July 5, 1766. At eight o’clock in the evening, a man who had laid a wager to cross the Thames in a butcher’s tray, set out in the same from Somerset Stairs, and reached the Surrey shore with great ease, using nothing but his hands. He had on a cork jacket, in case of any accident. It was said 1400l. was depending on this affair; and upwards of seventy boats full of spectators were present.
— Annual Register, 1766
On March 23, 1989, a 1,000-foot asteroid missed the Earth by 400,000 miles.
If it had passed 6 hours earlier it would have struck us, creating the largest explosion in recorded history.
42 = 24
In December 1974, Australian police arrested a man they believed was Lord Lucan, a British peer who had fled a murder investigation in London.
They were mistaken. It wasn’t Lord Lucan — it was British MP John Stonehouse, who had faked his suicide a month earlier.
If you’re the trusting sort, you might be pleased to carry this recommendation from Cardinal Richelieu to the French ambassador at Rome.
You wouldn’t last long, though. Rather than scan each line straight across, the ambassador would fold the page in half and read the truth about you in the left column.
(From Charles Bombaugh, Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1860)
On March 23, 1944, RAF tail gunner Nick Alkemade was over Berlin when a Luftwaffe attack set his bomber ablaze.
His parachute was in the flaming cabin, so he resigned himself to a quick death and jumped without it.
Alkemade fell head down for 18,000 feet, trying to relax and thinking of death. But after the impact he found himself looking up at the stars through a canopy of pines. The trees and snow had apparently slowed his fall, and he escaped with only a sprained leg.
The Gestapo refused to believe his story until they found his burned parachute at the crash site.
A stranger called at a shoe store and bought a pair of boots costing six dollars, in payment for which he tendered a twenty-dollar bill. The shoemaker could not change the note and accordingly sent his boy across the street to a tailor’s shop and procured small bills for it, from which he gave the customer his change of fourteen dollars. The stranger then disappeared, when it was discovered that the twenty-dollar note was counterfeit, and of course the shoemaker had to make it good to the tailor. Now the question is, how much did the shoemaker lose?
— H.E. Licks, Recreations in Mathematics, 1917
infandous
adj. too horrible to mention
In December 1976, the television program The Six Million Dollar Man was shooting an episode at California’s Long Beach Pike amusement park when a crew member discovered a wax dummy hanging in a funhouse gallows. When he tried to move it, its arm broke off — it wasn’t a dummy, but in fact a mummified human body. Stranger still, its mouth contained a 1924 penny and a ticket from the Museum of Crime in Los Angeles.
After much investigation, it turned out to be the body of Elmer McCurdy, an inept outlaw who had been killed in an Oklahoma gunfight in 1911. When no one claimed his body, an unscrupulous undertaker had embalmed it and charged a nickel to see “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up,” and for 60 years thereafter McCurdy’s corpse was traded among wax museums, carnivals, and haunted houses.
Elmer was finally buried, fittingly, in the Boot Hill section of Oklahoma’s Summit View Cemetery under two cubic yards of concrete. Ironically, his last words had been “You’ll never take me alive!”
It is said that, when Charles Dudley Warner was the editor of the ‘Hartford Press,’ back in the ‘sixties,’ arousing the patriotism of the State with his vigorous appeals, one of the type-setters came in from the composing-room, and, planting himself before the editor, said: ‘Well, Mr. Warner, I’ve decided to enlist in the army.’ With mingled sensations of pride and responsibility, Mr. Warner replied encouragingly that he was glad to see the man felt the call of duty. ‘Oh, it isn’t that,’ said the truthful compositor, ‘but I’d rather be shot than try to set any more of your damned copy.’
— John Wilson, “The Importance of the Proof-Reader,” 1901
