Gotham origin story
Batman lives in Gotham City. Where did the name come from? Its history follows a circuitous route via the 19th century equivalent of Mad magazine, smart idiots who hated public infrastructure, goats, and Robin Hood’s King John.
Category: History
Tongan wood king
For three years in the middle of the 12th century, the Tu’i Tonga Empire was ruled by a piece of wood.
Rooster egg
A tiny yolkless egg shows up in your henhouse. Today, we know this to be a chicken’s first training egg. In the 12th century? It came from a rooster, and you better throw it over your house or it will be born a monster.
Death by robot
January 25, 1979: the day that the robot uprising began. Well, not precisely, but that day saw the first human fatality caused by a robot. It would not be the last.
Macaroni hipster
“Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni.” What does that even mean? As it turns out, a macaroni was an 18th century hipster.
Roving bridge
Horse-drawn canal boats made up the early British Industrial Revolution’s transportation network. But they presented a tough problem: how to get a horse from one bank of a canal to another, without disconnecting the rope?
The origin of crops
In 1924 Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian / Soviet scientist, identified the geographic regions where crops were first domesticated: the Vavilov Centres of Diversity.
Horses vs. ships
In the long history of war, there are almost no conflicts between cavalry and navy. But in 1795, there was. And the cavalry won.
Dictator numerology money
General Ne Win, the dictatorial leader of Burma, was a fan of numerology. This meant that he had a penchant for creating new currency in interesting denominations – and making the old banknotes worthless.
One hundred
It’s my 100th post! Read on for a grab-bag of 100-related topics, including the death of the last apostle, the 100th asteroid, 100-handed gods, and the Germanic “long” hundred.
Granny vs. Nixon
June Foray was the voice of Granny (the owner of Tweety Bird) in the Looney Tunes cartoons, Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Magica De Spell in Duck Tales. And she was also on Richard Nixon’s Enemies List.
The ancients and the moderns
Is modern thought more advanced than the Greeks and Romans? Most people fall on the side of “duh, of course,” but in 16th century France the debate between the Ancients and the Moderns was fierce.
Rocket cat
In the early 17th century, the German artillery master Franz Helm suggested attaching a bomb to the back of a cat, in the hope that it would run into a fortified town and set it on fire. This sounds like a terrible idea.
Music at the end of time
Olivier Messiaen was one of the most prominent classical composers of the 20th century, and his most famous work – the Quartet for the End of Time – was first performed in a POW camp in Germany.
Green Sahara
For a period of about four thousand years, during the Neolithic Subpluvial, the Sahara was green. Rivers, lakes, trees, savanna, and pre-historic societies flourished in this wet period.
The second eradicated disease
Most people know that smallpox was the first disease that we have completely eradicated in the wild. But what was the second, and what does it have to do with Egyptian plagues, measles, and cattle?
The Generalist Academy 