During the oil boom of 1919, Wichita Falls, Texas, was desperate for office space, so investors jumped at developer J.D. McMahon’s offer to build a 480″ high rise downtown.
When the building turned out to be four stories tall, they double-checked the blueprints. McMahon had promised a building 480 inches tall, not 480 feet. And that’s what he’d delivered.
By that time he had decamped with the money.
In 1921 Charles Purdy worried that modern foods require too little chewing, resulting in “decayed teeth, undeveloped jaws, and various other complications due solely to the lack of exercise attendant on proper mastication.”
The answer, he decided, was a bite plate that can be attached to the wall by a spring. “By movements of the head, the device will receive a series of short jerks or impulses which will be transmitted to the teeth in order to produce a strain thereon, which strain serves to give the several organs of the mouth and head a proper exercise to maintain the necessary circulation therein.”
When used in tandem, as shown, this has all the makings of a romantic candlelight interlude as the exercisers “pull in opposite directions similar to the so-called ‘tug-of-war.'” What did this sound like?
When Long Island filmmaker Ellen Cooperman divorced her husband in 1975, she changed her last name to Cooperperson because it “more properly reflects [my] sense of human equality than does the name Cooperman.”
State Supreme Court Justice John Scileppi refused to ratify the change, saying that it “would have serious and undesirable repercussions, perhaps throughout the entire country.” He cited “virtually endless and increasingly inane” possibilities: A person named “Jackson” might seek to become “Jackchild,” a “Manning” might prefer “Peopling,” or a woman named “Carmen” might want to be “Carperson.” “This would truly be in the realm of nonsense,” he said.
Undaunted, she appealed Scileppi’s decision and won in 1978. She’s still using Cooperperson today.
Otto Funk left New York City on June 28, 1928. He arrived in San Francisco on July 25, 1929. In the interval he walked 4,165 miles, fiddling every step of the way.
Oh, and defying death. “While traveling through Arizona Funk was struck by a rattlesnake,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Unperturbed, the aged fiddler slew the snake, snipped off the rattles as souvenirs, cut open the wound and sucked out the blood and poison. He continued walking until he came to a doctor’s office.”
“I have seen God’s country, every foot of it that I walked over,” Funk said afterward. “You can’t see it right from a car or a train. Sole leather express is the only way.”
A German-born resident of Portland, Oregon named Otto Hell was permitted by a local judge to take the name Hall when he pointed out how his neighbors and associates took pleasure in calling him by his surname and the initial of his given name. Another Otto Hell was an optometrist who complained that persons in need of glasses were always being told to ‘go to Hell and see.’
— Robert M. Rennick, “Obscene Names and Naming in Folk Tradition,” in Names and Their Varieties, 1986
A problem from the Soviet Mathematical Olympiad:
Two hundred students are arranged in 10 rows of 20 children. The shortest student in each column is identified, and the tallest of these is marked A. The tallest student in each row is identified, and the shortest of these is marked B. If A and B are different people, which is taller?
From Popular Science Monthly, April 1933: “A mechanical horse that trots and gallops on steel-pipe legs, under the impulse of a gasoline engine, is the recent product of an Italian inventor. With this horse, he declares, children may be trained to ride. The iron Dobbin is said to canter along a road or across a rough field with equal ease. Its design recalls the attempts of inventors, before the days of the automobile, to imitate nature and produce a mechanical steed capable of drawing a wagon.”
That kid might be happier in a cart.
English scholar Richard Porson (1759-1808) may have had the most prodigious memory of the 18th century. “He knew almost the whole of Homer, Horace, Cicero, Virgil and Livy,” recounts Henry H. Fuller in The Art of Memory (1898). “He could repeat whole plays from Shakespeare and complete books from Paradise Lost, scenes from Foote, and scores of pages from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, or Rapin’s works. He knew by heart the whole of Mortal Tale of the Dean of Badajos, and Edgeworth’s Essays on Irish Bulls, and could repeat from beginning to end Smollett’s Roderick Random and other noted English novels. He could recite a newspaper page after one reading, and said that he would undertake to repeat the entire contents of a week’s issues of the London Morning Chronicle.”
Eliezer Cogan recalls that one day Porson called on a friend who asked him the meaning of a word in Thucydides. Without looking at the book, Porson repeated the passage. His friend asked how he knew which passage he’d been reading. “Because,” Porson replied, “the word occurs only twice in Thucydides, once on the right-hand page in the edition which are using, and once on the left. I observed on which side you looked, and accordingly knew to which passage you referred.”
Hold a match horizontally before a mirror. If the match’s head is to the right, then so is that of its reflection — the match is not reversed left to right. But now hold up the matchbox. Its writing is reversed. Why?
“Here is a related puzzle,” writes psychologist Richard Gregory in Mirrors in Mind (1997). “Hold a mug with writing on it to a mirror. What do you see in the mirror? The reflection of the handle is unchanged — but the writing is right-left reversed. Can a mirror read?!”
Set two mirrors together at a 60° angle and rotate the pair around your line of sight. Your image is preserved despite the mirrors’ rotation. This is not the case if the mirrors are set at 45° or 90°. Why?
“Sleep is death enjoyed.” — Friedrich Hebbel