Category History

In 1938 a theater textbook called popcorn fit only for cheap houses, and also the most profitable thing a theater could sell. The Depression and wartime sugar rationing settled the argument.

Ridged edges were invented to stop clipping, the crime of shaving silver off coins. In England it was a hanging offence, and Isaac Newton spent years hunting the clippers.

Fore is short for before, in the sense of in front. An 1887 golf glossary already defined it as a warning cry to anyone in the way of the stroke; the fore caddie and military theories are harder to prove.

The 2 is a hardness grade from the middle of the American scale, which goes back to the Thoreau family’s pencil business. There is no industry standard behind it, and the yellow paint came from a Koh-i-Noor pencil shown in Paris in 1889.

The tall white toque is usually credited to Marie-Antoine Carême, who stiffened his with cardboard. Escoffier later used hat height to mark rank in the kitchen.

Red barns started as a question of price: rust was the cheapest pigment a farmer could get. In 1922 Sears sold red barn paint for $1.43 a gallon, against $2.25 for other colours.

In 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic sank, a struggling writer published a novel about an unsinkable liner that hits an iceberg in April with too few lifeboats.

On a January afternoon in 1919 a five-storey tank in Boston split open and sent a wave of molasses through the streets at 35 miles an hour. It killed 21 people.

In 1932 Australia sent soldiers and two machine guns to fight the emus destroying its wheat crops. After six weeks the birds had won. Here is how the strangest war unfolded.

In 1518 a woman began to dance in the streets of Strasbourg and could not stop. Within weeks hundreds had joined her, and some reportedly did not survive it.