Music on hold was created by Alfred Levy, an inventor, factory owner, and entrepreneur. In 1962, Levy discovered a problem with the phone lines at his factory: a loose wire was touching a metal girder on the building. This made the building a giant receiver, so that the audio broadcast signal from a radio station next door would transmit through the loose wire, and could be heard when calls were put on hold. Levy patented his work in 1966. While other advancements have come to change and enhance the technology, it was this initial patent creation that began the evolution for today’s music on hold.
Hurricane Iniki is the most powerful hurricane to strike the U.S. state of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Islands in recorded history. Iniki hits the island of Kauai on September 11 at peak intensity. It had winds of 145 miles (235 km/h), and was a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.
Among those on Kauaʻi was filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who was preparing for the final day of on-location shooting of the movie Jurassic Park. He and his 130 cast and crew remained safely in a hotel during Iniki’s passage.
In 1924, a tunnel network was discovered under Washington DC.
While driving behind Pelham Courts in mid-September of 1924, a truck’s tires sank into the ground, revealing the entrance to a forgotten underground shaft. The manager and janitor of the building decided to explore, and called up some newspapermen to report.
Reports indicated that the tunnels were long and extensive—that they may have reached as far as Rock Creek Park. Some electric lighting was discovered inside. For days, wild theories abounded. Was it a Confederate soldier hideout? A stop on the Underground Railroad? A liquor depot for bootleggers? A counterfeiter’s lair? Or maybe a secret laboratory for “Dr. Otto von Golph’s” experiments?
None of the above.
The Smithsonian Institute’s mosquito-expert entomologist, Harrison G. Dyar, let the public spectacle go on for a couple of days before admitting to city newspapers that he himself had dug the tunnels from about 1906 until 1916, at which time he moved away to California. Why? “I did it for exercise,” he told the Washington Post, “Digging tunnels after work is my hobby. There’s nothing really mysterious about it.”
From afar, the leaves of the gympie-gympie (Dendrocnide moroides) look inconspicuous and even inviting judging from their soft and fuzzy appearance. But nothing could be further from the truth. This is one of the world’s most poisonous plants. A slight brush with its leaves is enough to deliver unimaginable pain that has been described as “like being burnt with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time.” To make matters worse, it can take months or, in some cases, even years before the pain completely goes away. Some have even killed themselves, finding the pain unbearable.
Medicines made from willow and other salicylate-rich plants appear in clay tablets from ancient Sumer as well as the Ebers Papyrus from ancient Egypt. Hippocrates referred to the use of salicylic tea to reduce fevers around 400 BC, and willow bark preparations were part of the pharmacopoeia of Western medicine in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Willow bark extract became recognized for its specific effects on fever, pain, and inflammation in the mid-eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, pharmacists were experimenting with and prescribing a variety of chemicals related to salicylic acid, the active component of willow extract.
In 1853, chemist Charles Frédéric Gerhardt treated sodium salicylate with acetyl chloride to produce acetylsalicylic acid for the first time; in the second half of the 19th century, other academic chemists established the compound’s chemical structure and devised more efficient methods of synthesis. In 1897, scientists at the drug and dye firm Bayer began investigating acetylsalicylic acid as a less-irritating replacement for standard common salicylate medicines, and identified a new way to synthesize it. By 1899, Bayer had dubbed this drug Aspirin and was selling it globally.
The Elephant Man was a critical and commercial success with eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor. After receiving widespread criticism for failing to honor the film’s make-up effects, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was prompted to create the Academy Award for Best Makeup the following year.
Some LED bulbs can interfere with a garage door opener’s radio signals. Often the problem is compounded because the jamming signal is amplified by the wiring.
KURUHIMBI IS ONE OF KIGALI’S most popular bars, and it doesn’t serve a drop of liquor. Instead, milk is on tap. Located in the city’s Kimisagara neighborhood, on a dirt road just a few minutes away from a bustling market, Kuruhimbi is a milk bar and Rwandan stalwart. Despite its popularity, Kuruhimbi is one of the last of its kind: With the growth of Inyange Milk Zone, a corporate milk bar chain, local milk bars are becoming relics of the country’s past.
