109 Fun Facts About Obscure

Which San Francisco resident declared himself 'Emperor of these United States' in 1859?

Joshua Norton was a bankrupt rice speculator when he made the claim. San Francisco played along: restaurants honoured the notes he printed, and some 10,000 people filed past his body when he died in 1880.

Which group murdered the emperor Pertinax and auctioned his throne in AD 193?

The Praetorian Guard, the emperor's own bodyguard, sold the throne to the senator Didius Julianus. He was killed 66 days later as Septimius Severus marched on Rome, and Severus dismissed the Guard.

Kongō Gumi, described as the world's oldest documented company, was founded in AD 578 to build what?

Buddhist temples were its trade for some 1,400 years, starting with Shitennō-ji in what is now Osaka. The family firm lost its independence in 2006, when debt forced its sale to Takamatsu Construction.

Sir Nils Olav, colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King's Guard, is what kind of animal?

A penguin: the King's Guard adopted a king penguin at Edinburgh Zoo in 1972, and its return visits have brought him promotions and, in 2008, a knighthood. The name has passed down through three birds.

The self-declared Principality of Sealand sits on what kind of offshore structure?

A wartime sea fort: Britain built Roughs Tower off its east coast in World War II to fend off enemy mine-laying aircraft. Pirate-radio broadcaster Roy Bates occupied the decommissioned fort in 1967 and declared it a principality.

Canada and Denmark's decades-long 'Whisky War' was a friendly dispute over which Arctic land?

Hans Island is a barren rock midway between the two countries' Arctic coasts. Each side's visitors planted a flag and left a bottle of whisky or schnapps, until a 2022 deal split it and gave them a shared land border.

Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby famously avoids which letter for 50,000 words?

E was kept out by force: Wright tied down that type-bar on his typewriter so none could slip in. He said the hardest part was the past tense, since nearly every verb ending in '-ed' was off limits.

Which king called smoking 'loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose' in a 1604 pamphlet against tobacco?

James I wrote 'A Counterblaste to Tobacco' the year after he took the English throne, then slapped a heavy import duty on the leaf. His subjects kept smoking, and the Crown collected the duties.

Roughly how long did Shizo Kanakuri take to finish the slowest Olympic marathon on record?

54 years: beaten by the heat at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, he stopped at a local family's home and dropped out. He was invited back in 1967, in his seventies, to cross the line.

Which Grand Slam staged tennis's longest match, won 70–68 in the fifth set in 2010?

Wimbledon had no fifth-set tie-break then, so John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played on for 11 hours 5 minutes over three days. The tournament added a final-set tie-break in 2019.

Why was cricket's last 'timeless' Test, in Durban in 1939, abandoned as a draw?

England had a ship to catch: at 654 for 5 they were just 42 short of the 696 they needed when they had to leave or miss the boat home. Cricket has not staged a timeless Test since.

In 1985, computer maker Symbolics was first to register what?

A .com domain: symbolics.com was registered on 15 March 1985, and only five more .com addresses followed that year. The computer maker later went bankrupt, but its address lived on and was sold in 2009.

What did the first ever SMS text message, sent over the Vodafone network in December 1992, say?

'Merry Christmas' went from engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone director who was at a Christmas party with a newly launched Orbitel phone. Jarvis did not text back.

Which keyboard symbol did Spanish merchants once use for the arroba, a weight of about 25 pounds?

The at sign (@) was ledger shorthand for the arroba, which is why Spanish and Portuguese speakers still call the symbol by that name. Ray Tomlinson borrowed it for email addresses in 1971.

The distress signal SOS was first adopted in 1905 by which country, while British ships still sent CQD?

Germany wrote the signal into its radio rules in 1905 because three dots, three dashes, three dots makes a distinctive pattern in Morse code. The letters stand for nothing: 'save our souls' was coined later.

Which country's national anthem has the oldest lyrics of any, taken from a poem more than 1,000 years old?

Japan's 'Kimigayo' takes its words from an anonymous poem in a 10th-century anthology, but its tune dates only from 1880, and it did not become the country's legal national anthem until 1999.

Along with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, which country's national anthem has no official lyrics?

Spain's 'Marcha Real' leaves its athletes to hum along: 'la, la, la', as the head of its Olympic Committee put it. His 2007 competition to find words drew thousands of entries, but none was adopted.

