In 480 bc, with the Persian army on the cusp of defeating Greece, Athenian general Themistocles sent a trusted slave to convey a message to Persian king Xerxes; the note professed allegiance to Persia and reported many Greek ships prepared to defect. The Persians, acting hastily on this false intelligence, sailed into the Strait of Salamis, where the Greek fleet was waiting and gained a decisive victory.
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At thirty-one ounces, the Trenta, a new drink size introduced by Starbucks in 2011, holds the same volume as the average capacity of the human stomach.
In September 1776, fearing illness from night air, John Adams asked Benjamin Franklin to close the window of their room in a New Jersey inn. “I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds,” Franklin responded, launching into “a harangue upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration” in favor of leaving windows open. “I was so much amused,” Adams wrote in his journal, “that I soon fell asleep and left him and his philosophy together.”
“There is a physical basis for all meteorological phenomena,” wrote the founder of the National Weather Service in 1901. “There are laws of mechanics and heat that apply to the atmosphere, and as fast as we acquire the ability to discover these and reason out their consequences, we shall perceive that law and order prevail in all the complex phenomena of the weather and the climate.”
In order to economize while sending a telegram, people sometimes relied on code books that reduced phrases to single words. From the third version of Anglo-American Telegraphic Code, published in 1891: Babylonite (Please provide bail immediately), Titmouse (I [we] accept with pleasure your invitation for the theater tomorrow evening), Mahogany (Malaria prevails extensively), Enringed (the news causes great excitement).
Among the acts advertised for a show in the Isle of Wight in 1849 by the “Unparalleled Necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos” were the Pudding Wonder and the Pyramid Wonder. The latter, it was noted, had been bought for five thousand guineas from “a Chinese Mandarin, who died of grief immediately after parting with the secret.” The performer and author of the ad copy was Charles Dickens.
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah may have been caused by an earthquake that occurred through the Great Rift Valley around 1900 bc. The “brimstone and fire” described in the Bible would have been due to petroleum and gases present in the area igniting the cities.
Titus Andronicus is William Shakespeare’s bloodiest play; the body count reaches fourteen. Rounding out the top-three deadliest plays are Richard III (eleven) and King Lear (ten).
Gone to Greece to fight for the country’s liberation from Ottoman rule, Lord Byron, who financed a fighting force, noted in his journal on September 28, 1823, that he “did not come to join a faction but a nation—and to deal with honest men” and was dismayed to find that “they are such d——d liars; there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise.” Nevertheless, he died there on April 19, 1824, after contracting a fever.
Slaves in ancient China during the Zhou dynasty were sometimes buried alive with their recently departed masters in order that they might continue to serve them in the afterlife.
A letter dated to the eighteenth century BC sent by a servant to Zimri-Lim, the king of Mari, details a system of long-distance signal fires, thought to be the first ever in use.
The earliest reliable account of human flight concerns a Benedictine monk named Eilmer, who in 1066 fastened wings to his hands and feet, jumped from a tower, and glided more than six hundred feet before falling from the sky and breaking both his legs. He blamed the failure on not having fitted himself with a tail.
“The history of the twentieth century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire,” reads the Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, June 3, 1997. Among the signatories were Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush—but not George W.
Two years after being exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Nobel Prize–winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn settled in a small Vermont town, living there reclusively for some eighteen years. He did however attend a few town meetings and was once spotted marching in a parade to celebrate the bicentennial of Vermont statehood.
Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed in 1947, “A typical American film, naive and silly, can—for all its silliness and even by means of it—be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learned a lesson from a silly American film.”