🇺🇸 United States
Oddlets from United States.
Big Chief Mason
The one person on earth who knew Garrett Morgan's 1914 smoke hood really worked was Garrett Morgan, inside it, in disguise as a Native American assistant to a white man selling it as his own.
English in Heaven
In 1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explained that Houdini's dead Jewish mother must have learned English in heaven.
Fifty Copies
The only Black member of the Edison Pioneers, the man who drafted Bell's telephone patent and fixed the lightbulb, wrote love poems on the side.
The Bear Went First
Sam Patch's final act opened with him shoving a bear cub off a hundred-foot waterfall in front of eight thousand people.
The Girl Who Shot the Kaiser
In 1889, a five-foot Quaker in an ankle-length skirt asked the audience for a volunteer, and Kaiser Wilhelm II stood up.
The Man With an Instinct for the Regrettable
What are the odds that the same man invented leaded gasoline and the chemical that punched a hole in the ozone layer?
The Man Who Went Down
What do you do when you buy ten acres of California sunshine and discover it's a slab of rock at 120 degrees?
The Nanny Who Never Looked
What if one of the twentieth century's great photographers spent her whole life making pictures she never bothered to look at?
The Queen of the Mist
What kind of woman test-drives a Niagara Falls barrel by sending a cat over first?
The Man Who Painted the Dead
How do you paint a wild bird at exact life size without it moving?
This Way to the Egress
He painted a sign over the back door reading THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, and patrons walked through it expecting a beast.
The Rope
What do you call a woman who wouldn't cross the lawn for Emerson, but rigged a rope from her window for children she refused to greet at the door?