Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a watchmaker, 240 years ago invented a robot that could write, and the parts could be interchanged to say whatever you want.
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There's a bar in Ireland (presently named Sean’s Bar) that was opened in 900AD.
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France’s King Louis XIV was offered biological weapons by an Italian chemist. He not only refused, but also paid the chemist an annual salary to never reveal the technology to anyone else.
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The ‘@’ sign is centuries old, and was used in Europe to denote a unit of weight (the “arroba”) equivalent to 25 lbs.
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The word 'mile' is derived from the Latin word for 1,000 - the number of paces it took the average Roman!
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Al Capone's armored limousine, after being seized by the feds, was later used to protect Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), 32nd President of the US, after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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Chunosuke Matsuyama, a Japanese Seaman, sent a message in a bottle in 1784 that his ship had wrecked. It washed up in 1935 in the village where he was born.
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