Starlite

Close-up of a barbed wire

Heracles , wearing his characteristic lion-skin, club in right hand, leash in left, presenting a three-headed Cerberus, snakes coiling from his snouts, necks and front paws, to a frightened Eurystheus hiding in a giant pot. Caeretan hydria…

Maurice Ward, a hairdresser from Yorkshire, coated an egg in Starlite and held a blowtorch to it for five minutes — the egg stayed raw inside. He took its formula to his grave in 2011.

Mongol invasions of Japan

Kublai Khan's fleets were wrecked twice — in 1274 and again in 1281 — by typhoons striking the same Japanese coastline. The Japanese named the storms kamikaze: divine wind.

Barbed wire

Joseph Glidden's 1874 barbed-wire patent — filed after sketching the design on a coffee grinder — closed the American open range within a decade and then reappeared at the Somme, herding men into machine-gun fire.

Frank Costello

A bullet grazed Frank Costello's skull in 1957 because he turned his head at precisely the wrong — or right — moment. The slug left a two-inch furrow. He read the note in his pocket and walked out.

Titanfall 2

One level drops players into a factory mid-demolition, then hands them a device that rewinds time — walls rebuild, catwalks reappear, fire retreats — letting a player walk across a collapsing structure by running backward through its own destruction.

Cerberus

Greeks slipped honey cakes called meli into the mouths of their dead to bribe Cerberus at the underworld gate. Virgil's Aeneas carries one. The three-headed dog's middle head was considered the most dangerous.

Saturnalia

Each December, Rome's masters dressed their slaves in the pileus — the freedman's cap — and served them dinner at table. For seven days, gambling was legal, work stopped, and the social order flipped on its back.

Fred Korematsu

Fred Korematsu had plastic surgery on his nose and changed his name to Clyde Sarah to pass as Spanish-Hawaiian. A coworker turned him in anyway. The Supreme Court upheld his 1942 conviction 6–3.

Biological warfare

Unit 731 aircraft dropped ceramic bombs packed with plague-infected fleas over 11 Chinese cities. Ceramic shattered on impact without incinerating the fleas — a design detail that took years to engineer.