History facts and facts about histories, from the Random Facts shelf.
261 facts on this shelf
Walter Payton had the flu when he broke the NFL record with 275 rushing yards when Chicago played Minn 11/20/77.
Corey Dillon broke this record in 2000 rushing for 278 yards Cincinnati vs Denver (10-22-2000)
The record was then broken by Jamal Lewis in 2003 (295), and again in 2007 by Adrian Peterson (296) against the San Diego (and LaDainian Tomlinson) amazingly in his rookie season.
Augustus Caesar became the emperor of Rome in 27 BC, and he ruled the empire for over forty years. This period of history became known as the time of the "Great Roman Peace" ... In A.D. 80 the Colosseum was finished where battles were reenacted, where gladiators fought, and where crowds were entertained by savage violence entertained by the spectacle of Christians being eaten by lions.
Sometime between 407-411 Constantine III legalized Christianity. Check out this list, it was easier than you think to be emperor, the hard part is staying emperor. http://www.roman-emperors.org/impindex.htm
n AD 404 a tragic event finally put an end to the gladiators. A Christian monk named Telemachus entered the arena in Rome and tried to separate two combatants. The crowd went berserk, climbed over the walls into the arena and tore the monk limb from limb. The Emperor Honorius permanently banned all gladiator contests.
The Romans were also known to sentencing Christians to death by play. In a live play, when it came time for a death scene, the real actor would be replaced by the accused and the execution would be performed live on stage.
yikes
Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades - King David; Clubs - Alexander the Great; Hearts - Charlemagne; and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.
The Battle of Normandy was the decisive battle of World War II fought in the summer of 1944 between the Allied nations and German forces. The Normandy Invasion, or D-Day, is the largest ocean-based invasions in history with nearly three million troops participating. The battle stretched from the English Channel to Normandy, France in German-occupied Western Europe.
In 1803 the US bought the Louisiana Territory from France for about $15 million. The deal roughly doubled the size of the country.
About 642 million people voted in India's 2024 general election, making it the largest democratic election in human history.
Japan's Kongō Gumi, a temple construction company founded in 578 CE, is one of the oldest continuously operating companies in history.
The Magna Carta, sealed by King John of England in 1215, established the idea that even the king had to obey the law.
France's national holiday on July 14 marks the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789, a key early moment of the French Revolution.
Italy did not become a single unified country until 1861. Before that it was a patchwork of separate kingdoms and states.
Despite the name, the French Bulldog's story starts in England, where lace workers in Nottingham kept toy-sized bulldogs. When many of those workers moved to France during the Industrial Revolution, they brought the dogs along, and the breed was refined into the Frenchie in France.
The American Kennel Club officially recognized the French Bulldog in 1898, so the breed has been part of AKC history for more than a century.
English aristocrats, especially the Earls of Malmesbury and the Dukes of Buccleuch, imported dogs from Newfoundland in the 1800s and developed them into the Labrador Retriever. Their breeding programs essentially saved the breed after the original St. John's water dog died out.
The Golden Retriever traces back to an 1868 pairing of a yellow wavy-coated retriever named Nous and a Tweed Water Spaniel named Belle. Their puppies became the foundation of the breed.
The German Shepherd Dog was created by German cavalry officer Captain Max von Stephanitz. In 1899 he registered a dog named Horand von Grafrath as the first official German Shepherd.
Snoopy, the famous dog from Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" comic strip, is a Beagle, which makes him probably the most famous Beagle in history.
Queen Elizabeth I of England kept tiny "pocket beagles" or "glove beagles," hunting dogs so small they could supposedly fit inside a saddlebag or a gloved hand.
Rottweilers were once called "Rottweil butcher's dogs" because they drove cattle to market and pulled carts loaded with meat for butchers.
German cattle merchants reportedly tied their money purses around their Rottweilers' necks, figuring no thief would be brave enough to try stealing from such an intimidating dog.
