William Petty’s device for “double writing” made it possible, he claimed, that “any man, even at the first sight and handling, may write two resembling copies of the same thing at once.” Petty wrote one of the first-known English claims for patent rights, in his 1648 “Brief Declaration Concerning Double Writing.” “Should I have given it away for nothing?” he asked. “The thing...would have been condemned as of no use, because of no price.”
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Residents of North Yorkshire from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries were so afraid of the dead rising to attack the living that they would dismember, decapitate, burn, and otherwise mutilate corpses before burying them. The process was generally undertaken shortly after death, when the bones were still soft.
The longest filibuster in U.S. Senate history lasted twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, a record set in 1957 by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to stall passage of the Civil Rights Act. Thurmond died in 2003, holding his same Senate seat.
In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macduff asks the Porter, “What three things does drink especially provoke?” The Porter replies, “nose painting, sleep, and urine”—the first of which is usually taken to mean the red flush that comes across a drinker’s face. It also leads to lechery, the Porter says, adding, “it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.”
“There is a story, repeated by a number of Roman writers,” explained the classicist Moses Finley, “that a man—characteristically unnamed—invented unbreakable glass and demonstrated it to Tiberius in anticipation of a great reward. The emperor asked the inventor whether anyone else shared his secret and was assured that there was no one else; whereupon his head was promptly removed, lest gold be reduced to the value of mud.”
A 2011 study found that Chinese consumers are charged more due to “superstitious manipulations” of retail prices—fives and sixes appear more often than unlucky fours, eights and nines more than unlucky sevens. “Retailers,” the study reported, “are the clear winners.”
“The contempt of risk and the presumptuous hope of success are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions,” wrote Adam Smith in 1776. “How little the fear of misfortune is then capable of balancing the hope of good luck.”
In August 1945 pioneering computer programmer Grace Hopper was working at Harvard University on the experimental Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical protocomputer being used in the war effort. After a circuit malfunctioned, one of her colleagues removed a two-inch-long moth using tweezers. Hopper taped the moth into her logbook and later recalled the first use of a now ubiquitous term: “From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.”
According to the Talmud, “If a fledgling bird is found within fifty cubits of a dovecote, it belongs to the owner of the dovecote. If it is found outside the limit of fifty cubits, it belongs to the person who finds it.” Jeremiah, a renowned fourth-century rabbi, once asked what the outcome would be if a bird were to have one foot inside the limit and the other outside. This was one quibble too many. “It was for this question,” the text relates, “that Rabbi Jeremiah was thrown out of the House of Study.”
Analysis of lead pipe from the buried city of Pompeii revealed in 2017 that the Roman water supply may have had high levels of antimony, a toxic element likely used to increase the pipes’ strength. “It’s bigger than the diarrhea,” said an expert in archaeological chemistry about antimony’s possible effect on the population. “It’s the decline of the Roman Empire in 476.”
As a result of technological advances and shortages of enslaved workers, water power became used more widely in the Roman Empire around the late third century; the earliest known depiction of a water-powered stone sawmill was produced around this time in Hierapolis. Later, in 371, the poet Ausonius wrote an ode to the Moselle River: “He turns his millstones in furious revolutions and drives the shrieking saws through smooth blocks of marble.”
“I am his highness’s dog at Kew; / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?” reads an epigram that Alexander Pope wrote in the 1730s and had engraved on the collar of one of his puppies, whom he gave to Frederick, Prince of Wales.
The Cincinnati Commercial complained in 1871 about the game of fly loo, a “detestable canker that destroys men’s souls.” Players selected sugar lumps and bet on which would attract a fly first. “Every afternoon from twenty to thirty of the very flower of our mercantile population retire to a private room and under locks and bolts give themselves up to this satanic game,” the article noted, “while the deserted ladies are languishing for a little male conversation below.”
About his habit of masturbating in public, Diogenes the Cynic said, “I only wish I could be rid of hunger by rubbing my belly.”
Around 1500 bc, the Hittite augur Maddunani sacrificed to the gods one goat kid, one piglet, and one puppy in an attempt to end an epidemic that had devastated the army. While puppies played “an extensive, and apparently vital” role in Hittite ritual, wrote historian Billie Jean Collins, “this is the only case in Hittite ritual of puppies being killed as an offering.”