Which country's national anthem is the only one still set to the melody of Britain's 'God Save the King'?

Liechtenstein adopted the tune when it was common property in central Europe: Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Switzerland all sang their own words to it. The Swiss dropped it in 1961; the principality kept it.

The ngultrum, pegged to India's rupee, is which country's currency?

Bhutan launched the ngultrum in 1974 at par with the Indian rupee, which is accepted alongside it: the economy is tied closely to India's through trade and monetary links.

Which Pacific islands did Captain Cook name the 'Friendly Islands'?

Tonga earned the name for its warm welcome in the 1770s, yet by an account published decades later some of its chiefs plotted to kill Cook during an entertainment in his honour and held back only because they could not agree on a plan.

Which is the only US state capital with neither a McDonald's nor a Starbucks?

Montpelier has only about 8,000 residents, the fewest of any state capital, and its downtown is given over to small, locally owned businesses rather than national chains.

Decades before Texas, which US state was a de facto independent republic for 14 years, with its own coinage?

Vermont went its own way in 1777 because New York and New Hampshire both claimed its land. Its founders banned adult slavery, and in 1791 it joined the Union as the 14th state.

Which Asian country is 'doubly landlocked', meaning every one of its neighbours is landlocked too?

Uzbekistan's five neighbours are all landlocked too, so anything it exports must cross at least two borders to reach an ocean. Only one other country in the world is in the same position.

Which country sits atop a sunken 'eighth continent' that lies 94 percent under the Pacific?

New Zealand and New Caledonia are the main parts of Zealandia still above water. The rest sank as its crust stretched thin while it pulled away from Gondwana, roughly 80 million years ago.

The oldest known pieces of Earth, 4.4-billion-year-old crystals from the Jack Hills, are grains of which mineral?

Zircon is almost indestructible, and it traps radioactive atoms that decay into lead at a known rate, so every grain carries its own clock. The Jack Hills grains outlasted the rocks they first grew in.

Lake Hillier, long famous for its bubble-gum pink water, lies on an island off which country?

Australia's Lake Hillier owes its colour to salt-loving microbes. A deluge in 2022 diluted the salt and the pink faded, though scientists expect it to return as the water level drops.

Which vertebrate has the longest known lifespan, estimated at anywhere from 272 to more than 500 years?

The Greenland shark was aged by carbon-dating the lenses of its eyes: of 28 sharks tested, the oldest was put at about 392 years, give or take 120. The species is not ready to breed until it is around 150.

Which microscopic eight-legged animals have survived direct exposure to the vacuum of outer space?

Tardigrades, or water bears, spent days exposed to open space on a European satellite flight in 2007 and revived back on Earth. Their trick is to dry out into a dormant state that also resists radiation and deep cold.

The male platypus, one of very few venomous mammals, delivers its venom from where?

Spurs on its hind feet are fed by a venom gland in each upper leg. Output peaks in the mating season, so the venom is thought to be a weapon against rival males; a sting is agonising for a person but not lethal.

How do frigatebirds sleep on ocean trips that last for weeks?

In short naps on the wing: brain recordings caught them dozing in bursts as they circled upward on rising air, often with half the brain awake. It added up to about 40 minutes a day, a fraction of their sleep on land.

A decade before Laika the dog reached orbit, which were the first animals launched into space?

Fruit flies rode a captured V-2 rocket up from New Mexico in 1947 so that scientists could see what radiation at that height would do to them. Their capsule parachuted down and they were recovered alive.

What was the first food and drink ever consumed on the Moon?

Communion bread and wine: Buzz Aldrin, a Presbyterian elder, took them in the lunar module soon after landing. NASA kept the moment off the air because an atheist campaigner had sued over Apollo 8's Bible reading.

Which planet's discoverer wanted to name the new world 'George's Star', in honour of Britain's King George III?

Uranus stayed Georgium Sidus in Britain's official almanac until 1850. Astronomers abroad put forward names of their own, and Johann Bode's choice from Greek myth won out.

Which element was first detected in the Sun's spectrum during an 1868 eclipse?

Helium first showed up as a line in sunlight that matched no known element, so it was named after helios, the Greek for sun. It was 1895 before anyone isolated it on Earth, from a radioactive mineral.