The Rottweiler nearly died out in the late 1800s when railroads replaced cattle drives and the dogs lost their main job. Their new careers as police and guard dogs helped save the breed.
The German Shorthaired Pointer was developed by mixing older German bird dogs and tracking hounds with the English Pointer, which added speed, elegance, and a sharper pointing instinct.
Prince Albrecht zu Solms-Braunfels of Germany is credited with helping develop the German Shorthaired Pointer in the 1800s by encouraging breeders to focus on versatility and hunting ability.
The Bulldog was originally bred in England for bull-baiting, a brutal blood sport. After England banned it with the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835, breeders reshaped the Bulldog into the gentle companion it is today.
A brown tabby Maine Coon named Cosey won the first major cat show in the US, held at Madison Square Garden in 1895.
Ann Baker, the founder of the Ragdoll breed, made bizarre claims about her cats, including that Josephine's kittens were changed by genetic experiments and even alien genes. Other breeders eventually broke away from her to develop the breed more seriously.
The Exotic began partly by accident, when American Shorthair breeders crossed their cats with Persians and ended up with stocky, plush-coated, flat-faced cats that became a breed of their own.
The first Devon Rex, Kirlee, is believed to have been fathered by a curly-coated feral tomcat living near an abandoned tin mine in Devon, England.
The Abyssinian is one of the oldest recognized cat breeds, shown at cat shows in England in the late 1800s and among the earliest breeds registered in the US.
Harrison Weir, known as the "father of the cat fancy," organized the first modern cat show at London's Crystal Palace in 1871, and British Shorthairs were among the cats he championed.
The Russian Blue was shown at London's Crystal Palace cat show in 1875, one of the earliest cat shows ever held.
Siamese cats were shown at the famous 1871 Crystal Palace cat show in London, and some attendees found their unusual look strange at first.
Lions once lived in parts of southeastern Europe, including ancient Greece, and Ice Age cave lions roamed across Europe tens of thousands of years ago.
A 2021 genetic study found that modern domestic horses trace back to the steppes of southern Russia about 4,200 years ago and then spread rapidly across Asia and Europe.
Humans first landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down while Michael Collins orbited above in the command module.
An estimated 600 million people around the world watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing on TV, one of the largest audiences in history at the time.
Because the Moon has no wind or water to erode them, the footprints left by Apollo astronauts could last for millions of years.
The Apollo Guidance Computer that helped land Apollo 11 had only about 4 kilobytes of erasable memory, millions of times less than a modern smartphone.
Neil Armstrong had to steer the lunar module past a boulder-filled crater by hand, and Apollo 11 landed with less than a minute of descent fuel to spare.
Apollo 11 left a plaque on the Moon stating that the astronauts "came in peace for all mankind," signed by the three astronauts and President Richard Nixon.
Only 12 people have ever walked on the Moon, all of them American astronauts on Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972. Gene Cernan was the last to leave.
President Nixon had a speech ready called "In Event of Moon Disaster," written by speechwriter William Safire in case the Apollo 11 astronauts got stranded on the Moon.
When a circuit breaker switch broke on the lunar module, Buzz Aldrin used a felt-tip pen to push it in so the engine could fire and lift them off the Moon.
Shortly after landing, Buzz Aldrin quietly took communion inside the lunar module, which was kept off the public broadcast at the time.
Johannes Gutenberg developed a movable-type printing press in Mainz, Germany, around 1440, which made it possible to mass-produce books for the first time in Europe.
Gutenberg printed about 180 copies of his Bible around 1455, and only about 49 are known to survive today, making them among the most valuable books in the world.
Gutenberg wasn't the first to invent movable type. Bi Sheng in China created ceramic movable type around 1040, about 400 years earlier.
The oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type is the Jikji, a Korean Buddhist text printed in 1377, decades before Gutenberg's Bible.
Gutenberg didn't get rich from his invention. He lost a lawsuit to his investor, Johann Fust, who took over much of his printing business.
By 1500, just a few decades after Gutenberg's invention, European printers had produced an estimated 20 million volumes.
