Latest Facts

Robert Kearns invented the intermittent windshield wiper. Ford passed - then put it on every car they built. He sued, representing himself for 12 years after three law firms quit. Ford offered $30 million to settle. Kearns turned it down - the offer came without an admission. He didn't want their money. He wanted Ford to say they took it.

John Fogerty wrote "Run Through the Jungle" for Creedence. Years later, Saul Zaentz sued him, claiming Fogerty's solo hit sounded too much like that old song. The problem: Fogerty wrote that song too. He brought a guitar to court, played both songs for the jury, and won in two hours. He got sued for plagiarizing himself.

A dog named Eclipse was at a Seattle bus stop with her owner. He stopped to finish a cigarette. The bus came. She got on without him. She rode 3 stops, got off at the dog park, and waited for him to catch up. Then she did it again. Every day. For 7 years. She had her own transit card on her collar.

A natural gas company's robot found hundreds of ancient jars on the Mediterranean floor: a 3,300-year-old Canaanite cargo ship, the oldest ever found in deep water. At 1.8 km depth, cold oxygen-free water kept it perfectly intact. Bronze Age sailors were crossing the open sea by the stars, not hugging the coast.

Yosemite ran a real fire waterfall for nearly a century. On summer nights, workers built a bonfire of red fir bark at the edge of Glacier Point. At 9pm, a caller shouted, "Let the Fire Fall!" Workers then pushed the embers off the cliff in a 3,000-foot cascade of flame. The Park Service banned it in 1968, calling it "as appropriate as horns on a rabbit."

At Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, rocks weighing up to 700 lbs slide across cracked mud on their own - leaving trails hundreds of feet long. Nobody caught them moving for nearly 100 years. Scientists finally solved it in 2014: rare winter ice forms overnight, cracks into floating panels at sunrise, and a light breeze pushes the panels against the rocks, skating them silently across the playa.

Jack Nicklaus won 18 major golf titles. The company bearing his name told others he had dementia and needed his car keys taken away. The 85-year-old sued and a jury awarded him $50 million.

Tama was a stray calico cat near Kishi Station in Japan when the railway was about to close. The company made her stationmaster in 2007, paying her salary in cat food. Over 8 years she was promoted 4 more times - ending as the company's third-highest executive. She drew 55,000 extra riders in her first year alone and saved the line. When she died in 2015, thousands attended her funeral.

Manny Pacquiao was boxing's reigning WBO welterweight champion. He was also a sitting congressman in the Philippines. Then he became head coach of a pro basketball team, Kia Sorento. He used the job to draft himself 11th overall, at age 35. His debut drew a record crowd of 52,612 fans. He played seven minutes and scored zero points.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is the tallest brick lighthouse in America, nearly 200 feet tall. At its closest, the Atlantic had come within 120 feet of its base. So engineers lifted the entire tower onto steel rails. They rolled it more than half a mile inland, five feet at a time. It took 23 days. Not one new crack formed in the century-old brick.

Fenway Park's right-field bleachers are all green, except one. That single red seat marks a home run by Ted Williams. He hit it on June 9, 1946. The blast was officially marked at 502 feet, the longest homer ever hit inside the park. The ball crashed into a fan's straw hat before he ever saw it coming.

Marvel filed for bankruptcy in 1996 and sold Spider-Man to Sony and the X-Men to Fox. Spider-Man alone grossed $1.6 billion in films - Marvel got $62 million. Marvel kept the characters nobody wanted: Iron Man, Captain America, the Avengers. Iron Man made $585 million in 2008. Disney bought it all for $4.24 billion the following year.

The Taj Mahal was disguised three times to protect it from bombers. In 1942, British engineers wrapped the dome in bamboo scaffolding. Without GPS, it looked like a building site from the air. India used the same trick in 1965 and 1971. In 1971, over 18,000 lbs of green jute were draped over the marble. Not one bomb ever fell.

Sylvester Stallone painted Rocky before he wrote him. In 1975, broke and typecast as a movie villain, he painted a self-portrait called "Finding Rocky." He carved the eyes with a screwdriver to get the sadness right. The script came later. Stallone never stopped painting after that. In 2021, Germany's Osthaus Museum Hagen gave him his full museum retrospective. Nearly 50 canvases, timed to his 75th birthday.

Cambodia carved a giant stone statue of a rat. It honors Magawa, who spent five years sniffing out landmines there. He became the first rat ever given the PDSA Gold Medal. That medal is the animal world's version of the George Cross. Magawa found 71 landmines and 38 unexploded bombs before he retired in 2021. He cleared ground equal to roughly 20 football fields.

Lake Michigan turned crystal clear turquoise in April 2015. A Coast Guard helicopter crew spotted something incredible on patrol. Complete century-old shipwrecks sat visible on the lake floor below them. The James McBride was a 121-foot brig that sank in 1857. It rested in 5 to 15 feet of water. Nearby, the Rising Sun wrecked in 1917 with all 32 aboard rescued. The lake holds an estimated 1,500 shipwrecks, and several remain unidentified.

Betty Willis designed the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign in 1959 and never copyrighted it. She called it her gift to the city, leaving the design free for anyone to use. That is why it appears legally on T-shirts, postcards, and souvenirs around the world with no royalties owed. She once said: "I should make a buck out of it. Everybody else is."

Alice Cooper got sober in 1983 by trading one addiction for another. In rehab, he took up golf. He played 36 holes a day, every single day, for a year, always with club pros. The new habit replaced the drinking for good. He still tees off six days a week at 5:30am. He once seriously considered playing a pro tournament in full stage makeup.

Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in North America. In February 2024, record rain turned its lowest point into a temporary lake called Lake Manly. It stretched six miles long and three miles wide, but only a foot deep. Death Valley has no outlet to the sea, so a lake this size almost never forms. People still grabbed kayaks and paddled across it.

Machu Picchu has been called the wrong name for over 100 years. A 2022 study found the Incas most likely called it "Huayna Picchu." The name "Machu Picchu" belongs to a different mountain nearby. Explorer Hiram Bingham attached the wrong label in 1911. The world knows it wrong - and it will stay that way.

Kowloon Walled City crammed 33,000 people into just 6.4 acres - one city block. That made it the densest place in recorded human history. About 300 towers rose 14 storeys high, packed so close that sunlight never reached the alleys. Neither Britain nor China governed it, so residents built their own unlicensed economy. It was demolished in 1993-1994. The site is now a park.

Carson Schmidt and Erik Masuda drove seven hours from Sacramento for a ski day at Palisades Tahoe. On their very first run, they spotted ski tips in the snow - and found a stranger buried several feet deep, face turning purple. They dug him out with their bare hands. He gasped, came around, and skied off to find his wife.

At the edge of Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, a storm has returned night after night for centuries. It produces almost 250 lightning flashes per km2 per year - more than anywhere on Earth. Sailors gave it a name: the Beacon of Maracaibo. It fires 140 to 160 nights a year, for up to 9 hours a night. Zulia state put a white lightning bolt on its flag.

Yacouba Sawadogo was a farmer in Burkina Faso who fought the desert with holes. He spent four decades digging zaï pits by hand. Each pit was packed with compost to capture rainfall and feed the soil below. Cracked, barren land became a living forest of nearly 40 hectares with more than 60 species. He won the Right Livelihood Award - the Alternative Nobel - in 2018.