Between 1867 and 1974, various cities of the United States had unsightly beggar ordinances, in retrospect also dubbed ugly laws. These laws targeted poor people and disabled people. For instance, in San Francisco a law of 1867 deemed it illegal for “any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.” Exceptions to public exposure were acceptable only if the people were subjects of demonstration, to illustrate the separation of disabled from nondisabled and their need for reformation.
Keepers at Colchester Zoo have been encouraging their flamingos to breed by using mirrors.
The birds have been tricked into thinking their flock is larger than it actually is as this helps them to nest and eventually lay eggs.
The zoo’s 15 Chilean flamingos have now started to build their own nests.
“Even if we don’t get eggs this year, it’s taken us a step in the right direction,” the zoo’s curator Sarah Forsythe told BBC Essex.
Like many birds, flamingos do not breed very well in small flocks and the illusion of a larger group means there could soon be flamingo chicks at the zoo for the first time.
Staff were surprised at just how quickly the full-length mirrors began to take effect, as the birds started to build their own nests and show courting behaviour within a week.
In every graduating class someone has to finish last. At West Point Military Academy that person has long been known as “the Goat..” In our own version of “Where Are They Now?” we interviewed James S. Robbins, author of “Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point” (Encounter Books) about the implications of being ranked dead last at West Point. The irony? Some of the Academy’s least distinguished cadets developed into the most famous and remarkable figures in American military history.
The name Wi-Fi, commercially used at least as early as August 1999, was coined by the brand-consulting firm Interbrand. The Wi-Fi Alliance had hired Interbrand to create a name that was “a little catchier than ‘IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence’.” Phil Belanger, a founding member of the Wi-Fi Alliance, has stated that the term Wi-Fi was chosen from a list of ten potential names invented by Interbrand.
The name Wi-Fi has no further meaning, and was never officially a shortened form of “Wireless Fidelity”. Nevertheless, the Wi-Fi Alliance used the advertising slogan “The Standard for Wireless Fidelity” for a short time after the brand name was created, and the Wi-Fi Alliance was also called the “Wireless Fidelity Alliance Inc” in some publications. The name is often written as WiFi, Wifi, or wifi, but these are not approved by the Wi-Fi Alliance. IEEE is a separate, but related, organization and their website has stated “WiFi is a short name for Wireless Fidelity”.
Wrap rage, also called package rage, is the common name for heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open packaging, particularly some heat-sealed plastic blister packs and clamshells.
The 1956 B-47 disappearance occurred on 10 March 1956 over the Mediterranean Sea.
A Boeing B-47 Stratojet, call-sign Inkspot 59, took off from MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, in the United States for a non-stop flight to Ben Guerir Air Base, Morocco, and completed the first of two planned aerial refuelings without incident.
After descending through solid cloud cover to begin the second refueling at 14,000 feet (4,300 m), B-47E serial number 52-0534, failed to make contact with its tanker.
The unarmed aircraft was transporting two different capsules of nuclear weapons material in carrying cases; a nuclear detonation was not possible.
Despite an extensive search, no debris or bodies were ever found, and the crash site has never been located. The crew was declared dead.
As the possibility of extinction became more widely established in the sciences, so did the prospect of human extinction. Beyond science, human extinction was explored in literature. The Romantic authors and poets were particularly interested in the topic. The first time the concept of human extinction was explored in literature in 1816, “The Year Without Summer.” Lord Byron wrote about the extinction of life on earth in his 1816 poem ‘Darkness’, and in 1824 envisaged humanity being threatened by a comet impact, and employing a missile system to defend against it. Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man is set in a world where humanity has been nearly destroyed by a mysterious plague.
