Mental Floss Presents Instant Knowledge Read online

  KEYWORDS: I can’t believe your dog just went on my lawn, carpet, or doormat

  THE FACT: Who could have known that a puddle of dog urine would spur the treatment for diabetes?

  That’s right! In studying the function of the pancreas (which wasn’t well understood in 1889), two professors from the University of Strassburg decided to remove the pancreas from a living dog. Later, flies were seen swarming around the canine’s urine. Curious as to the cause, the professors analyzed the sample and found that it contained a higher-than-normal amount of sugar. The doggone discovery led the scientists to determine a relationship between the pancreas and its control of insulin. In turn, this led to the first effective treatment of diabetes through insulin injections.

  DICTATORS

  (a really, really fat one)

  USEFUL FOR: impressing 4th-grade teachers, nerdy dates, bullies with weight problems (hey, someone’s gotta give ’em hope!)

  KEYWORDS: hefty, healthy, pudgy, paunchy, big boned, or obese

  THE FACT: The crown for the world’s chubbiest autocrat goes to the longtime king of Tonga, Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, weighing in at a lovable 462 pounds.

  Nothing establishes power over the people quite like making it abundantly obvious to them that you have access to more food than they do. Just think of the adorably pudgy (and slightly paranoid) Kim Jong Il or the rotund Idi Amin. But by far the fattest autocrat is Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga. But don’t let the chub fool you: despite weighing in at a clunky 400-plus pounds, the Tongan king is 100 percent dictator. And, in fact, he can be pretty unpleasantly plump. For instance, he actually led one of the strangest imperialist campaigns of all time. After an eccentric Nevadan named Michael Oliver piled sand onto a reef in the Pacific and declared his newly built paradise the Republic of Minerva in 1972, Tupou and a force of 350 Tongans invaded the one-man nation and annexed it in history’s most minor act of colonialism.

  DINOSAURS

  (specifically, one that never existed)

  USEFUL FOR: impressing preschool teachers, preschool students, and anyone fond of the gentle giant Brontosaurus

  KEYWORDS: Jurassic Park, The Land Before Time, or anytime you spot a dinosaur Band-Aid

  THE FACT: No matter what you remember from school, the Brontosaurus never existed. Apparently, someone’s been making a fool out of you for far too long.

  Turns out there’s no such thing. In 1874, scientist O. C. Marsh uncovered dinosaur fossils in Wyoming and thought he’d discovered another prehistoric genus, which he named Brontosaurus. What Marsh didn’t find was the body’s head, but that didn’t stop him from constructing a full-scale model of the “newly discovered” dinosaur. He just used the head of a Camarasaurus, even though it was a drastically different genus. When scientists finally found out about the great head switcharoo in the early 1970s, they revealed the Brontosaurus for what it really was: an Apatosaurus with a Camarasaurus head. In 1974, the name was formally rejected, but many elementary school teachers still haven’t gotten the memo.

  DISPENSERS

  (of the PEZ variety)

  USEFUL FOR: chatting with kids and ex-smokers, and making pals with those with a sweet tooth

  KEYWORD: PEZ

  THE FACT: The first PEZ dispensers were actually made for adults, and made to look like lighters to help nonsmokers fit in.

  The whole PEZ craze started back in 1927 when Austrian baker and candy maker J. Eduard Haas and a chemist friend developed the first cold-pressed hard candies. Mint flavored and wrapped in paper, these originals bore little resemblance to today’s PEZ other than the name, derived from PfeffErminZ, the German word for “peppermints.” Like we said, PEZ wasn’t even a children’s candy. Haas marketed his creation to adults, hyping it as a way to stop smoking—like nicotine gum, but without the rush. In fact, when Haas made the first PEZ dispensers almost two decades later, he designed them to look and work like Zippo lighters. When everyone else was lighting up, PEZ users could flick their own “lighter” and pop a peppermint instead. The brand’s familiar plastic heads didn’t appear until 1950, after PEZ arrived in North America and shed its medicinal image for those of cult heroes like Popeye and Santa Claus.

