In 1387 the physicians to Charles II of Navarre, in order to treat his illness, soaked his sheets in aqua vitae, a distilled wine, and wrapped him in them to enhance the curative power that the liquid was supposed to possess. The sheets were then sewn shut by a maid, who, instead of cutting the final bit of string, set a candle to it. The alcohol-soaked king went up in a blaze and the maid ran away, leaving him to burn to death.
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A hen near Leeds, England, caused a panic in 1806 when she began laying eggs inscribed with the words Christ is Coming. Terror of Judgment Day swept the population until it was observed that the hen’s owner, Mary Bateman, who had been charging a penny per visitor, was writing the message on eggs and forcibly reinserting them into the hen to be laid again.
During a battle with Scythians in Macedonia on April 29, 1091, Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus noted the midday sun “shedding its rays,” reported his daughter Anna Comnena in the Alexiad. He dispatched local peasants to bring water in skins or jars to his troops, who “sipped a drop of water, then returned to the fray.” The newly hydrated Byzantines wiped out their enemies, and a chant began: “All because of one day the Scythians never saw May.”
According to a notoriously unreliable late Roman biography, the emperor Hadrian established special hours in the public baths for exclusive use by the ill. “If we assume that the report is not an invention of the author,” wrote historian Garrett G. Fagan, “it suggests that prior to Hadrian’s ruling, the sick and healthy had bathed simultaneously as a matter of course.”
When the British Petroleum oil rig Deepwater Horizon was forced to shut down temporarily because of a gas surge, one engineer tried to persuade his colleagues that a liner was required to secure the pipe. The proposal, which would have cost about $7 million, was rejected by management. “This has been a nightmare well which has everyone all over the place,” the engineer wrote to a colleague. Six days later, on April 20, 2010, the rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and spilled more than four million barrels of oil before it was capped almost three months later.
A fifteenth-century Tunisian sex manual relates that “a big beard denotes a small mind” and tells of a long-bearded man who reads a quote to this effect on the back of a book. Afraid of being seen as a fool, he tries to trim his beard by setting it on fire but burns it off entirely. He then writes on the book below the quote, “These words are entirely true. I, who am now writing this, have proved their truth.”
Statistician Stephen Stigler wrote in 1980, “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” He identified this as a basic law of eponymy, admitted he was an “outsider to the sociology of science” acting in “flagrant violation of the institutional norms of humility,” and named the law after himself.
After the Jacobites were defeated in 1746, a sympathizer named Flora Macdonald disguised Bonnie Prince Charlie as an Irish maid, smuggled him to her home on the Isle of Skye, and helped him escape to France. She then “took the sheets in which he had lain,” James Boswell later reported, “charged her daughter that they should be kept unwashed,” and asked to be buried in them as a shroud. She was.
In 1965 Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke discussed a film project, then called Journey Beyond the Stars. “Science-fiction films have always meant monsters or sex, so we have tried to find another term,” said Clarke. “The best we’ve been able to come up with is a space odyssey,” added Kubrick. “The far-flung islands Homer’s wonderful characters visited were no less remote to them than the planets our spacemen will soon be landing on are to us.”
The West’s first flushable indoor toilet was designed in 1596 by John Harington, the “saucy godson” of Queen Elizabeth. He published his findings as The Metamorphosis of Ajax, the title a pun on a jakes, slang for a lavatory. Harington was banished from court for the pamphlet but allowed back in 1598, when he installed a water closet in the queen’s Richmond palace.
In 1783 an English rector named John Michell wrote to the physicist Henry Cavendish of his belief in the possibility of “dark stars,” entities so dense and with such a strong gravitational pull that they could prevent light from escaping them and render them invisible. The Royal Society published his theory the following year, but it would be nearly two hundred years before the term black hole was used to refer to such a phenomenon.
Beaver fur can contain between 12,000 and 23,000 hairs per square centimeter, and it is particularly good for making thick, pliable, water-resistant felt. In 1733 the Hudson Bay Company valued one prime-quality beaver skin at the same worth as one brass kettle, two pounds of Brazilian tobacco, one gallon of brandy, or a pound and a half of gunpowder.
Nineteenth-century British penologist Matthew Davenport Hill, who believed justice to be debased by fees extracted throughout the legal process, often cited mock examination questions given by Cambridge professor Richard Porson. “What happens if you win your cause?” asks the first, to which the answer is “You are nearly ruined.” The second: “What happens if you lose your cause?” Answer: “You are quite ruined.”
In 2012 a revenue office in Uttar Pradesh received an official-looking notice addressed to the Hindu storm god Indra, ordering the deity to provide written justification for a drought caused by insufficient rain during that year’s monsoon season. “If the Lord fails to give a satisfactory explanation within the stipulated period,” the notice warned, “it will be presumed that he has nothing to say, and stern action will be taken.”
For a 2005 British TV program, a full-size replica of the House of Lords was built in order to determine what damage would have been done had Guy Fawkes ignited the explosives during the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Everyone in the House, including King James I, and anyone within about three hundred feet, would have died.