History & Culture

The 1904 Olympic Marathon in St. Louis had one water station for the entire 25-mile course. The first man across the finish line had ridden in a car for 11 miles. The actual winner was fed strychnine and brandy by his trainers and was hallucinating at the finish. A South African runner was chased a mile off course by wild dogs. Only 14 of 32 runners finished.

In 1970, a dead whale washed up on an Oregon beach. Officials decided to dispose of it with half a ton of dynamite. A WWII explosives veteran warned them it was way too much. They ignored him. The explosion launched car-sized chunks of blubber 800 feet. One crushed a brand new Oldsmobile in the parking lot. The owner had just bought it from a dealership running a "Whale of a Deal" promotion.

In 1989, a man bought a painting for $4 at a flea market. He wanted the frame. When he took it apart, he found a folded document hidden behind the canvas — an original 1776 print of the Declaration of Independence, one of only 26 known to survive. It sold at Sotheby's for $2.42 million.

When the towers fell on September 11, the Coast Guard put out one call on marine radio: all available boats. Ferry captains turned mid-route. Tugboat operators dropped everything. Fishing boats, private yachts, dinner cruises - hundreds showed up. In nine hours, they evacuated nearly 500,000 people by water. The largest maritime evacuation in history. Larger than Dunkirk, which took nine days.

In 2009, thieves arrived by helicopter on a cash depot roof in Stockholm. They had placed a fake bomb at the police helicopter hangar. Scattered caltrops on every access road. Stole $5.3 million and escaped clean. Police caught them months later through DNA on a piece of duct tape someone had licked.

In 1989, the Soviet Union traded Pepsi 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer in exchange for Pepsi products. For a brief moment, PepsiCo had the 6th largest submarine fleet in the world. Pepsi's CEO told the National Security Advisor: "We're disarming the Soviet Union faster than you are."

In 1986, Cleveland released 1.5 million balloons to set a world record. A storm pushed them back down. They clogged Lake Erie, shut down a Coast Guard search for two missing boaters who drowned, caused a horse stampede, and triggered so many 911 calls about UFOs that the system crashed. The city was sued for years. The record was never officially recognised.

During the Cold War, the CIA spent $20 million and five years on Project Acoustic Kitty. They surgically implanted a microphone in a cat's ear, a transmitter in its skull, and an antenna in its tail. The plan was to eavesdrop on Soviet diplomats. On its very first mission, the cat was released near the Soviet embassy and was immediately hit by a taxi. The CIA concluded the technique was impractical.

Julie d'Aubigny was a 17th-century French opera singer and one of the most feared swordfighters in Paris. When her girlfriend's parents sent the girl to a convent, Julie checked in as a novice, placed a dead nun's body in her lover's bed, set the building on fire, and escaped with her. She was sentenced to death. The king pardoned her.

In 1324, Mansa Musa — ruler of the Mali Empire — made a pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan of 60,000 men and thousands of pounds of gold. When he stopped in Cairo, he gave away so much gold that he crashed the local economy. The price of gold didn't recover for twelve years. He is widely considered the wealthiest person who ever lived.

In 2012, archaeologists dug up a parking lot in Leicester and found the skeleton of King Richard III - lost for 527 years. An amateur historian convinced a university to dig on a hunch. They found him in the first trench, six hours into a two-week dig. The parking space above his grave was marked with the letter R.

In 1990, the cockpit windshield of British Airways Flight 5390 blew out at 17,400 feet. The captain was sucked halfway out of the aircraft. A flight attendant grabbed his legs and held on for 20 minutes while the co-pilot made an emergency landing. Everyone survived. The cause? 84 of 90 windshield bolts were the wrong size.

For centuries, the Gordian Knot defeated every scholar and king who tried to untie it. An oracle declared whoever solved it would rule all of Asia. Alexander the Great studied it for a moment — then drew his sword and cut straight through it.

A rival cut off Takeda Shingen’s salt. Uesugi Kenshin sent him salt anyway—saying wars are won with swords, not salt.

During a war between France and England in 1697, Louis XIV ordered the release of a captured English engineer who had been building a lighthouse. His reasoning: "France is at war with England, not with humanity."

In 1869–1870, boosters called Washington vulnerable and pitched St. Louis as the nation’s natural center, even hosting a Capital Removal convention.

In 1930, six anonymous Chicago businessmen formed a secret vigilante organization to take on the city's rampant crime. They investigated bombings, kidnappings, and bank robberies — and Al Capone himself said they were responsible for bringing him down.

In 1971, a man named Dan Cooper hijacked a plane, extorted $200,000, parachuted into a stormy night, and vanished without a trace. The only clue ever found was $5,800 of the ransom, rotting on a riverbank years later.

In 1932, the Australian military deployed soldiers armed with machine guns to combat an invasion of 20,000 emus destroying farmland in Western Australia. After six days of failed attacks, the emus outsmarted the soldiers, and the military withdrew in defeat.

In 1986, federal prisoner Ronald J. McIntosh escaped during an unsupervised prisoner transfer. Eight days later, he returned in a stolen helicopter and broke out his girlfriend, bank robber Samantha Lopez, from federal prison in a daring daylight rescue.