True or False - Weird History Tidbits

1. Walter Knott got rich off of, and popularized, the boysenberry. So many tourists visited his farm that it would be converted into a theme park—Knott's Berry Farm.

2. At a patron's soirée, Mozart requested cheese and meat between slices of bread so his fingers would not get oily. The upper-class dinner guests copied the trendy musician, leading to the "sandwich" becoming a common food item.

3. Famed pop artist Andy Warhol managed and produced the band Velvet Underground. Their song "Waiting for the Man" ranked 81 on Rolling Stone Magazine's top 500 songs of all time.

4. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck was a billiards prodigy. In fact, he invited other enthusiasts, including Charles Dickens and French President Jules Grévy, to his estate just to play. Official German records suggest that he rarely lost.

5. Many passengers survived the Hindenburg airship disaster. In fact, the last survivor died in 2019.

6. Speaking of the Hindenburg, a vaudeville acrobat called Ben Dova smashed a window to escape the crashing blimp. He plunged 20 feet and did an acrobatic roll to avoid serious injury.

7. Long after the United States and Russia had sent animals into space, France sent a cat named Félicette. It even survived the 1963 journey, lived a long life, and became a "celebrity": Felix the Cat is an homage to the feline astronaut.

8. President Herbert Hoover was eccentric throughout his life. In Stanford's "Pioneer Program", Hoover tried to cure a stomach ache with pioneer ingenuity; he consumed writing chalk with meals for several weeks. He was hospitalized with an impacted bowel and failed all his classes except mathematics.

9. Future Australian prime minister Terry Digham married a woman named Terri Digham in 1929. No genealogical connection has been found between the two.

10. Thinking himself King Richard III, a painter with dissociative disorder tried to assassinate President Andrew Jackson. Fortunately, his pistols misfired and Davy Crockett wrestled the would-be assassin to the ground.

11. Following the Titanic disaster, White Star Lines collected a large amount of insurance money, barely any of which went to survivors or the families of victims. Instead, it built the Olympic in 1913. Just like its predecessor, it struck an ice berg and sank.

12. The 1904 St. Louis Olympics saw few international athletes attend, so 76 of 97 gold medals went to Americans. It was so lopsided, that Canadian athletes began a "discus fight" against the Americans, which ended in a dozen broken bones and one dead Canadian.

13. During the French Revolution, the Cult of Reason was created to replace Catholicism as a state religion. It was a hodge-podge of philosophical ideas and was replaced by Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being. Robespierre's cult was also terribly received, and he would be ousted from power in the month of Thermidor (the leaders of the French Revolution had changed the calendar).

14. In university, Benito Mussolini was an extremely proficient calcio balilla player (foosball). The game was extremely popular at the turn of the 20th century, and the young Mussolini gained the nickname "Il Duce" by dominating a university tournament.

15. Mackenzie King, Canada's 22-year prime minister who led the country during World War II, believed in the occult. He regularly held séances to communicate with his deceased parents, Leonardo da Vinci, and even some of his past pet dogs.

16. The Vitruvian Man is a famous diagram of the ideal human form by Leonardo da Vinci. When the circle that da Vinci drew around the man was analyzed by a computer in 1982, the circle's radius to circumference ratio was accurate to 17 digits of pi. This is more accurate than any other circle known to be drawn by a human hand.