Which metal, solid at room temperature, will melt into a puddle in the palm of your hand?

Gallium melts at 29.76 °C, well below body temperature. Mixed with indium and tin it stays liquid even below freezing, which makes the alloy a non-toxic stand-in for mercury in thermometers.

In legend, the goatherd Kaldi discovered which drink after his goats grew frisky from nibbling a wild shrub?

Coffee's best-known origin story is set in ninth-century Ethiopia, but nobody wrote a version of it down until a treatise printed in Rome in 1671, which is why historians file it under legend.

Which condiment's name may come from a Hokkien Chinese word for the brine of pickled fish?

Ketchup first meant a sharp Asian fish sauce, though the word's exact origin is uncertain. English cooks copied it with mushrooms, walnuts and oysters, and the first known tomato recipe dates from 1812.

By company lore, which sauce was born when two English chemists left a foul first batch in a cellar for months?

Worcestershire sauce, by Lea & Perrins lore, was first judged too strong to eat. About 18 months later the chemists tasted the forgotten barrel again, found it had mellowed, and were selling bottles by the late 1830s.

The Panama hat actually originates from which country?

Ecuador's weavers shipped their toquilla straw hats through Panama, where Gold Rush travellers bought them, and the name stuck. Theodore Roosevelt sealed it by wearing one on his 1906 visit to Panama.

Before the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi pitched a giant robed woman with a torch as a lighthouse for what?

The Suez Canal was to get 'Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia', a peasant woman holding a torch at its entrance. Egypt's ruler rejected the design, and Bartholdi soon had another colossal torch-bearer in mind for New York.

Which painting was stolen in 1911 by a workman who helped build its glass case?

The Mona Lisa was taken from the Louvre by Vincenzo Peruggia, who was caught two years later trying to sell it in Florence. The media frenzy that followed the theft made the portrait famous around the world.

Which van Gogh painting, bought by Anna Boch in 1890, is often called the only one he sold in his lifetime?

The Red Vineyard fetched 400 francs from Boch, a painter and the sister of a friend. The legend overstates things, though: a Paris paint dealer had bought an earlier canvas, and Vincent's brother Theo sold another in London.

Which humorist's 1915 novel has the line 'Elementary, my dear Watson'?

P. G. Wodehouse has his hero murmur 'Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary' in 'Psmith, Journalist'. Doyle's Holmes says 'elementary' and 'my dear Watson', but never together as one line.

Ruby on screen, Dorothy's magic shoes are what colour in L. Frank Baum's original novel?

Silver shoes carry Dorothy home in the 1900 book. A screenwriter on the 1939 film is credited with turning them ruby, reputedly so they would stand out in Technicolor.

Which philosopher declined the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, saying a writer should not become an institution?

Jean-Paul Sartre had written ahead asking not to be chosen, unaware that the Swedish Academy's decisions were irrevocable. He had turned down France's Legion of Honour in 1945 as well.

For three years during World War II, Oscar statuettes were made of what?

Painted plaster stood in for the usual gold-plated metal because metal was in short supply. Once the war ended, the Academy invited winners to trade their plaster figures for the real thing.

Why is one name in the 1984 Edmonton Oilers' Stanley Cup engraving covered with Xs?

The owner had added his father: Peter Pocklington slipped Basil Pocklington's name in among the champions, and since Basil had no role with the team, the league had it stamped over with a row of Xs.

Why does no complete broadcast recording of Super Bowl I (1967) survive?

Both networks wiped the tapes: CBS and NBC each aired the game, then reused the costly videotape. A private recording surfaced from an attic decades later, missing halftime and most of the third quarter.

The 1900 Paris Olympics were the only Games to use which live animals as shooting targets?

Pigeons were released one at a time, and a shooter was out after two misses. The event was not held again, and its results are left off the IOC's official list.

Which country's islands stretch across all four hemispheres, north, south, east and west?

Kiribati straddles both the equator and the 180th meridian. In 1995 it pushed the International Date Line east so that the whole country shared one calendar day, which also made it the first to see in the year 2000.

At just 21 square kilometres, which Pacific island is the world's third-smallest country?

Nauru is a single island of phosphate rock, and more than a century of strip-mining laid waste to most of its interior. The mining wealth was largely mismanaged, and the country came to depend heavily on aid.

Which country skipped Friday 30 December 2011 by jumping across the International Date Line?

