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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
Hubble's mirror was polished precisely to the wrong shape
When the Hubble Space Telescope reached orbit in 1990, its pictures came back blurred.
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He waited eight years for Venus, and that day it was cloudy
In 1761 the French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil was at sea when Venus crossed the Sun, on a ship rolling too hard to measure anything.
They blamed pigeons for the faint glow left by the Big Bang
In 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found a faint, steady noise in a big horn antenna in New Jersey. It came from every direction, day and night.
The first stethoscope was a few sheets of paper, rolled up
In 1816 the Paris doctor René Laennec needed to hear a young woman's heart, and putting his ear to her chest was out of the question.
In 1851 a pendulum let Parisians watch the Earth turn
Léon Foucault hung a 62-pound ball on a 220-foot wire from the dome of the Panthéon in Paris. Its swing slowly turned, about 11 degrees an hour.
Congress once set aside money to paint the Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty was copper-colored when it was dedicated in 1886.
Helium turned up in sunlight 27 years before it did on Earth
During a total eclipse in 1868, astronomers saw a yellow line in the light from the edge of the Sun that matched nothing known on Earth.
The first Atlantic cable's chief electrician burned it out
In August 1858 a telegraph cable finally joined Ireland to Newfoundland, and New York fired a 100-gun salute. Signals crawled through it at about two minutes a letter.
The apple never hit Newton, and his tree is still growing
Isaac Newton told the apple story himself, late in life, over tea under some apple trees in 1726.
An argument over frog legs produced the first battery
In the 1780s Luigi Galvani found that a dead frog's legs twitched when he joined them to brass and iron, and decided the electricity came from the frog.
149 stories. Ten free a day.
In the app these are the Learn cards.