Saturn Devouring His Son

Coat of arms of the Indies Company, with the reclining figure representing the Mississippi River taken from Law's Compagnie d'Occident , and the motto Florebo quocumque ferar taken from Louis XIV's East India Company

Zimbabwean banknotes ranging from 10 dollars to 100 billion dollars printed within a one-year period. The magnitude of the currency scalars signifies the extent of the hyperinflation.

Saturn Devouring His Son

Goya painted a giant cramming a headless, legless human torso into his mouth — directly onto his own dining room plaster. He never meant it to be seen. It was peeled off the wall decades after his death.

GoldenEye 007

Rare's 1997 Nintendo 64 cartridge shipped a four-player split-screen world that hadn't existed in any home console before it — the dam, the facility, the cradle — turning a Bond film into a geography that an entire generation memorized.

Pebble Island raid

45 SAS men landed on Pebble Island in the Falklands dark, placed demolition charges on eleven Argentine aircraft, and were back at sea in 30 minutes — before the garrison knew they'd arrived.

Quantrill's Raiders

Quantrill's Raiders rode into Lawrence, Kansas, at dawn on August 21, 1863, and spent ninety minutes killing 150 unarmed men and boys — then burned the town. Not one raider was killed.

John Law's Company

John Law — a Scottish gambler who killed a man in a duel — convinced France to replace gold with paper backed by Louisiana swampland. Within two years, the word 'millionaire' was coined, then the crash.

1I/ʻOumuamua

In 2017 a cigar-shaped object tumbled through our solar system accelerating beyond what solar radiation pressure could explain. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb argued in print it might be alien technology.

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe

At its worst, Zimbabwe's inflation hit 89.7 sextillion percent annually. Workers were paid twice a day so they could spend wages before lunch erased the value.

Copper Scroll

Inscribed on a sheet of copper rolled up with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Copper Scroll lists 64 treasure locations holding tons of gold and silver. Scholars dispute whether any of it was real.

Revolt of the Batavi

The Batavians were Rome's most trusted cavalry — exempt from taxes, garrisoned near the emperor — until 69 AD, when their commander Julius Civilis led them to annihilate five Roman legions in a single revolt.