Samoa jumped west across the line to share a working week with its biggest trading partners. That undid a switch made in 1892, when it had moved to the eastern side to trade more easily with the United States.

The shortest recorded war in history, in 1896, was fought between Britain and which sultanate?

Zanzibar's new sultan had taken the throne without British consent and ignored an ultimatum to leave the palace. Royal Navy ships opened fire at 9 am, and well within the hour he had fled and the war was over.

In 1932, soldiers with machine guns were sent to cull some 20,000 of which crop-raiding birds, and largely failed?

Emus scattered faster than the gunners could aim, and at one ambush the gun jammed almost at once. The army pulled out within weeks, and the press dubbed the whole affair the 'Emu War'.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person officially recognised by his government as having survived what?

Both atomic bombings: an engineer on a business trip, he was burned at Hiroshima, went home to Nagasaki and was describing the blast to his boss when the second bomb fell three days later. He lived to 93.

What was 'dord', which appeared on page 771 of Webster's New International Dictionary in 1934?

A ghost word: a slip reading 'D or d', meant to list abbreviations for density, was misread as a single word and printed as an entry. An editor caught it in 1939, but it took until 1947 to vanish for good.

How did Frederick Lorz cover much of the 1904 Olympic marathon before being crowned with a wreath?

In a car: Lorz dropped out with cramps, rode for miles in his manager's automobile, then jogged into the stadium to be hailed as the winner. Banned for life, he was reinstated and won the Boston Marathon the next year.

The word 'nerd' first appeared in print in which 1950 children's book?

If I Ran the Zoo has its narrator vow to bring back 'a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too'. The slang sense was first recorded a year later, and dictionaries say only that the book may have helped it along.

What was missing when the Mary Celeste was found deserted in 1872?

The ship's lifeboat was gone, along with all ten people aboard. One theory is that a false reading of the water in her hold convinced the captain she was sinking; the vessel, launched as the Amazon, was still sound.

Which toy maker also counts as the world's top tyre manufacturer by number, making some 300 million a year?

Lego was making about 306 million small rubber tyres a year by 2006, more by count than any full-size tyre firm. The company's name comes from the Danish for 'play well'.

Which university, the oldest in the English-speaking world, was teaching long before the Aztec Empire arose?

Oxford had teaching by 1096, more than 300 years before the Aztec Empire took shape in 1428. Academics fleeing a quarrel with its townspeople went on to found Cambridge in 1209.

Which marsupial has fingerprints so human-like that even an electron microscope struggles to tell them apart?

The koala evolved its fingerprints independently of primates, as animals that climb and grip often do, yet the ridges are a near match for a person's.

Which video game giant was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make handmade playing cards?

Nintendo started with hanafuda, flower cards made by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi, and only began producing toys in the 1960s, with video games following later.

Which planet spins so slowly that one day there lasts longer than its entire year?

Venus takes 243 Earth days to turn once but only 224.7 to circle the Sun. It also spins backwards compared with most planets.

Which distant world, discovered in 1930, will not finish its first full orbit since then until 2178?

Pluto needs about 248 Earth years for one trip around the Sun, so its first lap since Clyde Tombaugh found it on photographic plates is still far from over.

Which power tool descends from a 1780s surgical saw that was used to widen the pelvis during difficult births?

The chainsaw's ancestor was a fine serrated chain pulled between two wooden handles, and surgeons also used it to cut away diseased bone.

Whose brain did a pathologist remove during a 1955 autopsy and later cut into about 240 blocks for study?

Albert Einstein may never have agreed to it: later research suggests that neither he nor his close relatives gave permission for the brain to be kept.

Which nation's national animal is the unicorn, shown in pairs holding up its royal coat of arms before 1603?

Scotland's unicorn was, in legend, the natural enemy of the lion, the beast that English royals had already adopted as their own symbol.

Which fruit did the US Supreme Court unanimously declare a vegetable in 1893 for the purpose of import tariffs?

The tomato lost because, the justices reasoned, people eat it as part of a main course rather than as dessert, whatever botanists call it.

Which board game grew out of The Landlord's Game, which Lizzie Magie patented in 1904 as a lesson in economics?

Monopoly turned its ancestor's message upside down: Lizzie Magie designed her game to show the harm done when a few owners hold all the wealth.

