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149 short, true stories behind the things you use every day. Each one names its source.
In 1943 the US banned sliced bread.
Answer to read the story.For seven weeks, partly to save on wrapping. Read the story
A chess machine kept its secret for 84 years
In 1770 Wolfgang von Kempelen showed the court in Vienna a life-size figure in a turban, seated at a cabinet that seemed full of gears. It played chess and usually won.
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Two teams put the same space game in a coin box in 1971
Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck wired a $14,000 minicomputer to a walnut console in Stanford's student union and charged 10 cents a game.
The game that named a genre is set in a real Kentucky cave
Will Crowther and his wife Pat, both programmers, spent years mapping Kentucky's Mammoth Cave.
Pokémon began with a boy's bug hunts and a Game Boy cable
As a boy outside Tokyo, Satoshi Tajiri caught insects in fields that were later paved over. Years later he heard the new Game Boy would come with a cable linking two consoles.
Atari really did bury its games in a New Mexico landfill
In 1983 trucks from Atari's warehouse in El Paso dumped crushed cartridges and consoles into the landfill at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and workers poured concrete over them.
The rules of a 4,500-year-old board game survived on clay
In the 1920s and 1930s archaeologists dug up boards for the Royal Game of Ur, but nobody knew how to play it.
Lincoln's new beard pushed a printer into board games
In 1860 Milton Bradley, a printer in Springfield, Massachusetts, sold a portrait of the Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln.
A gene that shapes our brains and hands is named after Sonic
In 1980 two scientists in Heidelberg described a fruit fly gene whose mutant larvae were stubby and covered in tiny spikes, so it was called hedgehog.
Lab bosses at MIT played a maze game and tried to stop it
In 1973 three high school students in a NASA work-study program made Maze, a game in which players walk a 3D maze and shoot each other.
Online avatars are named for a Hindu god's descent to Earth
In Hinduism an avatar is a god's descent to Earth in bodily form.
149 stories. Ten free a day.
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