gnostek1 / 21920 advertisement for the Thor electric washing machine.
01The Thor, launched in 1908 by Hurley Machine Company, had no electrical insulation on its motor housing.
02Alva Fisher's patent drawings show live copper contacts positioned inches above the water basin.
03Early electric washing machine electrocutions were recorded in Chicago within the first year of Thor's sale.
gnostek1 / 8Chapel interior
01František Rint bleached and arranged the bones of roughly 40,000 people between 1870 and 1872.
02The chandelier contains at least one of every bone in the human body — 206 types, repeated thousands of times.
03The ossuary was created after a 13th-century abbot scattered soil from Jerusalem across the cemetery, making burial there the most coveted in Bohemia.
gnostek
01Preciado self-administered testosterone for 236 consecutive days while writing 'Testo Junkie' in 2008.
02He named his framework 'pharmacopornography' — the regime of pills and porn governing 21st-century desire.
03Preciado's transition began publicly at age 40, after decades as a female-presenting academic philosopher.
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01Howard Scott Warshaw had 5.5 weeks to code it; a normal Atari game took 6–9 months.
02Atari pressed roughly 12 million cartridges for a console with only 10 million owners.
03A 2014 dig in Alamogordo pulled 1,300 cartridges from concrete-sealed desert landfill.
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01The Amber Room contained roughly six tons of carved amber panels, gold leaf, and mirrors, valued today at ~$500 million.
02Soviet investigator Georg Stein was found disemboweled in a Bavarian forest in 1987 while searching for it.
03At least three separate men confessed on their deathbeds to knowing its location; every site dug up was empty.
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01The descent drops at gradients exceeding 10%; the fatal corner offers no runoff and no barrier.
02A basalt stone memorial bearing Casartelli's relief portrait stands at the exact crash point on the col.
03Dante Rezze, a Swiss amateur, died on the same descent during the 1935 Tour de France.
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01Millett analyzed a Norman Mailer sex scene paragraph by paragraph as a manual for domination, not eroticism.
02Her Columbia PhD thesis became 'Sexual Politics' after being rejected by one press as 'too angry.'
03The book coined 'sexual politics' as a concept, placing bedroom power inside political theory for the first time.
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01Hetty Green's fortune of roughly $100 million in 1916 equals over $2.5 billion today — all self-managed.
02Her son Ned's leg was amputated after she allegedly delayed treatment to avoid medical fees.
03She lived in cheap boarding houses and ate cold oatmeal, despite being America's wealthiest woman.
gnostek1 / 12Gasoline in a glass jar
01Midgley himself contracted lead poisoning in 1923 while demonstrating tetraethyl lead's safety to reporters.
02Blood lead levels in children fell 78% within a decade of the US leaded-gas phaseout in 1986.
03Midgley died in 1944 strangled by a pulley-and-rope device he invented to lift himself out of bed.