The printing press helped Martin Luther's ideas spread rapidly after 1517, as printed copies of his writings reached readers across Europe within weeks, fueling the Protestant Reformation.
Books printed in Europe before 1501 are called incunabula, from a Latin word for "cradle," because they come from the infancy of printing.
The Library of Congress owns one of only three perfect surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum, a type of animal skin parchment.
In a 1999 A&E Biography ranking, Johannes Gutenberg was named the most influential person of the past thousand years.
"Renaissance" means "rebirth" in French and refers to the revival of art, science, and classical learning that began in Florence, Italy, in the 1300s.
The Medici were a wealthy banking family in Florence who funded artists like Michelangelo and Botticelli, which helped make the city the center of the Renaissance.
The Mona Lisa became world-famous partly because it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia. The two-year disappearance made headlines everywhere until it was recovered.
Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling from 1508 to 1512 standing on scaffolding with his head tilted back, not lying down as the popular myth claims.
Michelangelo carved his 17-foot statue of David from a huge block of marble that earlier sculptors had abandoned as too difficult to work with.
Leonardo da Vinci filled his notebooks with mirror writing that reads right to left, along with sketches of flying machines, anatomy, and inventions far ahead of his time.
Bill Gates bought Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester, a notebook of scientific writings, for about $30.8 million in 1994.
Filippo Brunelleschi's dome on Florence Cathedral, finished in the 1430s without traditional wooden supports, is still the largest brick and masonry dome ever built.
Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated linear perspective in the early 1400s, which let Renaissance artists create realistic 3D depth on flat surfaces.
The term "Renaissance" was popularized in the 1800s by historians like Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, long after the period itself ended.
The Industrial Revolution began in Britain around 1760, when new machines and factories transformed how goods were made and how people lived.
In 1769, James Watt patented a separate condenser that made steam engines far more efficient, and the "watt" unit of power is named after him.
James Watt came up with the term "horsepower" to help sell steam engines by comparing their power to the work of horses.
The spinning jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in the 1760s, let one worker spin multiple threads at once and helped launch the textile factory boom.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which opened in 1830, was the first intercity railway to run passenger trains entirely by steam.
George and Robert Stephenson's locomotive Rocket won the 1829 Rainhill Trials, a competition to find the best engine for the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
Eli Whitney's cotton gin, patented in 1794, made cleaning cotton much faster, but it also caused the expansion of slavery in the American South as cotton farming boomed.
Britain's Factory Act of 1833 was one of the first laws to limit child labor, banning children under nine from working in textile mills.
The 1851 census showed that, for the first time, more people in Britain lived in towns and cities than in the countryside, a direct result of industrialization.
During the Industrial Revolution, soot darkened trees in England, and dark-colored peppered moths became more common because they were better camouflaged, a famous example of natural selection.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2560 BC.
The Great Pyramid was the tallest human-made structure in the world for about 3,800 years, until England's Lincoln Cathedral spire surpassed it in the early 1300s.
The Great Pyramid is made of about 2.3 million stone blocks, many weighing several tons each.
Archaeologists now believe the pyramids were built by paid Egyptian laborers rather than slaves, based on workers' tombs and villages discovered near Giza in the 1990s.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is the only one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the 1969 Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The Great Pyramid was originally covered in smooth, polished white limestone casing stones that made it shine in the sun. Most were later removed for other buildings.
The Great Pyramid's sides are aligned almost exactly with true north, south, east, and west, a stunning feat of precision for ancient engineers.
The Diary of Merer, discovered in 2013, is the oldest known inscribed papyrus. It records an official's work transporting limestone blocks for the Great Pyramid.
In 2017, scientists used cosmic-ray particles called muons to detect a large hidden void inside the Great Pyramid that no one had known about.
The Magna Carta, sealed by England's King John at Runnymede on June 15, 1215, was a charter that limited the king's power and established that even the king was subject to the law.
The original Magna Carta lasted only about ten weeks before Pope Innocent III declared it invalid, but later revised versions were reissued and became part of English law.