Which fairground sweet was first made by machine in 1897, thanks to an invention co-created by a dentist?

Cotton candy was the work of dentist William Morrison and confectioner John C. Wharton, who sold it as Fairy Floss at the 1904 World's Fair.

Which children's modelling compound was first sold in the 1930s as a putty for cleaning coal soot off wallpaper?

Play-Doh was reborn after nursery teacher Kay Zufall read that the cleaning putty worked for art projects, just as washable wallpaper was killing demand for it.

Which sport did Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard play on the Moon, swinging one-handed in a stiff spacesuit?

Golf reached the Moon by way of a six-iron head that Shepard had fixed to the handle of a lunar sample scoop, and he struck two balls with it.

Which snack was the first food deliberately cooked with microwaves, by engineer Percy Spencer in the 1940s?

Popcorn came first, and the second test was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters. Spencer had stumbled on the heating effect by accident in 1945.

Which sea creature has three hearts, two of them devoted solely to pumping blood through its gills?

The octopus has one main heart for the body and two for the gills, and the main one becomes inactive whenever the animal swims.

Which country flies the only national flag that is not a rectangle, its shape formed from two stacked pennants?

Nepal joined two pennons once flown by rival branches of its ruling dynasty, which also makes the flag the only national one taller than it is wide.

Which party song earned its publisher licensing fees until a US judge threw out the copyright claim in 2015?

Happy Birthday to You made money for Warner Chappell until the judge ruled its registration covered only one piano arrangement; the firm agreed to pay back $14 million.

Which American author was born just after Halley's Comet passed in 1835 and died as it swung by again in 1910?

Mark Twain had predicted it in 1909, remarking that he came in with the comet and expected to go out with it. He died a day after it passed closest to the Sun.

Which Hollywood star of the 1940s co-invented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes?

Hedy Lamarr devised it with composer George Antheil to defeat radio jamming, and the approach later became a foundation of spread-spectrum communications.

Which technology standard is named after a 10th-century king who united the tribes of Denmark into one kingdom?

Bluetooth honours King Harald Bluetooth because the standard was meant to unite communication protocols in the same way. Its logo merges the runes for his initials.

Caesar salad is named after restaurateur Caesar Cardini, whose restaurant first served it in 1924 in which country?

Mexico is the salad's home: by his daughter's account, Cardini improvised it at his Tijuana restaurant on 4 July 1924, when a holiday rush left the kitchen short of ingredients.

Bulbs of which flower sold for extraordinary prices in a Dutch craze that collapsed in February 1637?

The tulip was a recent and fashionable arrival in the Netherlands, and when the market fell apart no deliveries were ever made on the contracts traders had signed.

Which liquid burst from a Boston storage tank in 1919 and swept through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour?

Molasses poured out in a wave 25 feet high that killed 21 people, then thickened in the cold and trapped those caught in it.

Which landmark did con artist Victor Lustig sell to a scrap-metal dealer in 1925, then try to sell again?

The Eiffel Tower made a believable target: Lustig got the idea from a newspaper article about how troublesome the structure had become to maintain.

Which toy takes its name from a Connecticut pie maker whose empty tins Yale students tossed around campus?

The Frisbee got its brand name in 1957, after Wham-O's founders learned that students were already calling the plastic disc by the Frisbie Pie Company's name.

Which word entered English through the 1920 play R.U.R., drawn from a Czech term for forced labour?

Robot comes from robota, the unpaid work that serfs owed on their masters' lands. Playwright Karel Čapek's brother Josef is credited with suggesting it.

Which word comes from the Italian for forty days, the time Venice made vessels from plague ports wait offshore?

Quarantine began as a Venetian policy of holding arriving ships for 40 days to be sure that no hidden cases of plague were aboard, a longer version of an earlier 30-day wait.

Aircraft 'black box' flight recorders are actually required to be painted which bright colour?

Orange makes a recorder easier to find after an accident, and each one also carries an underwater locator beacon to guide search teams.

Which fruit lends its name to an informal unit of radiation dose, thanks to the potassium-40 it naturally contains?

The banana equivalent dose compares a radiation exposure with eating one average fruit, an amount so small that the body simply excretes the extra potassium.

What is the dot over a lowercase i or j called, one that is dropped when an accent takes its place?