On 10 November 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, then the managing director of the Guinness Breweries, went on a shooting party in the North Slob, by the River Slaney in County Wexford, Ireland. After missing a shot at a golden plover, he became involved in an argument over which was the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover or the red grouse – it is the plover. That evening at Castlebridge House, he realised that it was impossible to confirm in reference books whether or not the golden plover was Europe’s fastest game bird. Beaver knew that there must have been numerous other questions debated nightly in pubs throughout Ireland and abroad, but there was no book in the world with which to settle arguments about records. He realised then that a book supplying the answers to this sort of question might prove successful.
Beaver’s idea became reality when Guinness employee Christopher Chataway recommended university friends Norris and Ross McWhirter, who had been running a fact-finding agency in London. The twin brothers were commissioned to compile what became The Guinness Book of (Superlatives and now) Records, in August 1954. A thousand copies were printed and given away.
“Cinderella”, or “The Little Glass Slipper”, is a folk tale with thousands of variants throughout the world. The protagonist is a young woman living in forsaken circumstances that are suddenly changed to remarkable fortune, with her ascension to the throne via marriage. The story of Rhodopis, recounted by the Greek geographer Strabo sometime between around 7 BC and AD 23, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, is usually considered to be the earliest known variant of the Cinderella story.
The gladiatrix (plural gladiatrices) is the female equivalent of the gladiator of ancient Rome. Like their male counterparts, gladiatrices fought each other, or wild animals, to entertain audiences at various games and festivals. Very little is known about them. They seem to have used much the same equipment as male gladiators, but were heavily outnumbered by them, and were almost certainly considered an exotic rarity by their audiences. They seem to have been introduced during the very late republic and early empire, and were officially banned as unseemly from 200 AD onwards. Their existence is known only through a few accounts written by members of Rome’s elite, and a very small number of inscriptions.
In 1902, the fastest automobile in the world was electric. At Staten Island, New York, Walter Baker’s Electric Torpedo achieved the miraculous speed of 100 mph.
Ahmed, a 41-year-old Egyptian, has broken the record for the deepest SCUBA dive, plunging an astonishing 332.35 m (1,090 ft 4.5 in) in the Red Sea off the coast of Dahab, Egypt.
When the day finally came, Ahmed needed approximately 12 minutes to reach his record depth, which was measured with a specially tagged rope that accompanied him. But, to ensure safe passage back to the surface, it required nearly 15 hours to have Ahmed return back for air after breaking the record, due to the various risks of the water pressure at such depths.
If you look at many of Hanna-Barbera’s most popular characters – Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear and Scooby Doo – you will see that they wear a necktie or have a prominent collar.
Because of what we were doing, the entire business came back to work Joseph Barbera This meant that the body could remain static when the character was speaking, and the artists would only have to re-draw the character’s face in each frame.
As a result of cost-cutting measures like these, the company reduced the number of separate drawings required for a seven-minute cartoon from 14,000 to nearly 2,000.
Why did we ever force doctors to learn their profession in this exhausting, sleepless way? The answer originates with the esteemed physician William Stewart Halsted, MD.
Halsted founded the surgical training program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in May 1889. As chief of the Department of Surgery, his influence was considerable, and his beliefs about how young doctors must apply themselves to medicine, formidable. The term “residency” came from Halsted’s belief that doctors must live in the hospital for much of their training, allowing them to be truly committed in their learning of surgical skills and medical knowledge.
Halsted’s mentality was difficult to argue with, since he himself practiced what he preached, being renowned for a seemingly superhuman ability to stay awake for apparently days on end without any fatigue. But Halsted had a dirty secret that only came to light years after his death, and helped explain both the maniacal structure of his residency program and his ability to forgo sleep. Halsted was a cocaine addict.
