King vs. monkey
Alexander, the unlucky puppet king of Greece, was killed by a monkey bite and medical incompetence in 1920.
Category: Europe
Fatal television
An episode of the 1970s television series The Goodies killed a man. He died laughing.
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 houses have eyes
The houses in the Transylvanian city Sibiu are watching you.
The universal catalogue
The Universal Decimal Classification aims to label all human knowledge, and it’s even more thorough than the Dewey Decimal system.
Rachmaninoff’s All by Myself
The Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has a songwriter credit for the power ballad “All by Myself.”
Human alarm clock
How did people wake up in the morning before alarm clocks? They paid to get knocked up.
Long mile
The Scandinavian mile is 10 kilometres long. It used to be longer still.
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.
Transylvanian school of witchcraft and wizardry
The 19th century Scottish author Emily Gerard collected local legends about a school of black magic high in the mountains of Transylvania.
Grace from slavery
John Newton was a press-ganged sailor, a slave, a slave-ship captain, an Anglican priest, an abolitionist, and the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace.”
Chaos on Berners Street
Georgian London’s most famous prankster once summoned thousands of officials and tradespeople to the house of an unsuspecting victim.
Prehistoric tracks
The Sweet Track in Somerset, Britain, was built exactly 5,828 years ago.
Mozart’s missing movement
Mozart’s famous piece Ein kleine Nachtmusik has four movements – but in his personal catalogue, Mozart recorded five.
The Generalist Academy 