15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, March 1, 2025
Thomas Edison is known for stealing many of the inventions for which he is credited, and that has now given him a bit of a reputation as a fraud. If you were around in the year 1900 and were looking at Edison products, you might have found yourself victim to an even more direct kind of fraud. You might have found yourself buying an Edison product called the Mago-Electric Vitalizer, which you wore on your head or chest to cure your diseases.
This device was not created by the famous Thomas Edison, however. Fins out who made it below, along with some information on precious ham and the dangers of ghosts.
Dust in the Wind
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 sounds like a Chicago problem. But to replace the destroyed buildings, they had to cut down all the trees in the town of Singapore, Michigan. The town now had no way to hold back blowing sand, which eventually covered the whole town, destroying it.
Watchful Protector
While Batman Begins was filming, and a stunt driver was transporting the Batmobile from one shooting location to another, a Chicago man caught sight of the vehicle and deliberately drove into it. He didn’t realize it was a film shoot and said that he believed he'd seen an alien spacecraft.
’Snot the Intended Purpose
When Kleenex first made facial tissues, they sold them exclusively as a product for removing makeup. Only when the product was out in the wild did they learn customers used it more for blowing their noses, and the company now adapted the marketing accordingly.
What He Wrote Down
Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” had an alternate version with all-different lyrics. The original, unlike the famous one, spent all its verses explaining he actual concept of losing yourself in music. This proved uninteresting, and it was the revised one that won the Oscar.
Earth’s Chief Export
When Apollo 11 went to the Moon, the first entity to emerge from the lander and touch the lunar surface was not Neil Armstrong. It was a bag of trash that Neil Armstrong chucked out. The bag included the astronauts’ bodily waste.
Tram Tramp
The Sagrada Família church in Barcelona has been under construction since 1882. The architect, Antoni Gaudí, died in 1926 when a tram hit him. The tram driver paid no attention to the man he had hit, thinking it was a beggar and therefore deserved no concern.
The Town Bike
Biking was quite popular in Oregon at the end of the 19th century. Then sex workers took to using bikes to show themselves off. Then the public assumed that anyone who rode a bike had to be selling sex, and people suddenly decided they didn’t want to be seen cycling anymore.
Speak Ill of the Dead
Australian TV programs sometimes start with the following warning message: “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that the following program contains images and voices of people who have died.” This relates to the cultural practice whereby a dead person should not be depicted and sometimes should not even be named.
New Video Just Dropped
When two people in the crowd at a concert start to brawl, some would suggest alerting security. At a 2014 Miley Cyrus concert, Cyrus instead addressed the issue by taking out a phone and filming the fighters.
Precious Flesh
One treasured artifact in the National Palace Museum in Taipei is known simply as the Meat-Shaped Stone. It dates to the Qing Dynasty and has been carved to look like a piece of pork.
Cutting Off One’s Nose
High-class European food used to be a lot more spicy, before the 17th century. But when spices became less expensive thanks to improved trade, gourmets starting associating spices with common people and switched to a new theory of food that says food must taste like “itself.”
A Secret Chord
The song “High Voltage” is an especially appropriate one for the band AC/DC. Not only is the title about electricity, but the chorus contains the chord A, then C, then D — and then, after a little bit, C again.
Mysteries of Space
The Milky Way chocolate bar was not named for our galaxy but for a type of milkshake that was popular at the time. Though we had been calling a certain feature in the night’s sky “the milky way” since Ancient Greece, people in the early 1920s did not yet know galaxies existed.
Cataplexy
The cat that Marlon Brando holds early on in The Godfather was a random stray that showed up in the studio. The director dropped it in Brando’s lap with zero explanation, either in the script or delivered aloud, and everyone just accepted his.
Family Court
Thomas Edison once took someone to court for selling quack products under the Edison name. The defendant genuinely was named Edison. It was Thomas Alva Edison Jr., Thomas Edison’s son.
