Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet: Recent Episodes
Damn Interesting
When it came to protests, America’s lower classes at the turn of the century had a bevy of galling circumstances to c...
Located 350 km (217 miles) southeast of Puerto Rico, the British island of Montserrat is sometimes called 'The Emeral...
In the mid-1800s, Italy was consumed by two parallel fights: one to rid itself of Austrian domination (a holdover fro...
As is often the case with people in dangerous professions, the Apollo astronauts found that life insurance policies w...
In the days when hunting was a more common pursuit than it is today, those involved in the job cultivated a taxonomy...
When the Earth was young, shortly after the moon formed, our planet was spinning so fast that a day was approximately...
It is down to geological and evolutionary happenstance that there are no monkeys on the island of Madagascar: a fact...
It can be tough to give the boss a hint, but it was even more difficult back in the days of domestic servitude when t...
On 17 December 1967, Harold Holt--at that time the Prime Minister of Australia--decided to go for a swim. He and his...
Popeye the Sailor is well known for his penchant for spinach, and the popularity of the character led to generations...
Compared to Earth, our astronomical next-door neighbor Venus is 95 percent as large, 28 percent closer to the sun, an...
What do the American bison, western gorilla, and Eurasian eagle-owl have in common? One answer is that they are all s...
In January 2010, two journalists knocked on the door of 84-year-old Frenchman Jacques Bellanger to ask him about the...
At the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, social psychologist Paul Piff paired off approximately 200 u...
Alois Schicklgruber was never quite certain who his father was. Born in 1837, Schicklgruber was the child of Maria An...
"Article the Second" was a single-sentence amendment written by James Madison in 1789, intended to be added to the Un...
During the development of the Apollo moon missions in the early 1960s, the newfangled government agency called “NASA”...
The smallest denomination coin ever circulated in the United States was valued at five milles, equivalent to one 200t...
Laßt Froh Uns Sein ("Let Us Be Joyful") is a short musical canon in B-flat major for six voices, written by the celeb...
One of the most dramatic surgical procedures still performed on human patients is the hemispherectomy, or the removal...
In April 1929 in the town of Naco, Arizona, the Cristero War was raging just over the border in Mexico. Rebels in tha...
Sign languages rely on the use of space (locations, motions, and handshapes) to express meaning or grammatical nuance...
In the European theater of World War 2, as early as 1943, the German Army deployed a small number of special Panther...
In the midst of World War II, the British Air Ministry began publicly extolling the virtues of carrot-eating. The vit...
In June of 1965, a 27-year-old gentleman by the name of Angus Barbieri checked himself into the Maryfield Hospital in...
In the early 1980s, a certain Mr. Vic Tandy found himself working for a medical device manufacturer in Warwick, in th...
Only one fictional character has ever been honoured with a front-page obituary in The New York Times: Hercule Poirot,...
When Germany was divided in two after the Second World War, military leaders recognized the need for liaison between...
Nestled in a valley high in the Himalayas in northern India is a small lake named Roopkund, known locally as Mystery...
On 13 May 1960, a NASA Thor-Delta rocket carried the agency's new Echo 1 satellite into a 1,000 mile orbit around the...
In 1936, Russian scientist Vladimir Lukyanov was confronted with the problem of devising a system to improve the qual...
An iconic sight in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the Kimjongilia. This hybrid begonia was bred by a Ja...
According to a 1957 US government study entitled The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages,...
By the 1840s the British Empire was at full tilt, operating colonies on every continent apart from Antarctica. Key fo...
Götz von Berlichingen (1480-1562) was a German knight and warrior for hire in the first half of the 16th century. In...
The introduction of non-native species can be a tricky business. The feral camels of Australia are a case in point. T...
Shortly after aluminum was first discovered in the early 19th century it was counted among the most precious metals o...
Zanzibar, an island nation that is now part of Tanzania, has been a contested territory for centuries. Starting in th...
The height of Mount Everest was not calculated by George Everest, but by a brilliant mathematician who has since been...
In the early 1960s, General Electric proposed a system whereby an astronaut in a space emergency might abandon ship a...
One way of determining a person’s likely ethnicity is looking inside their ears. Simply put, there are two kinds of e...
Inside America's Mount Rushmore National Monument there is a "secret" chamber known as the Hidden Hall of Records. Th...
The most perfectly spherical object ever observed by mankind is the electron. In a series of experiments led by physi...
In the 17th Century there was a shortage of giants in Europe, and only one man was to blame. The giant-greedy Frederi...
When a caterpillar enters the chrysalis stage, it is not merely sprouting wings to become a moth or butterfly. Enzyme...
Consumption of tomato juice is unusually popular on commercial airline flights. For example, German airline Lufthansa...
While today’s vision of the conductor is that of the be-tuxedoed individual standing in front of an orchestra holding...
Jack Ketch was a man in need of a career change. As the official executioner during King Charles II’s 17th-century re...
When inventing a name for an imaginary and/or ridiculous object or concept, the best resource is often a child. A cle...
On 18 September 1980, an Air Force airman was conducting routine maintenance high in the missile silo at a Titan II n...
Among other things, former president Lyndon Baines Johnson was known for his collection of unique automobiles, which...
Frank Hayes must have been excited as he climbed into the saddle on 04 June 1923. While the 35-year-old horse trainer...
Before London taxi drivers are allowed to convey paying customers in their renowned black cabs, they must be ‘of good...
Serving your melon with a layer of prosciutto around it may simply seem like one of the many lovely contributions of...
The framers of the United States Constitution explicitly forbade the United States from granting titles of nobility i...
In 1993, in an effort to avoid bad press, a zoo in Toluca, Mexico sought to quickly and quietly replace a gorilla tha...
In 1964, The Beatles traveled across the pond for a series of tour dates that would be their first in North America....
Market researcher James Vicary became well-known for a 1957 study attesting to the efficacy of subliminal advertising...
Inés Ramírez Pérez of Rio Talea, Mexico, is known for being one of the only confirmed people to have successfully completed a Caesarian section on herself.
In 1935, Sonne ins Haus (The Sun in the Home) was one of the few magazines allowed to circulate in Nazi Germany. The...
In South America, in the swamps of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers, lives a very unusual bird.
The hoatzin is a phea...
During the early days of atomic bomb experiments in the 1940s, nuclear weapons scientists had some difficulty studyin...
In 1950s-era Germany, the British forces which had been stationed there after World War 2 were understandably nervous...
By using selective breeding programs over many generations, horse breeds have been produced which are little more tha...
Very few details are known about the life of Adam Rainer, but in a way, he represents an extraordinary piece of medic...
In 1953, the United States Department of Defense was conducting a series of nuclear weapons tests called Operation Up...
Imagine a car that seats eleven passengers, turns on a dime, has excellent fuel efficiency, and cruises happily at 12...
The Brits called it "Dazzle Painting," and the Yanks called it "Razzle Dazzle." It transformed ships of war from plai...
In the early- to mid-1950s, Dr. Paul Kuroda from the University of Arkansas described the possibility of naturally oc...
The Spotted Rose Snapper, which lives off the coast of California, is one of a handful of species of fish that are pl...
Although the fax machine did not begin to see wide acceptance until the late 1970s, the device's invention predated i...
Tourette Syndrome is a highly misunderstood neurological disorder. It is depicted throughout popular media as an unco...
Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book Library is in possession of many fascinating historic texts, but perhaps its mos...
On the night of 9 July 1962 a number of beach front hotels in Honolulu, Hawaii were throwing “rainbow bomb” parties;...
One of World War 2's best-kept secrets was that of the Japanese balloon bombs, the first weapon ever deployed with in...