  DIVINITY SCHOOL

  (and a dropout with a really bad rep)

  USEFUL FOR: cocktail parties, first dates, and Sunday school

  KEYWORDS: Casanova, Catholicism, quitters, or sex

  THE FACT: Giacomo (“Jacques”) Casanova, as in the 18th century’s most notorious cad, actually began his lecherous escapades as a seminary student.

  That is, until he was expelled under “cloudy circumstances” (we’re guessing it was for sleeping with someone). As you well know, everyone’s favorite 18th-century libertine led a postseminary life that’s as ungodly as it gets. By the age of 30 he was sentenced to prison for engaging in “magic,” but he escaped after only a year to Paris. Oddly enough, he made a fortune there by introducing the lottery to France. But before settling down to pen his ribald, self-aggrandizing autobiography, Casanova was expelled from more European countries than most of us will ever get to visit. Along the way, he slept with tons of women, dueled with many of their husbands, and generally sinned his way to the top of European culture, befriending such figures as Madame de Pompadour and Jean-Jacques Rousseau along the way.

  DIXIE CUPS

  USEFUL FOR: chatting at watercoolers and whenever you find yourself using a Dixie Cup, really

  KEYWORDS: Dixie, Harvard, or Kansas’s greatest contribution to drinking

  THE FACT: Who knew it was a Harvard dropout who started the little cup craze that swept the nation?

  You can thank Hugh Moore, Dixie Cup genius, and Ivy League underachiever for putting his education, or lack thereof, to good use. It all started in 1909, when Kansas’s Board of Health outlawed public wells and communal water dippers based on the novel logic that they spread disease. Unfortunately, this left Kansans at a loss for a way to distribute water. Enter Moore. He invented an ice-chilled dispenser that served customers five ounces of water in a disposable paper cup. Moore’s Health Kups didn’t exactly take the country by storm, but they sold well enough to keep him in business until 1919, when he thought of a better name. The choice was Dixie. Moore adopted the name from the Dixie Doll Company in New York, simply because he liked the sound of the word. And judging from the increase in post–name-change sales, so did most of America.

  DOUBLE DECAF

  (of the Jell-O variety)

  USEFUL FOR: after-dinner conversation, making small talk at Starbucks, and anytime you see a Jell-O mold

  KEYWORDS: grande, jiggle, or Pudding Pops

  THE FACT: Just one of the many odd flavors they experimented with, in 1918, the makers of Jell-O introduced a new flavor: coffee. No one went wild for it.

  Its release was ostensibly based on the logic that, since lots of people like to drink coffee with dessert, they’d be game for combining the two after-dinner treats. Not the case. The company soon realized if anyone wants dessert coffee, they’re going to have a cup of it. In fact, if anyone wants coffee at all, they’re going to have a cup of it. Not surprisingly, this realization came at about the time they yanked the product off the shelves. All in all, it hasn’t harmed the company too much. At least they learned their lesson, right? Wrong. Cola-flavored Jell-O was sold for about a year starting in 1942, and for a brief while the wiggly dessert was sold in celery and apple flavors, too.

  DOWNSIZING

  (in the ancient Icelandic form)

  USEFUL FOR: barroom banter, chatting with Vikings fans (more the historical than the football kind)

  KEYWORDS: insults, Iceland, downsizing, or punishment

  THE FACT: What’s a poor farmer to do when his honor is insulted by three servants of a wealthy landowner? According to ancient Icelandic sagas, if you’re Thorstein Thorarinsson, you kill ’em.

  Of course, then you’ve got to announce your actions after the fact in accordance with ancient Icelandic custom. Luckily for Thorste
in, the three he killed were so worthless that their own boss didn’t particularly want to avenge them. Thorstein and the chieftain, a chap named Bjarni, fought a rather halfhearted duel, punctuated by frequent water breaks, pauses to examine one another’s weapons, and even stops to tie their shoes in mid-battle. Finally, they reached a settlement: Thorstein, who was strong enough to do the work of three men, became the perfect replacement for the three he had killed. Downsizing, Icelandic style.

