Not long before his death in 961, Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III testified that over his fifty years of reign, during which “riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call,” he had “diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness.” Al-Rahman had counted only fourteen. “O man,” he lamented, “place not thy confidence in this present world!”
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Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince, was well known in his lifetime as a comic dramatist. An early performance in Florence of The Mandrake caused Pope Leo X to insist that its actors and scenery be brought to Rome in 1520. In the prologue to Clizia, a play inspired by Plautus, Machiavelli wrote, “Comedies were invented to be of use and of delight to their audiences.”
Concerned about pigeons carrying military communications, German troops in occupied Belgium during World War I would shoot at overhead flocks. Such fears had not abated by World War II, when the British government ordered a systematic slaughter of pigeons throughout the UK, and inmates at British and Australian interment camps were banned from approaching birds on compound grounds.
Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” to raise money for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal fund in 1883 and soon after embarked on a ship to London to promote the cause for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Her poem was only placed on a plaque at the foot of the “Mother of Exiles” in 1903, six years after her death.
While stationed as a secret agent in Bern in 1917, future CIA director Allen W. Dulles received a phone call from a Russian exile with an urgent message to deliver to the United States. Having already arranged a rendezvous with Swiss twin sisters at a country inn, Dulles demurred, finding out only later that the caller was Vladimir Lenin, who returned to Russia in a sealed train the next day.
“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in a letter in the last year of his life.
The Book of the General Laws and Liberties Concerning the Inhabitants of Massachusetts, passed in 1647 and published the following year, contained capital law number fourteen, stating that a “stubborn or rebellious son” could be put to death.
On Friday, January 13, 1882, thirteen men met in New York City as the Thirteen Club; they walked under a ladder, ate lobster salad sculpted into the shape of a coffin, and sat beneath a banner reading morituri te salutamus (“we who are about to die salute you”). The following year, the club’s newsletter gleefully reported that “not a single member is dead.”
Around noon on April 27, 1932, while aboard a steamship southeast of Florida, poet Hart Crane, intoxicated and still wearing his pajamas, jumped overboard. The ship’s captain later told Crane’s companion, Peggy Cowley, “If the propellers didn’t grind him to mincemeat, then the sharks got him immediately.”
Committed to learning the principles of Latin grammar as a child in Mexico in the 1650s, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz recalled that she cut her hair very short, and if she had not “learned such and such a thing” by the time it grew out, she “would again cut it off as punishment for being so slow-witted.”
In 1878 the American consul in Bangkok presented a cat to President Rutherford B. Hayes, who named it Siam. It is believed to have been the first Siamese cat to enter the U.S.
At the thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1967, one second was redefined as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.” In April of this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, unveiled a new atomic clock to act as the United States’ primary time standard; it will not gain or lose a second in 300 million years.
In 2013 a picture taken by the Planck telescope of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background—radiation generated by the Big Bang—resulted in the estimation that the universe is 13.82 billion years old.
In the Himalayan valley of Kullu, in Himachal Pradesh, there sits a Shiva temple on whose property is erected a sixty-foot iron pole. According to an ancient tradition, the pole attracts the “blessing of heaven,” and a Shiva lingam is placed underneath. During storms the pole acts as a lightning rod, carrying electricity down to the lingam and shattering the object. The broken pieces are collected by the temple priest and used for the next blessing.
In 1927 Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik identified a phenomenon that came to be known as the Zeigarnik effect, which states that waiters are good at remembering particulars of a restaurant bill—until the bill is paid. “Unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones,” concluded Zeigarnik.