King vs. monkey
Alexander, the unlucky puppet king of Greece, was killed by a monkey bite and medical incompetence in 1920.
Category: 20th century history
Fatal television
An episode of the 1970s television series The Goodies killed a man. He died laughing.
The Church of One Tree
The Church of One Tree in Santa Rosa, California, was built in 1873 out of a single giant redwood tree.
Invisible art
The French artist Yves Klein sold empty space – an invisible “zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility.” Buyers paid in gold, half of which Klein would throw into the Seine River.
Arecibo reply
In 1974 the Arecibo message was broadcast into space. In 2001 hoaxers made a reply “from aliens” in a field next to another observatory.
The universal catalogue
The Universal Decimal Classification aims to label all human knowledge, and it’s even more thorough than the Dewey Decimal system.
Highest unclimbed mountain
It is illegal to climb Gangkhar Puensum in Bhutan, so no-one has ever reached the top. It is the highest unclimbed mountain in the world.
For President: Convict No. 9653
Eugene Debs received more than 900,000 votes in the 1920 American presidential election – while in prison for sedition.
First computer chess cheat
In the 1993 World Open chess tournament, an unknown competitor drew a match against a grandmaster. He used a computer to cheat.
The doubters and the oracle bones
The Doubting Antiquity School were sceptics of ancient Chinese texts’ historical veracity… until the oracle bones were deciphered.
The rail zeppelin
Germany’s 1930 Schienenzeppelin was a propeller-driven train that could pull forty passengers at speeds faster than 200 kilometres per hour.
Wittgenstein’s propellers
The famed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an early pioneer of jet-engine propellers.
The curse of Colonel Sanders
The ghost of KFC’s Colonel Sanders has haunted a Japanese baseball team since 1985.
Monorail elephant
In 1950 Tuffi the elephant fell 12 metres out of a suspended monorail into a river. She survived.
Eight years on the Suez Canal
In 1967, fifteen ships and their crews were trapped on the Suez Canal because of the Six-Day War. The ships would remain there for the next eight years.
The sentinels and the missionary
In 2018 an American missionary travelled to North Sentinel Island in an attempt to bring Christianity to one of the last uncontacted peoples in the world. He did not return.