Astronomer Percival Lowell believed that he was the first person to observe canals on Venus, but because of a faulty adjustment of the eyepiece on his telescope, he was in fact looking at the blood vessels in his own eye.
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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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Leonardo Da Vinci predicted the mass use of solar energy as long ago as 1447.
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Unsinkable Sam (nickname of a German ship's cat) who served on 3 warships, one German, two British, all sank in action. The cat survived each sinking, floating away on wooden planks to rescue.
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In 1846, a 14 year old French peasant girl named Angelique Cottin was found to possess extraordinary electrical power. With a gentle touch she could knock over heavy pieces of furniture and even shock people near her.
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Iceland has been so culturally isolated through history since the Vikings, that compared to other Scandinavian counties, people who speak Icelandic can still read the old Norsk sagas.
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