Committed to learning the principles of Latin grammar as a child in Mexico in the 1650s, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz recalled that she cut her hair very short, and if she had not “learned such and such a thing” by the time it grew out, she “would again cut it off as punishment for being so slow-witted.”
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“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.”
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.”
According to a biographer, Honoré de Balzac called out on his deathbed for Dr. Horace Bianchon, a fictional creation that appeared in thirty-one of his stories. “Send for Bianchon,” the novelist said to his attending physician.
“You don’t need a brain to sleep” was a central takeaway for a team of biologists who found that Cassiopea, a genus of upside-down jellyfish, display signs of sleep deprivation when disturbed by water pulses at twenty-minute intervals throughout the night.
Herodotus reports that after Cyrus the Great was warned by a Spartan herald not to tread further into Greek lands, the Persian king received a primer on Sparta, including an explanation of an agora, to inform his response. “I have never yet been afraid of any men,” he told the herald, “who have a set place in the middle of their city where they come together to cheat each other.”
In 1923 Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg declined painter Wassily Kandinsky’s offer to join the Bauhaus, having heard that other members of the school were anti-Semitic. “For I have at last learned the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year,” Schoenberg wrote to Kandinsky, “and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew.”
Wikipedia editing guidelines ask that page authors avoid including mission statements in entries. “These usually focus on platitudes rather than specifics,” the site warns. “In short, they rarely tell us anything useful.”
“Kings embodied the whole period of their reign,” wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power. “Their death, whether it came with the decline of their strength or, as later, coincided with their natural span of life, indicated a break in time. They were time. Between one king and the next, time stood still. There was a gap in it—an interregnum—which people sought to keep as short as possible.”
In 1956 psychologist George Miller published a paper that claimed the average number of objects a typical human can hold in short-term memory is seven (plus or minus two). “What about the magical number seven?” he wrote. “What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week?”
In 2014 surgeons in the U.S. performed at least 26,175 gynecomastia corrections—breast reductions—on male patients.
Joseph Smith and other Mormon church leaders drew up articles for the Kirtland Safety Society Bank to provide capital to the burgeoning economy of Kirtland, Ohio, in 1836. Unable to obtain a bank charter, they printed banknotes as the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company. The notes were used as tender. The bank failed during the Panic of 1837; holders of the notes were unable to recover their face value, and Smith then fled to Missouri to avoid arrest.
“The difference between us is very marked,” wrote Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman in 1868. “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night.”
Menstrual taboos persisted in nineteenth-century Europe. In the Rhine it was said that women on their periods turned fermenting wine to vinegar, in France that they were unable to whip up a successful batch of mayonnaise, in Britain that “women should not rub the legs of pork with the brine-pickle at the time they are menstruating, or the hams will go bad.”
At the start of the French Revolution, the physician Jean-Paul Marat began publishing an antimonarchical journal in which he called the king’s minister of finance “the cruelest adversary of freedom.” In 1790 the Marquis de Lafayette dispatched thousands of soldiers to arrest Marat, even stationing them on rooftops in case Marat, an aviation enthusiast, attempted to escape by balloon. While the legality of the warrant was being disputed, Marat wrote and published a pamphlet mocking these extravagant efforts before making a quiet escape.