Before the entire palette of modern mathematical notation existed, Johannes Kepler relied on musical notation to describe the planets’ rotation around the sun in his Harmonies of the World, published in 1619. The plus and minus signs were introduced in print in 1489 by Johann Widman, and the equal sign in 1557 by Robert Recorde, but the multiplication sign (×) was not introduced until 1631, by William Oughtred; modern exponential notation in 1637, by René Descartes; and the obelus (÷) to indicate division in 1659, by Johann Rahn.
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The first Olympic champion on record, Coroebus, was a cook. He won the sprint in 776 BC.
The Chinese Communist Party requires that all published books be assigned a “book number” by the government; between 2003 and 2004 the General Administration of Press and Publication banned around fifty periodicals and dictionaries for using registration numbers illegally obtained from other books. In January 2004 the People’s Daily reported that two men had been sentenced to seven and nine years in prison by a court in Anhui Province for “unlawful operation of a business.” The men had published a book of love poetry using fraudulent book numbers.
Phia Rilke’s infant daughter had died a year before she gave birth to her son. She named him René Maria—sometimes referring to him as Fräulein, Margaret, and Sophie—and gave him dolls to play with, dressing him as a girl until he was six years old. The poet did not start using Rainer instead of René until he was in his twenties.
George Romero, who pioneered the modern zombie film in 1968, complained in 2010 that he’d “never had a zombie eat a brain, but it’s become this landmark thing.” The trope was introduced in 1985 by Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, in which a zombie woman explains that eating brains relieves the “pain of being dead.” Some fans have speculated this is due to the brain’s high levels of serotonin.
“Swallowing sunshine is not at all difficult, and it works miracles of power, but some people are too lazy to do it,” wrote Unitarian Universalist clergyman Alden Eugene Bartlett in a 1918 guide to happiness. He advised, however, against swallowing too quickly. “If you have only been existing, half-dead,” he warned, “you will purify your blood so fast it will make you dizzy.”
At the end of his American lecture tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde was given money by a young man who claimed to be the son of a Wall Street banker and who invited him to then play in a game of dice. Wilde ended up losing over $1,000, writing three checks to cover the expense. “I’ve just made a damned fool of myself,” Wilde later confessed to a police captain, having stopped payment of the checks. From a series of mug shots, Wilde identified the swindler: it was notorious banco scammer Hungry Joe Lewis.
François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand complained late in life that he was going deaf. When someone mentioned the malady to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, he remarked, “He only thinks he is deaf because he can no longer hear anyone talking about him.”
Members inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010 included Yvonne Brill, whose electrothermal hydrazine thruster keeps satellites in space orbit, as well as Arthur Fry and Steven Silver, who created sticky notes (Fry, the concept; Silver, the glue). “Note: It took one woman to invent a rocket thruster,” wrote a Washington Post reporter about the induction ceremony, “and two men to invent Post-its.”
Between 1959 and 1962 in China, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward increased industrial growth at the expense of agricultural output. More than 45 million people perished from famine and disease, as well as from floods, droughts, and locusts.
William Petty’s device for “double writing” made it possible, he claimed, that “any man, even at the first sight and handling, may write two resembling copies of the same thing at once.” Petty wrote one of the first-known English claims for patent rights, in his 1648 “Brief Declaration Concerning Double Writing.” “Should I have given it away for nothing?” he asked. “The thing...would have been condemned as of no use, because of no price.”
It’s considered bad luck in parts of Mississippi for mourners to call a coffin pretty.
Breaking the necks of pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens while the gendarme went for a glass of wine was supposedly how Ernest Hemingway on occasion fed his family in Paris in the 1920s. He hid the bodies in his son Bumby’s stroller. Sometimes when he went without, the novelist studied the paintings by Paul Cézanne, which “looked more beautiful if you were belly empty, hollow hungry.”
To promote malingering and desertion among German soldiers during World War II, the British Political Warfare Executive and Special Operations Executive produced innocuously titled German-language booklets, among them Exercise Protocol for War Marines, into which they inserted information on how to feign illness and escape service. The British then circulated such propaganda using various special-ops agents and balloon drops across Europe.
In 1967 Bobby and Ethel Kennedy participated in the tenth annual Hudson River Whitewater Derby. Bobby’s kayak capsized in the freezing water; he was hurtled down the rapids. The next day Ethel attempted the course, accompanied by a ski expert and a mountain guide; the trio’s canoe tipped over three times. “A rescue party’s been sent up the river to get Mrs. Kennedy, who is on a rock,” an announcer told those waiting at the finish. “She’s having a bad day.”