First fatal plane crash
Thomas Selfridge was a passenger in one of the Wright brothers’ early planes when it crashed in 1908; he was the first person to die in a plane crash.
Category: Sciences
The rock-paper-scissors lizard
Side-blotched lizards cycle through three different colour patterns and behaviours in an evolutionary game of rock-paper-scissors.
Coney Island to the moon
One of the earliest amusement park dark rides was a trip from Coney Island to the Moon and back.
Mystery watch
The 19th century mystery watch was a genuine engineering puzzle: a pocket watch whose face was entirely transparent.
Longest half-life
Bismuth-209 is radioactive, decaying like any other unstable atom over time and emitting radiation as it goes. But its rate of alpha decay is slower than any other.
Accidental drums
Gated reverb drums, one of the core sounds of 1980s rock music and most famously played in Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” were the result of an accident in the recording studio.
Akan goldweights
From the 15th to the 19th century CE, the Akan used sets of ornate statues as a measurement system for weighing gold dust, but also encoding and reinforcing cultural knowledge at the same time.
Infinity and beyond
The set of natural numbers is infinite: 1, 2, 3…. The set of real numbers is also infinite: 0.1, 0.11, 0.12, 0.2… but it’s larger than the infinity of natural numbers. Georg Cantor devised an elegant argument to prove these different infinities.
Bump keys
A bump key can be used to open most standard pin tumbler locks.
The Phenol conspiracy
In World War I, phenol was a key ingredient in aspirin, explosives, and phonograph records. German agents secretly redirected Thomas Edison’s excess phenol supply to prevent it being used for British bombs.
Secret volcano
In 1943 a new volcano arose in Hokkaido. The Japanese government managed to keep it a secret for several years.
Oldest satellite
Sputnik 1 orbited the Earth for three months; Sputnik 2 for nearly six months. Explorer 1 stayed in orbit for twelve years, but the fourth artificial satellite, Vanguard 1, is still flying today.
Singing sand dunes
In a few places around the world sand dunes make a sound like a sad tuba when you walk on them.
First vanishing point
Masaccio’s Holy Trinity is possibly the earliest surviving work of art to use a single vanishing point. His work and that of Brunelleschi triggered a Renaissance explosion of mathematical perspective in art.
First vanishing point
Masaccio’s Holy Trinity is possibly the earliest surviving work of art to use a single vanishing point. His work and that of Brunelleschi triggered a Renaissance explosion of mathematical perspective in art.
Hard is easy and easy is hard
Why can computers play chess or Go better than any human but struggle with walking or seeing? This is Moravec’s paradox.
The Generalist Academy 