🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Oddlets from United Kingdom.
The Woman Who Dressed Like a Cathedral
She had a coffin she liked to lie in before writing each morning, to focus her mind.
The Woman Who Wrote the Future
She arrived at the Royal Society in 1666, critiqued their methods to their faces, and they used her visit as justification to ban every woman who came after her — for 278 years.
The Man Who Set Himself on Fire to Cure Hiccups
He inherited 132,000 acres at age two and died in a debtors' prison at thirty-seven, and those are not the strange parts.
The Poet Who Brought a Bear to College
When Trinity College banned dogs from student rooms, Byron checked the statutes, confirmed they said nothing about bears, and installed one.
The Man Who Stabbed a Bible
A century before the Civil War, a four-foot-seven cave-dweller in a military coat walked into a Quaker meeting and sprayed fake blood on every slaveholder in the room.
The Man Who Walked Into His Own Secret
He kept his route secret so no rival could reach the city first. More than a hundred people have since died trying to find him.
The Woman Who Destroyed Her Own Discovery
She found exactly what she was looking for, then ordered it smashed and thrown into the sea.
The Man No One Could Stop
Burton pulled a javelin through his own face and kept fighting, but his wife burned forty years of his writing to save his soul.
The Girl Who Was Struck by Lightning
Her neighbors believed she became a genius because lightning killed three women standing next to her when she was fifteen months old.