The 1900s

The century that moved fastest. 38 stories, a few minutes each.

The Great Molasses FloodOn January 15, 1919, a storage tank in Boston's North End collapsed and released 2.3 million gallons of molasses in a wave that reached speeds of…
The Woman Who Sold the Eiffel TowerContrary to popular legend, Victor Lustig did not actually sell the Eiffel Tower. He sold the rights to scrap it, which in 1925 seemed like a…
The Wow! SignalOn August 15, 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio detected something that still has no definitive explanation. The signal lasted 72 seconds, arrived at…
Bubble Wrap Was Invented as WallpaperIn 1957, two engineers in New Jersey sealed two shower curtains together and created a sheet of plastic filled with air pockets. Alfred Fielding…
The Tunguska EventOn the morning of June 30, 1908, something exploded in the sky above a remote stretch of Siberian forest.
Australia's Great Emu WarIn 1932, the Australian government deployed soldiers with machine guns against a population of emus. The emus won.
Why Shopping Carts Needed Paid ActorsWhen Sylvan Goldman introduced the first shopping cart at his Humpty Dumpty supermarket in Oklahoma City on June 4, 1937, customers refused to use it.
The Inventor of Pringles Is Buried in a Pringles CanFredric Baur spent most of his career at Procter & Gamble developing food storage technologies. He created frying oils, engineered freeze-dried ice…
How Velcro Was Inspired by BurrsIn 1941, Swiss engineer George de Mestral took his Irish pointer for a walk through the woods near the Alps. When they returned home, both man and…
Tsutomu YamaguchiTsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as having survived both atomic bombings. He was three…
The Exploding Whale of Florence, OregonOn November 9, 1970, a 45-foot sperm whale washed ashore near Florence, Oregon. The carcass weighed eight tons and was already decomposing. The…
How the Microwave Oven Was Accidentally InventedIn 1945, a self-taught engineer named Percy Spencer was walking through a radar testing room at Raytheon when he noticed the chocolate bar in his…
CentraliaThe underground fire beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been burning since 1962. Experts estimate there is enough coal in the seams under the…
How Post-it Notes Were Accidentally InventedIn 1968, Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M, was trying to develop a super-strong adhesive for the aerospace industry. He failed.
How the Caesar Salad Was Invented in TijuanaThe Caesar salad is not named after the Roman emperor. It's named after Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who ran a restaurant in Tijuana, and…
The Door to HellIn the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan, about 160 miles north of the capital, there's a crater that has been on fire for over fifty years. It…
How the Slinky Was Accidentally InventedIn 1943, Richard James was a naval engineer at the William Cramp & Sons shipyards in Philadelphia, working on a problem that had nothing to do with…
The Zone of SilenceIn the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, where the states of Durango, Chihuahua, and Coahuila meet, there's a patch of scrubland about thirty…
Murphy's LawThere was a real Murphy. His name was Edward A. Murphy Jr., a captain in the U.S. Air Force, and the law that bears his name originated from a 1949…
The Marree ManOn June 26, 1998, a charter pilot named Trec Smith was flying between Marree and Coober Pedy in the South Australian outback when he noticed…
The Collyer BrothersIn March 1947, the New York City Police Department received an anonymous tip that someone had died inside a decaying brownstone at 2078 Fifth…
The BloopIn the summer of 1997, hydrophones operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up an unusual sound in the South Pacific.
The Woman Who Fell 33,000 FeetOn January 26, 1972, JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 exploded at 33,330 feet over Czechoslovakia. A bomb planted in the forward cargo hold by…
The Dyatlov Pass IncidentIn February 1959, nine experienced hikers died under unexplained circumstances in the northern Ural Mountains of Russia. The group, led by…
The Man Who Ate an Entire AirplaneMichel Lotito was a French entertainer who spent his career eating things that were not food.
The Great Stork DerbyWhen Charles Vance Millar died in Toronto on October 31, 1929, his will contained a clause that would consume the city's attention for a decade.…
The Tanganyika Laughter EpidemicOn January 30, 1962, three girls at a boarding school in Kashasha, a village near the western shore of Lake Victoria in what was then Tanganyika,…
FordlandiaIn 1928, Henry Ford purchased 2.5 million acres of land along the Tapajós River in the Brazilian Amazon and built a town called Fordlandia. His…
The Day Sweden Switched Sides of the RoadOn September 3, 1967, at precisely 4:50 in the morning, every vehicle in Sweden stopped.
The Inventor Killed by His Own InventionOn February 4, 1912, Franz Reichelt climbed to the first platform of the Eiffel Tower and jumped. He was wearing a combination overcoat-parachute…
Cher AmiIn October 1918, during the final weeks of World War I, a battalion of the U.S. 77th Infantry Division advanced into the Argonne Forest in…
Hedy LamarrHedy Lamarr was one of the biggest movie stars of the 1940s. She was also the co-inventor of a frequency-hopping communication system that laid the…
The Night WitchesDuring World War II, the Soviet Union formed three all-female air regiments. The most famous was the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, which the Germans…
How Lego Nearly Went BankruptBy 2003, the Lego Group was losing roughly a million dollars a day. The Danish toymaker that had defined construction play for half a century was…
The 1904 Olympic MarathonThe marathon at the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis is widely considered the most absurd sporting event in modern history. Of the 32 runners who…
Bobbie the Wonder DogIn August 1923, a family from Silverton, Oregon, lost their dog while traveling in Wolcott, Indiana—roughly 2,500 miles from home. Six months…
The Invention of the ZipperThe zipper took more than forty years and three inventors to get right, which is remarkable given how simple the finished product looks. Its…
The Woman Who Paid Kenya to Plant TreesIn 1977, Wangari Maathai planted seven trees in her backyard in Nairobi. It was World Environment Day, and the seedlings were the start of…