King John didn't actually sign the Magna Carta. He approved it with his royal seal, which was how official documents were authorized at the time.
The Magna Carta was written in Latin, the language of official documents in medieval England.
Only four original 1215 copies of the Magna Carta survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Cathedral, and one at Salisbury Cathedral.
Only three clauses of the Magna Carta are still part of English law, including the famous guarantee that no free man can be imprisoned except by lawful judgment or the law of the land.
The Magna Carta's ideas about due process and limits on government power influenced the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Businessman David Rubenstein bought a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta for about $21.3 million in 2007 and put it on display at the US National Archives.
During WWII, the Lincoln Cathedral copy of the Magna Carta, which happened to be in the US for the 1939 World's Fair, was stored for safekeeping at Fort Knox alongside the US gold reserves.
Along with big ideas about justice, the Magna Carta includes a clause ordering the removal of fish weirs, or traps, from the River Thames and other rivers in England.
The Wright brothers made the first controlled, powered airplane flight on December 17, 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville flew 120 feet in 12 seconds.
Before building airplanes, Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, which paid for their flight experiments.
The Wright brothers flipped a coin to decide who would try first. Wilbur won, but his attempt on December 14, 1903, failed, so Orville made the historic first flight three days later.
The Wright brothers made four flights on December 17, 1903. The longest, by Wilbur, covered 852 feet in 59 seconds.
The Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel in 1901 to test hundreds of wing shapes, collecting data that was more accurate than what scientists had at the time.
When no company could build a light enough engine, the Wright brothers' mechanic Charlie Taylor built a 12-horsepower engine for the Wright Flyer in just six weeks.
The Wright brothers controlled their plane using "wing warping," twisting the wingtips to roll left or right, an idea inspired partly by watching birds.
Pieces of the original Wright Flyer have traveled to the Moon on Apollo 11 and to Mars on NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.
Because of a feud with the Smithsonian over who deserved credit for the first airplane, Orville Wright sent the Wright Flyer to the Science Museum in London. It didn't return to the US until 1948.
Neither Wilbur nor Orville Wright received a high school diploma, yet they solved one of the biggest engineering challenges in history.
In 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from vacation and noticed that a mold growing in one of his bacteria dishes had killed the bacteria around it. That mold produced penicillin.
Howard Florey and Ernst Chain developed penicillin into a usable drug in the early 1940s, and they shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Alexander Fleming.
In 1943, scientists in Peoria, Illinois, found a moldy cantaloupe with a strain of penicillin mold that produced far more of the drug, which helped make mass production possible.
In 1941, police officer Albert Alexander became the first patient treated with penicillin. He improved dramatically, but he died after the small supply ran out, even though doctors had been recovering penicillin from his urine to reuse it.
In 1942, Anne Miller became the first American civilian saved by penicillin when it cured her of a life-threatening infection.
In his 1945 Nobel lecture, Alexander Fleming warned that misusing penicillin could lead bacteria to become resistant, a prediction that has become a major global health problem.
By the D-Day invasion in June 1944, US companies had produced about 2.3 million doses of penicillin to treat wounded Allied soldiers.
About 10% of Americans say they're allergic to penicillin, but fewer than 1% actually are, according to the CDC.
Penicillin comes from Penicillium mold, the same group of molds you might find growing on old bread or fruit.
Alexander Fleming's lab at St. Mary's Hospital in London, where he discovered penicillin, is now a museum.
On November 9, 1989, East German official Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced that new travel rules took effect "immediately," and crowds rushed to the Berlin Wall that same night.
On the night of November 9, 1989, East German border guard officer Harald Jäger, facing huge crowds at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, decided to open the gates without official orders.
President Ronald Reagan challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" in a speech in West Berlin on June 12, 1987.
The Berlin Wall stretched about 96 miles (155 km) around West Berlin, cutting the city off from East Germany.
