Explore our latest articles

A Fish With Red Lipstick, a Glowing Shark and 8 More Real Animals That Look Fake

A fish that seems to wear red lipstick, a 6-foot shark that glows in the dark and a bat whose tongue tucks away beside...

The First Photo Ever Taken Needed 8 Hours of Sunlight on a Pewter Plate in France

The first photograph in history looks more like a smudged charcoal sketch than a picture. Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made it in 1826 or...

The ZIP Code Only Arrived on July 1, 1963, and Americans Did Not Want It at First

The five-digit ZIP code feels as if it has always been part of an American address, but it only started on July 1, 1963....

Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Has Been Guarded Around the Clock Since 1937

On November 11, 1921, the United States dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery to honor an unidentified American killed...

A NASA Engineer Invented the Super Soaker, and Over 250 Million Have Sold Since 1990

The Super Soaker, the water gun that ruled American summers in the 1990s, was invented by an actual rocket scientist. Lonnie Johnson came up...

Boston’s 1919 Molasses Flood Sent a 25-Foot Wave Through the North End, Killing 21

On January 15, 1919, a badly built storage tank in Boston's North End burst open and released as many as 2.3 million gallons of...

Tupperware Parties Hit $25 Million in Sales by 1954, Then the Party Slowly Ended

Tupperware did not sell well in stores at first, because shoppers could not work out how to close the lids. Home parties fixed that,...

The First Coast-to-Coast Drive in 1903 Began With a $50 Bet and Took 63 Days

In 1903, a Vermont doctor named H. Nelson Jackson bet $50 that he could drive a car from San Francisco to New York City....

Ceuta Is a Spanish City in Africa, a Leftover of Portugal’s 1415 Conquest

Ceuta is a self governing Spanish city on the coast of North Africa, and its only land neighbor is Morocco. It is Spanish because...

Old Tjikko, a 9,500-Year-Old Spruce in Sweden, Is Not the World’s Oldest Tree

Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce on Fulufjället Mountain in Sweden, is estimated to be more than 9,500 years old. That puts its start around...

Old West Saloons Rarely Relied on Swinging Doors Alone, Whatever Westerns Show

Swinging batwing doors were real in the Old West, but most saloons that had them also had a solid, lockable door right behind or...

Monopoly Began as Lizzie Magie’s 1904 Landlord’s Game, a Warning About Greed

The board game Monopoly grew out of The Landlord's Game, which Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie patented in 1904. She designed it as an attack on...

Abraham Lincoln Won the 1860 Election With Just 39.8% in a Four-Way Race

Abraham Lincoln became president in 1860 with only 39.8% of the popular vote. He beat three serious rivals, two of them Democrats, in a...

McSorley’s in New York Has Poured Just Two Kinds of Ale for Over 150 Years

McSorley's Old Ale House at 15 East 7th Street in Manhattan has sold exactly two drinks for almost its entire life: light ale and...

A Bet Over One Cocktail Sent Joe Duckworth Into a Hurricane’s Eye in 1943

On July 27, 1943, Army Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Duckworth flew a small training plane straight into a hurricane off Galveston, Texas, because...

FDR Moved Thanksgiving Up a Week in 1939, and 23 States Refused to Follow

In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving one week earlier to give stores more shopping days before Christmas. The country split almost down...

Ring Around the Rosie Is Probably Not About the Plague, and 9 More Rhyme Origins

Generations of children have been told that Ring Around the Rosie describes the Great Plague of London in 1665, with its rosy rash, pockets...

Galileo’s Middle Finger, Chopin’s Heart and 13 More Body Parts You Can Still See

Almost a century after Galileo was buried, an antiquarian and an anatomist removed his middle finger, two other fingers and a tooth, and the...

Alaska Natives Aged 12 to 80 Guarded 6,640 Miles of U.S. Coast in World War II

In June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes bombed Dutch Harbor in Alaska's remote Aleutian Islands, and Japanese forces then occupied the...

Sequoyah Could Not Read Any Language, Yet Spent 12 Years Inventing Cherokee Writing

Sequoyah could not read or write in English or any other language when he set out, in 1809, to give the Cherokee Nation a...

Trending Now

Subscribe

© 2026 FunTrivia. All Rights Reserved.