Alice Ball, the first African-American master’s graduate from the University of Hawaii, used her passion for chemistry to develop an injectable oil extract for leprosy. A century ago, leprosy, otherwise known as Hansen’s disease, was not as rare as it is now. The ailment that changes from skin lesions to disfigurements could gradually kill. Lepers at the time were quarantined and had to announce their presence using bells so people could avoid them. By the early 20th century, treatments began evolving for the disease. Chaulmoogra oil, a substance from the seeds of a tropical evergreen tree, was being used to treat patients but produced inconsistent results and had side effects.
Chemist Ball came to their aid. She began investigating the chemical properties of chaulmoogra oil, where she managed to isolate the effective ingredients. This resulted in the creation of a new regimen of injection-based medicine that stayed in use for the treatment of the disease for more than two decades.
Sadly, Ball never got to see the results of her work as she died in 1916, aged 24, shortly after making her discovery and before she could publish her findings. After her death, Arthur Dean, the chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Hawaii, began using Ball’s research work and discovery. He eventually claimed ownership of the work and never credited Ball. In 1922, Dr. Harry T. Hollmann, the assistant surgeon at Kalihi Hospital who had mentored Ball and encouraged her to explore chaulmoogra oil, published a research paper giving Ball the proper credit she deserved for her discovery, calling it ‘The Ball Method’, which became the most effective way of treating Hansen’s disease. It was also almost 90 years after Ball’s death that the University of Hawaii officially recognized Balls’ contributions and declared February 29 as “Alice Ball Day.”
After Michael Jackson’s death in 2009, Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor took steps to secure all three Mercury/Jackson duets, with a view to releasing them in 2012. However, Taylor likened dealing with the Michael Jackson Estate to “wading through glue”. Eventually, the parties agreed for “There Must Be More to Life Than This” alone to be released. “I was very pleased we had three new tracks to put on Queen Forever,” said Taylor. “As well as the Michael Jackson track ‘There Must Be More to Life than This’, there is another song Freddie did with him, called ‘State of Shock’, with a massive rock sound. But we could only have one track with Michael, which is a great shame.”
A contributing factor to the delay from the time it was recorded was Mercury’s frustration over Jackson’s insistence that his pet llama be allowed to attend recording sessions. According to manager Jim Beach Freddie told him “Can you get me out of here. I’m recording with a llama.” Michael wasn’t keen on Freddie’s recreational drug use during their recording sessions. Mercury returned to London soon after and the track remained unfinished.
William Powell Lear (June 26, 1902 – May 14, 1978) was an American inventor and businessman. He is best known for founding the Lear Jet Corporation, a manufacturer of business jets. He also invented the battery eliminator for the B battery, and developed the 8-track cartridge, an audio tape system. Throughout his career of 46 years, Lear received over 120 patents.
Before 1949, U.S. airlines didn’t serve alcohol in flight, writes Rust in Flying Across America: The Airline Passenger Experience. But when a few airlines eventually decided to serve alcohol, that didn’t mean it was easy to do so. Because of conflicting state liquor laws, drinks could be served only over certain states. The New York Times reported in 1950 that on a flight leaving New York for the West Coast, passengers could drink over New Jersey, but not over Pennsylvania, a no-sale state. On Northwest Airlines’ two-deck Stratocruisers, bar attendants were given a chart of state liquor sale restrictions. “The chart lists the states along the route, and for each state gives prohibited hours, prohibited days and restrictions to persons served,” the article reports. “The attendant judges from landmarks, his own watch or advice from pilots whether—and to whom—he can serve drinks.” (That includes refusing drinks to “spendthrifts” when flying over South Dakota, for some reason.) The attendant also knew that drinks couldn’t be served on Sundays, election days, certain other holidays, and specific hours in some states.
On March 17, 1970 The Grateful Dead performed in Buffalo with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra at Kleinhans Music Hall.
“It was a very different one-of-a-kind show in the Dead’s history,” said Kate Jenkins of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.
Mixing a rock band with an orchestra almost never happened some 47 years ago, but Music Director at the time, Lukas Foss decided to take a chance on the Dead. This concert though may as well be dead to Grateful Dead fans. While there’s a tape of almost all Dead performances, this one, from Buffalo went undocumented.
