Icebox

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Icebox used in cafés of Paris in the late 1800s

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Families paid the iceman daily for a 25-pound block of lake-harvested ice just to keep butter solid and milk unturned. When ice didn't arrive, the food rotted by afternoon.

Designed in five and a half weeks by one man, 3.5 million unsold cartridges were buried under concrete in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill — a corporate burial that became an urban legend confirmed by excavation in 2014.

Tarrare, an 18th-century French soldier, ate live cats, eels, and a silver fork whole — and was suspected of swallowing a toddler from a hospital ward. Hunger never left him.

Britain's 'impregnable' Singapore fortress had fifteen-inch coastal guns pointed permanently seaward. Japan's 30,000 troops arrived on bicycles from the Malayan jungle to the north and accepted the surrender of 80,000 Allied soldiers.

Ottoman sultans kept Angora rabbits as living luxury objects in the Topkapi Palace; their wool — harvested monthly by hand — was spun into garments reserved for imperial gift-giving.

Dawn Brancheau, SeaWorld Orlando's most senior trainer, was pulled into the water and killed by orca Tilikum in front of an audience on February 24, 2010. She had 16 years of experience. The show had just ended.

Eric Lawes borrowed a metal detector to find a lost hammer in a Suffolk field and instead turned up 15,234 Roman coins, still in their wooden chest. The hammer was found too.

Patti Smith spent years photographing Robert Mapplethorpe's hands — obsessively, serially — because, she wrote, she couldn't stop seeing them. Her 2010 memoir 'Just Kids' won the National Book Award and was written, she said, to keep a promise to a dying man.

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.