A tittle is the dot's proper name, and the term also appears in English Bibles at Matthew 5:18, paired with jot to stand for the tiniest written detail.

Which word for the sheath on the end of a shoelace comes from an Old French term meaning little needle?

An aglet keeps the fibres of a lace from unravelling, and its firm, narrow tip makes the lace easier to feed through the holes of a shoe.

What name did two researchers coin in a 1964 Nature paper for the earthy smell of rain falling on dry ground?

Petrichor replaced the clumsier label 'argillaceous odour', which scientists had used for the scent before Isabel Bear and Dick Thomas published their paper.

Which African country follows a calendar with 13 months, twelve of 30 days and a short one of five or six?

Ethiopia's year count also runs seven to eight years behind the Gregorian one, so the country celebrated the start of its new millennium in September 2007.

Which country has more surviving pyramids than Egypt, built as royal tombs by the kings and queens of Kush?

Sudan has more than 200 pyramids, the most of any country. They are narrower and steeper than Egypt's, and builders were still raising them as late as AD 200.

Measured from its base on the ocean floor, which Hawaiian volcano is often called the world's tallest mountain?

Mauna Kea rises more than 9,000 metres from the seabed, topping Everest's 8,849, yet less than half of that height shows above the waves.

Which African country's capital, Monrovia, is named after the US president James Monroe?

Liberia's capital was called Christopolis until 1824, when it was renamed for Monroe, a prominent backer of the plan to settle freed African Americans there.

Which Siberian lake, the world's deepest, holds more water than all the North American Great Lakes combined?

Baikal contains 22 to 23 percent of the world's fresh surface water and, at 25 to 30 million years old, is also the oldest lake on Earth.

Which American founding father invented the glass armonica, an instrument of rotating glass bowls, in 1761?

Benjamin Franklin mounted 37 bowls on an iron spindle turned by a foot pedal, and he named the result after the Italian word for harmony.

Which European microstate claims to be the world's oldest surviving sovereign state, founded in AD 301?

San Marino is named after Saint Marinus, a legendary stonemason said to have fled Roman persecution and built a small chapel on Monte Titano.

Which horseshoe-shaped bone in the neck is the only one in the human body not connected to any other bone?

The hyoid is anchored only by muscles and ligaments, an arrangement that lets it aid the movement of the tongue and the act of swallowing.

What was the first item ever sold on AuctionWeb, the 1995 hobby site that grew into eBay?

A broken laser pointer fetched $14.83, and when founder Pierre Omidyar checked that the buyer knew it did not work, he was told the man collected them.

What did astronaut John Young smuggle aboard the Gemini 3 spacecraft, hidden in a pocket of his spacesuit?

A corned beef sandwich went into orbit with him in 1965, and both crewmen took a few bites before it was stowed away again.

Which country gave February a 30th day in 1712 while unwinding its own botched switch between calendars?

Sweden had meant to reach the Gregorian calendar gradually by dropping leap days, but war halted the plan after one, so an extra day was added to rejoin the Julian count.

Whose paper cut-out Le Bateau hung upside down in New York's Museum of Modern Art for 47 days in 1961?

Henri Matisse made the work from paper painted with gouache, and it was a visiting stockbroker, Genevieve Habert, who noticed the mistake and told a guard.

Which US president appears on the $100,000 bill, a note used only between Federal Reserve Banks?

Woodrow Wilson's note was created for gold transactions between the banks and never reached the public. Outside government it may be shown only for educational purposes.

In which city did the dancing plague of 1518 begin, when Frau Troffea started dancing fervently in the street?

Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, saw the mania run from July to September 1518, by which time somewhere between 50 and 400 people had joined in.

Point Nemo, the place in the ocean farthest from land, takes its name from a captain created by which novelist?

Jules Verne gave the name to the submarine captain of his 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, and it is also the Latin for nobody.

Which sea is the only one with no land boundaries, hemmed in instead by four currents of the North Atlantic?

The Sargasso Sea was named by Portuguese navigators after the brown sargassum seaweed that grows there, and it is known for calm, deep-blue water.

Which punctuation mark did adman Martin Speckter propose in 1962 by fusing a question mark with an exclamation mark?

The interrobang was meant for adverts: Speckter believed copywriters could convey a surprised rhetorical question better with a single mark than with two.