“Even though almost every single Grateful Dead show in history has some kind of tape, this one is like the great white whale, nobody has seen it, and everybody wants to,” said Grateful Dead fan Michael Caputo.
Caputo is offering a $500.00 reward for anyone who can come up with the mysterious, and possible nonexistent recording of this concert. Other organizations and people have matched his offer, and now the reward is up to $1,200.
During construction of the Memorial Stadium at the University of Illinois, torrential rains caused a bulldozer to sink into the mud of what is now Zuppke Field. Being too expensive to remove, the bulldozer remains buried beneath the field to this day.
A rather unusual and decidedly British ceremony takes place each year in late October. The City of London pays rent to the Crown for two pieces of land, even though it no longer knows their exact locations! For the first piece of land, somewhere in Shropshire, the City pays two knives, one blunt and one sharp. For the second piece of land, 6 giant horseshoes and 61 nails are handed over.
The Ceremony of Quit Rents is the oldest legal ceremony in England, apart from the Coronation, and usually takes place between St Michael’s Day (October 11) and St Martin’s (November 11) every year in the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London.
One-armed versus one-legged is a form of cricket in which one team has cricketers with only one arm while the members of the other team only have one leg.
Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began in 1913, an Ohio couple named Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived just a few miles away in Batavia. According to Lynch, Baby James was just shy of the 11-pound weight limit for packages sent via Parcel Post, and his “delivery” cost his parents only 15 cents in postage (although they did insure him for $50). The quirky story soon made newspapers, and for the next several years, similar stories would occasionally surface as other parents followed suit.
Moose milk, also known as elk milk, refers to milk produced by moose (Alces alces). Though it is most commonly consumed by moose calves, its production has also been commercialised in Russia, Sweden and Canada.
The Middle Ages are thought to be an age of wizards and magic. Medieval stories are filled with men like Merlin or saints who could perform incredible deeds. However, even medieval people liked the simpler magical tricks – how to make an apple roll around by itself; a dead fish to jump out of the frying pan; turn a white rose into a red one; or have a candle where the flame could not be blown out.
A few books from the Middle Ages can tell us more about these magic tricks, such as the Secretum philosophorum, which was written by anonymous author at the beginning of the fourteenth-century. At the beginning it explains “there are contained in it certain secrets which, by vulgar opinion, are impossible, but which philosophers consider to be necessary and secrets. Now, contained in this book are the secrets of all the arts.”
While the Secretum philosophorum might sound to be very mysterious, a modern reader might find it to be more a medieval version of The Dangerous Book for Boys – it contains all sorts of fun stuff, like how to make different colours of ink, riddles, and creating scientific experiments like how to make a soap bubble. The anonymous author even creates simple simple cyphers for to disguise a few words, so that his reader will have to figure it out.
The universal nut sheller (UNS; formerly called the Malian peanut sheller) is a simple hand-operated machine capable of shelling up to 57 kilograms (126 lb) of raw, sun-dried peanuts per hour.
The Universal Nut sheller in Uganda, 2005 It requires less than $10 USD in materials to make, and is made of concrete poured into two simple fibreglass molds, some metal parts, one wrench, and any piece of rock or wood that can serve as a hammer. It accepts a wide range of nut sizes without adjustment. Operators can make necessary adjustments quickly and easily. It is estimated that one Universal Nut Sheller will serve the needs of a village of 2,000 people. The life expectancy of the machine is around 25 years.
The Full Belly Project is working to establish local, sustainable businesses that manufacture and distribute appropriate technologies such as the Universal Nut Sheller.
