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.
4
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.
15
In ancient Athens, the worlds first democracy, they had a process called ostracism, where once a year the people could vote on the politician they thought was most destructive to the democratic process. The “winner” was banished from Athens for 10 years.
3
In 1700s, the deer skin was a common medium of exchange between the trading settlers and the native Red Indians in America. This is how a buck became a slang for a dollar.
28
'⸮' is a punctuation mark that was first proposed in the 1580s to denote sarcasm or irony.
17
Although Nostradamus died in the middle of 1566, his 1567 almanac was published because he had the foresight to prepare it before his death.
19
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.
21
If Earth's history was condensed into twenty-four hours, life would've appeared at around 4am, land plants at 10:24pm, dinosaur extinction at 11:41pm, and human history would’ve began at 11:58:43pm.
21