Peaceful protests, especially the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig where about 70,000 people marched on October 9, 1989, pressured East Germany's government weeks before the Wall opened.
East and West Germany officially reunified on October 3, 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall fell.
Days after the Berlin Wall opened in 1989, famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich played Bach in front of it in a spontaneous celebration.
David Hasselhoff performed his song "Looking for Freedom" on top of a section of the Berlin Wall on New Year's Eve 1989, and the moment is still remembered in Germany.
The East Side Gallery is the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall, about 0.8 miles long, and is covered in murals painted by artists from around the world.
Pieces of the Berlin Wall are on display around the world, including at presidential libraries, museums, and public spaces in the US.
Rosa Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 381 days.
Nine months before Rosa Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat.
About 250,000 people attended the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
The famous "I have a dream" section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech was largely improvised after gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out for him to tell the crowd about the dream.
On February 1, 1960, four Black college students sat at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, starting a wave of peaceful sit-ins across the South.
In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first Black student to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, escorted by federal marshals.
In Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and ended legal segregation in public places.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned discriminatory voting practices like literacy tests, which had been used to keep Black Americans from voting.
Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 at age 35, making him the youngest winner at the time.
In 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing country to give women the right to vote in national elections.
Wyoming became the first US territory to give women the right to vote, in 1869, more than 50 years before the 19th Amendment.
The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York was the first women's rights convention in the US, and it launched the American women's suffrage movement.
Susan B. Anthony was arrested and fined in 1872 for voting in the presidential election. She never paid the $100 fine.
Beginning in 1917, suffragists called the Silent Sentinels picketed outside the White House for women's right to vote, the first group to protest there continuously.
Tennessee legislator Harry Burn cast the deciding vote to ratify the 19th Amendment in 1920 after his mother wrote him a letter urging him to support women's suffrage.
The women's suffrage amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1878 and wasn't ratified as the 19th Amendment until 1920, 42 years later.
Some British women over 30 won the right to vote in 1918, but women didn't get equal voting rights with men in the UK until 1928.
Swiss women didn't win the right to vote in national elections until 1971, and one canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, didn't allow women to vote locally until a court forced it in 1990.
Women in Saudi Arabia voted and ran for office for the first time in 2015, in local municipal elections.
The first message sent over ARPANET, the internet's ancestor, went from UCLA to Stanford Research Institute on October 29, 1969. It was supposed to be "LOGIN," but the system crashed after "LO."
The internet and the World Wide Web aren't the same thing. The internet is the global network of connected computers, while the web is a system of pages and links that runs on top of it.
CERN released the World Wide Web software into the public domain in 1993, and Tim Berners-Lee chose not to patent it, which helped the web spread worldwide.
On January 1, 1983, ARPANET officially switched to the TCP/IP protocol, which many consider the true birth of the modern internet.
Computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email in 1971 and chose the @ symbol to separate the user's name from the computer's name.
The first webcam was set up at the University of Cambridge in 1991 to let researchers check whether the coffee pot in the Trojan Room was full.
The first item sold on eBay, then called AuctionWeb, in 1995 was a broken laser pointer that sold for $14.83 to a buyer who collected broken laser pointers.
The first YouTube video, "Me at the zoo," was uploaded on April 23, 2005, by co-founder Jawed Karim and shows him at the San Diego Zoo talking about elephants for 18 seconds.
About 5.5 billion people, roughly two-thirds of the world's population, use the internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
The word "pizza" appears in a Latin document from Gaeta, Italy, in 997 AD, though the food it referred to was very different from modern pizza.
Bruges, Belgium, is home to the Frietmuseum, a museum about the history of French fries.
Early frozen desserts were enjoyed in ancient Persia and China centuries before modern ice cream was developed.
The Toyota Corolla is the best-selling car nameplate in history. Toyota celebrated its 50 millionth Corolla in 2021.
The Ford F-Series debuted in 1948 with the F-1 pickup.
Volkswagen brought back the Beetle as the New Beetle in the late 1990s, then ended production of the modern version in 2019.