For the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1892, following a lynching in New Orleans where a mob had murdered 11 Italian immigrants, President Benjamin Harrison declared Columbus Day as a one-time national celebration. The proclamation was part of a wider effort after the lynching incident to placate Italian Americans and ease diplomatic tensions with Italy. During the anniversary in 1892, teachers, preachers, poets and politicians used rituals to teach ideals of patriotism. These rituals took themes such as citizenship boundaries, the importance of loyalty to the nation, and the celebration of social progress, included among them was the Pledge of Allegiance by Francis Bellamy.
In 1997, someone speared a massive pumpkin on the spire atop of Cornell’s McGraw Tower … 173 feet in the air.
No one knew who. No one knew why. And no one knew how.
In fact, for a while, no one even knew — for sure — if it was a pumpkin. Suspicions grew as the gourd lingered on, month after month. But some students figured that one out with the help of a drill attached to a remote-controlled weather balloon, which captured a sample. (Seriously.)
It was definitely a pumpkin.
But the other mysteries remain today. And Farhad Manjoo — Cornell alum, former editor-in-chief of the school paper and now a tech reporter at the New York Times — wants answers.
Thylacoleo (“pouch lion”) is an extinct genus of carnivorous marsupials that lived in Australia from the late Pliocene to the late Pleistocene (2 million to 46 thousand years ago). Some of these marsupial lions were the largest mammalian predators in Australia of their time, with Thylacoleo carnifex approaching the weight of a lioness. The estimated average weight for the species ranges from 101 to 130 kg (223 to 287 lb).
A sluggard waker was an 18th-century job undertaken by a parishioner (usually the parish clerk), in British churches. The sole task of the sluggard waker was to watch the congregation during the services and tap anyone who appeared to be falling asleep sharply on the head. The actual tapping was not done by hand, nor was it done particularly gently or subtly. The sticks (or wands) used to do the tapping were usually long straight poles of stout local woods, and were sometimes tipped with either brass knobs, forks (both added and natural in the wood), or fox tails. In some regions of England there was a clear definition of which tips were for what purpose, sometimes to the extent of the stick having two ends. A brass tip or fork would usually be used for waking the men, while the fox tail was used for waking the female congregants.
Eddie Van Halen is listed as an inventor of several patents including U.S. Patent No. 4,656,917 that is directed to a stabilizing support for a musical instrument.
The majority of adult professional players shoot free throws in the overhand style, despite both theoretical and practical demonstrations that the underhand style (aka “granny-style”) usually produces better average results.
Anchorage, Alaska is almost equidistant from New York City, Tokyo, and Frankfurt, Germany (via the polar route), Anchorage lies within 10 hours by air of nearly 90% of the industrialized world.
Harry Myers was driving down West Third Street in Dayton, when he was pulled over for hastily driving at an alarming speed of 12 miles per hour. He was issued the first paper speeding ticket on the spot in 1904.
In 1967, University of Colorado students decided to name their new dining hall after Colorado’s most famous cannibal, Alferd Packer, coining the slogan, “Have a friend for lunch!”
Statistics suggest that up to 78% of NFL players go bankrupt or fall into severe financial stress within just two years of retirement. For basketball players, the figures are only slightly better at 60% of financial ruin within five years of retirement.
Up until the 1966 World Cup, soccer balls were a bland color that was simply the natural color of the leather. Not very telegenic. But as matches increasingly became televised, the telegenic problem was solved in 1970 by Adidas with the advent of a high-contrast black and white design called the Telstar (Television Star).
First used in the 1970 World Cup, this design was chosen specifically so spectators watching black-and-white televisions could clearly see the ball, with the black accents on a white background revealing the ball’s direction of spin. The pentagons-on-hexagons pattern of 32 panels, called an icosahedron by math geeks, would remain part of the design for many years.
According to CBC, the original prototype for Smarties (or Rockets) wasn’t invented in the U.S. The candy was first developed in England but was flavored using imported spices like cinnamon and clove. And they were developed utilizing old gunpowder pellet machines, repurposed for candy making after World War I. As it turns out, it was possible to make candy by compressing the Smarties ingredients the same way gunpowder was compressed.
