CHRISTMAS In the mid 1950s, Otis Blackwell was a struggling […]
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Jeremy R. asks: How did Switzerland manage to stay neutral during WWI and WWII? The tiny mountainous country of Switzerland has been in a state of “perpetual neutrality” since the major European powers of the time declared it as such during the Congress of Vienna after the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. Why did they do this? The […]
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On May 6, 1954, just under one year after New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary and Nepalese mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first humans to reach the top of Mount Everest, another seemingly insurmountable barrier was crossed- a human being ran the mile in less than four minutes. The man who did it was 25-year-old British medical student Roger Bannister, finishing […]
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Mike C. asks: Why don’t we use the popular vote to pick the president? On December 13, 2000, Vice President Al Gore conceded the presidential election to Governor Bush. A day earlier, a lengthy and expensive manual vote recount process in Florida was stopped by the United States Supreme Court despite Bush leading by only 537 votes. With Bush winning […]
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Richard Turpin, better known by his nickname, Dick, was a legendary highwayman who stalked the English countryside. A century or so after his death by hanging in 1739, Turpin was idealised as a dashing rogue or gentleman thief type in a multitude of supposedly factual stories purportedly based on his life. In reality, he was not exactly dashing, with a […]
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Gina A. asks: Is the ocean continually getting saltier as salt comes in from the rivers or is there some way that the salt gets moved back onto land? Most sea salts come from water-caused erosion, whereby rivers ultimately carry the dissolved salts to the oceans. Absent a few key processes, the ocean’s salinity would continuously increase; however, there are […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Harley Earl is considered one of the three most important figures in the history of the American auto industry (Henry Ford and GM head Alfred Sloan are the other two). Yet other than car buffs, few people have heard of him. THE HOLLYWOOD KID In 1925 the General Motors Corporation […]
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McKayla asks: Why do Daft Punk always dress like robots? Have they ever shown their faces? Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, more succinctly known as Daft Punk, are arguably two of the most famous and easily recognisable musicians on Earth, having won countless major awards including six Grammys and even managed a “Best Original Score” award for the absolutely […]
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Anonymous asks: Why did people pick VHS over laserdisc? On January 14, 2009, LaserDisc officially died. Of course, the shiny, 12-inch optical disc that once competed with VHS and Betamax in the home video market spun into oblivion long before. However, it was that Wednesday in January seven years ago that Pioneer – the last remaining company to make the […]
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Mark Y. asks: Why were people who made alcohol during prohibition called bootleggers? Although Prohibition officially began on January 16, 1920, the impetus for banning the production, sale, importation and transportation (though not the consumption) of alcohol had been brewing for decades before. Part of a string of reforms introduced by Progressives, Protestants and other activists to cure all of […]
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M. Silverman asks: Why aren’t the windows aligned with the rows of seats on planes? While airplane manufacturers do design the planes with general row positioning and pitch (the measurement from one seat to the same exact point on the seat in front or behind it) in mind, with the windows often lining up with the seats, the designers’ exact […]
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The 1890s were a gilded age of sports in America. Backed by the country’s moral and intellectual elite in the form of ministers and urban reformers, institutions like the YMCA were popularized, enforcing the rather novel idea of healthful recreation via organized sports. While this may seem obvious to us today, this was only decades after a time when watching […]
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Marco Rossi asks: Is it true that the queen of England isn’t required to have a passport when she visits other countries? As the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom, the commonwealth, and certain other countries that have since declared independence but decided they kind of like having the Queen on their money, Queen Elizabeth II enjoys a number of […]
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Melissa T. asks: What is the process involved with climbing Mount Everest? Do you need a permit or something or can anyone just try and climb it if they want to try it? Standing at a foreboding 8,848 metres (or 29,029 feet) high, Mount Everest is recognised as the Earth’s highest mountain. While Everest isn’t generally considered to be the […]
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Jared M. asks: Why are breasts called boobs? There’s an oft repeated and decidedly untrue claim that Eskimos have hundreds of words for “snow”. (Beyond the fact that there is no single “Eskimo language”, when talking about the wider Eskimo-Aleut language family, these actually have roughly the same number of root-words for snow as English.) The false claim that they […]
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