The Ford Model T was introduced on October 1, 1908.
The Ford Mustang debuted on April 17, 1964, at the New York World's Fair.
The 1968 movie "Bullitt," starring Steve McQueen, made the Mustang famous with one of the greatest car chases in film history.
The Chevrolet Corvette debuted in 1953, and only 300 were built that first year, all in Polo White with fiberglass bodies.
Engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov is considered the father of the Chevrolet Corvette.
The Porsche 911 has kept its rear-engine layout throughout its history.
The Jeep Wrangler was introduced in 1986 as a 1987 model, replacing the CJ, and its first generation had square headlights.
The Tesla Model Y launched in 2020.
Before vaccines, people in China, India, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire practiced variolation, deliberately infecting someone with mild smallpox material to build immunity.
According to a popular story, Western Union turned down a chance to buy Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent for $100,000, one of the worst business decisions in history.
In 1988, Steffi Graf won all four Grand Slam tournaments and an Olympic gold medal in the same year, the only "Golden Slam" in singles history.
Walter Camp is considered the father of American football. He introduced key features like the line of scrimmage and downs.
The 1972 Miami Dolphins had the only perfect season in NFL history.
Rugby split into rugby union and rugby league in 1895.
California became a state in 1850 without ever being an official US territory.
Texas was an independent country, the Republic of Texas, from 1836 to 1845 before joining the US.
"Six Flags Over Texas" refers to the six countries that have ruled Texas: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and the United States.
The Alamo in San Antonio is a former mission where Texan defenders were defeated in 1836, inspiring the battle cry "Remember the Alamo!"
St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565, is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the US founded by Europeans.
New York City was the first capital of the US under the Constitution, and George Washington was inaugurated at Federal Hall in 1789.
Hawaii became the 50th state on August 21, 1959, and it's the only state made up entirely of islands.
Alaska became the 49th state on January 3, 1959.
Colorado is called the Centennial State because it joined the US in 1876.
Arizona became the 48th state, the last of the contiguous states, on February 14, 1912.
William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681.
Nevada is called the "Battle Born State" because it became a state in 1864 during the Civil War.
The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed most of the medieval city, but only a handful of deaths were officially recorded.
Tokyo was originally called Edo and was renamed in 1868, when it became Japan's imperial capital.
Thailand is the only Southeast Asian country that was never colonized by a European power.
Vladimir Lenin's body has been displayed in a mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square since 1924.
Before settling on "Friends," the show's working titles included "Insomnia Cafe" and "Friends Like Us."
The "Seinfeld" pilot was called "The Seinfeld Chronicles," and it tested so poorly that the show almost didn't get picked up.
"The Simpsons" started in 1987 as short cartoons on "The Tracey Ullman Show."
"I Love Lucy" helped pioneer filming with three cameras in front of a live audience, which preserved episodes on film and made reruns possible.
Lucille Ball became the first woman to run a major TV studio when she took over Desilu Productions.
"The Big Bang Theory," which aired from 2007 to 2019 with 279 episodes, is the longest-running multi-camera sitcom in history.
"M*A*S*H" didn't use a laugh track during operating room scenes.
English scientist Henry Cavendish identified hydrogen as a distinct element in 1766, calling it "inflammable air."
Scottish scientist Daniel Rutherford discovered nitrogen in 1772.
Oxygen was discovered independently by Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley in the 1770s, and Antoine Lavoisier named it.
The Iron Age began around 1200 BC.
Humphry Davy first isolated sodium in 1807 using electrolysis.
The Copper Age came before the Bronze Age.
There were several early saints named Valentine, and little is known about them.
Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997.
Pop songs are often about three to four minutes long partly because early records could only hold about that much music per side.
The "Amen break," a short drum solo from a 1969 song, is one of the most sampled pieces of music in history.
The Grand Ole Opry has been broadcasting since 1925, making it the longest-running radio broadcast in US history.
