Those who paid even peripheral attention to the 2000 US Presidential election should remember the PR nightmare that was Al Gore's claim to have had a hand in the creation of the Internet (often misconstrued as having said he invented it). The reason this point was so obsessed over by George W. Bush's advertising campaign was because of a ( Read more... )

Everyone has heard the myth of George Washington's wooden teeth. For that matter, everyone has heard the myth of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, but it's his teeth that are going to be talked about now. While everyone has heard that George Washington had wooden teeth, nobody has heard anything beyond that. Simply that he had wooden ( Read more... )

It's been pointed out by conspiracy theorists for at least two hundred years that all of the men referred to as America's “Founding Fathers” were members of the enigmatic Masonic Order. Washington D.C. was designed around specific Masonic patterns and symbols. The White House, for instance, is at one point of a pentagram of streets. It's been ( Read more... )

One problem with historical biographies is that they rarely give the motivations of the person being biographied. For example, how many people know that Adolf Hitler's real reason for trying to take over the world, as well as all those book and art burnings, was to make art historians the world over list him as the greatest artist of his time, and ( Read more... )

From about 1850 to 1875, it seemed that everyone in the inventor's community was trying to create the same thing: the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was not the only one. There was also Charles Bourseul, Johann Philipp Reis, Elisha Gray, and even Thomas Edison. That Alexander Graham Bell is famous for the invention is simply a matter of luck, and ( Read more... )

It's a well documented fact that in the Philippines, a weapon similar to the yo-yo was used as a hunting weapon, though the toy we all know and love was developed independently in Greece. You see, the weapon was developed by some unnamed Filipino, who saw people throwing rocks at their prey, and thought "That's a good idea, but it's really a shame ( Read more... )