  ELEPHANTS

  (gone wild)

  USEFUL FOR: circus dates, safaris, discussions on single (elephant) parenting

  KEYWORDS: elephant, rage, teenage rebellion

  THE FACT: In 1995, rangers at South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park began finding dead rhinos, brutally battered and mutilated. An investigation was launched, and it led them to a surprising realization: the raucous culprits were teenage elephants.

  Many of the thuggish elephants were turning increasingly violent, and had added rhino murder to their rap sheets. But why all the charges? Apparently, the young bulls were entering a period known as musth, or heightened aggression related to mating, at a younger age and for longer periods than normal for teens. Wildlife biologists also realized that the youngsters in the park—populated by relocated animals—lacked the structure they needed. When a few older, and perhaps wiser, bulls were added to the park, it forced the young’uns to return to their place in the elephant hierarchy. But not only did the adult supervision give them a bit of social order; it actually repressed the teens’ testosterone levels, delaying and shortening musth. The elephant-on-rhino crimes stopped soon after.

  THE ELITIST DICTIONARY

  USEFUL FOR: academic gatherings, making friends at Mensa, and amusing anyone who finds fault with good old Webster’s

  KEYWORDS: pretentious, pompous, or arrogant

  THE FACT: Fed up with reading one boring dictionary after the other (who isn’t!), lexicographer Eugene Ehrlich decided to publish The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate. Clearly, the act of a modest man.

  Reportedly uninterested in contributing to the “forces of linguistic darkness,” this freedom fighter of pretentiousness dedicates his pages to concentrating on unusual words that normal dictionaries may not take the time to fully explain. His companion to the book, The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate, provides synonyms to the kinds of fancy words he covers in his dictionary, inadvertently offering the “extraordinarily literate” a list of words they probably learned in elementary school.

  END OF THE WORLD

  (almost)

  USEFUL FOR: putting some real fear into people who like Fear Factor, scaring anyone, and making a room go silent

  KEYWORDS: Suez Crisis, nuclear holocaust, or “look at those beautiful swans”

  THE FACT: On November 5, 1956, during the Suez Crisis, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) received warnings that indicated a large-scale Soviet attack was under way. Read wrong, it could have started a third world war.

  Signs showed that a Soviet fleet was moving from the Black Sea to a more aggressive posture in the Aegean, 100 Soviet MiGs were flying over Syria, a British bomber had been shot down in Syria, and unidentified aircraft were in flight over Turkey, causing the Turkish air force to go on high alert. All signs pointed to the ominous, except that each of the four warnings was found to have a completely innocent explanation. The Soviet fleet was conducting routine exercises, the MiGs were part of an escort for the president of Syria, the British bomber had made an emergency landing after mechanical problems, and, last but not least, the unidentified planes over Turkey turned out to be a large flock of swans.

  ESCALATORS

  (fun for the feeble-minded)

  USEFUL FOR: cocktail parties, amusement park lines, definitively convincing any kid that things were a lot more boring before their time

  KEYWORDS: Who knows how the first escalator came about?

  THE FACT: The original escalator wasn’t so much a moving staircase as a really big ramp.

  In 1891, Jesse Reno patented the first escalator, paving the way for today’s world—one in which we choose not to use staircases, just StairMasters! But Reno’s initial invention was more of an inclined ramp than the escalator we know today, where passengers hooked into cleats on the belt and scooted up at a 25-degree angle. Fairly soon after, he built a spiral escalator—the mere thought of which nauseates us—in London, but it was never used by the public. Reno’s first escalator, though, was widely used, albeit not practically. In a testament to how utterly unamusing amusement parks were in the 1890s, 75,000 people rode Reno’s “inclined elevator” during a two-week exhibition at Coney Island in 1896. Let’s be clear: The escalator was not the means by which one traveled to a ride. It was the ride itself.

  instant personalities

  JESSE JAMES, the lawless, murderin’ bank robber, went by the nickname “Dingus” in honor of the time he accidentally shot off the tip of his finger. Without so much as wincing, James looked down and said, “Ain’t that the most dingus-dangest thing you ever seen?”

