🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Oddlets from United Kingdom.
The Man Who Counted the Hurdy-Gurdies
The man who designed the first computer spent a quarter of his working life fighting street musicians. Guess which project he finished.
The Hermit Who Kept Office Hours
What kind of hermit hires two armed guards, then hands out gin to two hundred children through the bars of his window?
The Man Who Refused to Lose a Thought
What does a Victorian mathematician invent when he refuses to lose a single thought to the dark?
My Name Is Shackleton
He emptied his pockets of gold into the snow, then told the meteorologist to keep the twelve-pound banjo.
The Half-Sovereign
What do you do when the greatest engineer of the Victorian age inhales a gold coin during a magic trick for his children?
Present But Not Voting
What kind of man spends sixty-three years perfecting the instructions for his own stuffed body?
The Cartwheel Brims
A loom took half her scalp at thirteen; she spent the next eighty-seven years deciding what the world was allowed to see.
The Cure He Boiled Away
In 1747 he proved two oranges and a lemon cured scurvy. Then he spent forty years boiling the cure into a syrup that didn't work.
The Beast of Netherwood
What does the wickedest man in the world order for breakfast when he's a sixty-nine-year-old pensioner in a Hastings boarding house?
The Only Englishman to Win the Iron Cross
What does a Soho safecracker have to do to get personally decorated by the Nazis?
The Ping-Pong Ball
What are the odds the first autobiography in English survived because a colonel hunting a ping-pong ball was talked out of burning it?
The Schoolboy Who Kidnapped a General
Expelled at eighteen for holding a greengrocer's daughter's hand, he was saluted through twenty-two German checkpoints eleven years later wearing a stolen general's cap.