In music history, the "Classical" period specifically means roughly 1750 to 1820, the era of Haydn and Mozart.
The first jazz recording was made by the Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917.
In his will, Shakespeare left his wife Anne Hathaway his "second-best bed," a line historians still debate.
Almost none of Shakespeare's original handwritten manuscripts survive.
Jane Austen died in 1817 at age 41.
Agatha Christie's play "The Mousetrap" has run continuously in London since 1952, making it the longest-running play in history.
The hurdy-gurdy's ancestor, the organistrum, was played by two people.
The hurdy-gurdy was linked to beggars and street musicians.
Luray Caverns were discovered in 1878.
A nyckelharpa appears on a church gate on the Swedish island of Gotland dated to about 1350.
Johannes Vermeer was largely forgotten until critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger rediscovered him in the 1860s.
Georgia O'Keeffe rejected Freudian interpretations of her flower paintings.
In the Middle Ages, onions were sometimes used to pay rent.
The Madonna lily is one of the oldest cultivated flowers.
"Orchidelirium" was a Victorian craze for collecting orchids.
In 2003, an amateur named Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker Main Event and $2.5 million after qualifying through an $86 online tournament, sparking a nationwide poker boom.
Harold Vanderbilt invented contract bridge in 1925 while on a cruise.
Ely Culbertson popularized bridge in the 1930s.
Bridge descends from whist.
Gin rummy is often said to have been invented in 1909 by Elwood Baker and his son.
Hearts descends from an old game called Reversis.
Stephen Hawking's 1988 book "A Brief History of Time" sold millions of copies.
Engineer Charles Ellis did much of the math for the Golden Gate Bridge but wasn't officially credited until 2007.
About 200,000 people walked across the Golden Gate Bridge on opening day in 1937.
The Panama Canal opened on August 15, 1914.
A tunnel under the English Channel was first proposed in 1802.
The first piece of the International Space Station, the Zarya module, launched in 1998.
The Great Wall of China was built over about 2,000 years.
The Hoover Dam was called Boulder Dam from 1933 to 1947.
Sun Yat-sen proposed a dam on the Yangtze in 1919.
John Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge, died of an injury before construction began.
The Suez Canal was closed from 1967 to 1975.
The transistor is the most manufactured human-made object in history, with an estimated 13 sextillion made by 2018.
Ancient Egyptian civilization lasted about 3,000 years, longer than any other ancient civilization.
The first recorded labor strike in history happened in ancient Egypt around 1157 BC, when tomb builders stopped work because their rations were late.
Women in ancient Egypt could own property and get divorced.
The Indus Valley civilization was at its peak from about 2600 to 1900 BC.
A 2017 DNA study found that a famous Viking warrior grave in Birka, Sweden, belonged to a woman.
The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history.
Cannon Beach is named after a cannon that washed ashore from a shipwreck in 1846.
Portland was named in 1845 by a coin toss between founders from Portland, Maine, and Boston.
Astoria, founded in 1811 as Fort Astoria by John Jacob Astor's fur company, is the oldest US settlement west of the Rocky Mountains.
Bend got its name from "Farewell Bend," a spot on the Deschutes River.
Bend's Old Mill District was once a lumber mill.
The Civilian Conservation Corps built the Silver Falls Lodge in the 1930s.
On October 16, 1846, dentist William Morton gave the first public demonstration of surgery using ether anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital, a date now called "Ether Day."
One of the first X-ray images ever taken showed the bones of Röntgen's wife's hand, with her wedding ring.
Before germ theory, many people believed diseases were caused by "bad air," called miasma.
Surgeons once wore bloody coats as a badge of experience.
The first person treated with insulin was 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, in 1922.
Some of the first blood transfusions, in the 1660s, used blood from animals like lambs.
The first stethoscope was a wooden tube for one ear.
Swiss scientist Friedrich Miescher first discovered DNA in 1869.
Early pacemakers were external and had to be plugged into a wall outlet.
Raymond Damadian performed the first full-body MRI scan of a human in 1977.