  Italian violinist NICCOLÒ PAGANINI used to saw partway through the strings on his violin so that during a show three would break. In fact, his one-string performance led to widespread rumors that he’d sold his soul to the devil.

  Apparently, the real portrait of the artist is that of a confused man: Writer JAMES JOYCE liked wearing five wristwatches on his arm, each set to a different time.

  EVA PERÓN

  USEFUL FOR: making snide comments whenever someone forces you to watch Evita

  KEYWORDS: Madonna, dictators’ wives, or “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”

  THE FACT: While Ms. Perón definitely has a bit of a sob story and a rags-to-riches tale, you really shouldn’t feel obligated to cry for her.

  “Saint Evita” was the daughter of an adulterous relationship between two villagers in an impoverished part of Argentina. She made a name for herself as an actress before marrying Juan Perón in 1944, but, being illegitimate (and a peasant), she was never really accepted in the social circles in which he routinely traveled. As a rising military officer, Perón quickly found himself dictator of Argentina, and “Evita” was by his side. In fact, she was more than just there to wave at crowds and manage the mansion. Evita actually ran several government ministries and almost became vice president in 1951 (the military bullied Perón into making her drop out of the campaign). And though she’s best known in the United States from the musical and movie that bear her name, the flick plays up the glamour and romance of her career while largely ignoring her corruption, oppression of political rivals, cozying up to Nazi war criminals, and other questionable doings.

  EXECUTION

  (and a lopping mistake)

  USEFUL FOR: impressing history buffs, making small talk on death row

  KEYWORDS: guillotine, execution, or flat-out wrong

  THE FACT: Despite what you may think, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not invent the guillotine, though the contraption is named for him.

  The doctor’s name was Guillotin, with no final e, and he was deputy to the French States-General in 1789. A supporter of capital punishment, he thought it should be done uniformly, with merciful efficiency, and proposed a head-chopping device. Of course, such machines had been around for centuries. After the States-General became the revolutionary General Assembly, French Procureur General Syndic Pierre-Louis Roederer turned not to Guillotin, but another doctor, Antoine Louis, for a design. And, in fact, it was a German engineer who built the first working model. While it’s not clear how the machine came to be named for Guillotin, we do know why it’s spelled that way. The final e was added to make it easier to rhyme with in revolutionary ballads.

  EX-LAX

  USEFUL FOR: any situation where you feel comfortable enough, really

  KEYWORDS: bathroom, prunes, or great Hungarians

  THE FACT: While Max Kiss told everyone that the name he picked for the
medication he invented, Ex-Lax, stood for “excellent laxative,” the word originally came from a slang term he found in a Hungarian newspaper referring to parliamentary deadlock.

  Definitely strange but true. As for the product itself, in 1905, the Hungarian immigrant and pharmacist, Kiss, went on vacation in the old country, and while en route aboard ship, a physician told him about a new tasteless powder laxative produced by Bayer. It was one small step for the drug company, but one giant leap for humanity, which had been previously plagued by foul-tasting, not-altogether-gentle laxatives such as castor oil and tea made from moss. Kiss set off on a series of flavor experiments that eventually led to the chocolate-flavored medication still sold today. Oddly enough, though, Ex-Lax did try to expand its taste roster, but with dubious results. Early in the company’s history, Kiss tried to turn the American public on to a fig-flavored drink version, but it went over like a lead balloon.

  FAN CLUBS

  (a.k.a. A Groupie Kind of Love)

  USEFUL FOR: cocktail parties, making friends at obedience school, and lamenting with all the other rock stars how hard having an enormous fan base is