Wash copper

A laundry copper

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

3D illustration of Gabriel's horn

Every Victorian kitchen held a coal-fired copper cauldron that boiled the week's clothes like soup — lye, blood, and grease rising together. Washday lasted from dawn to dusk, every Monday, without exception.

Therizinosaurus

Therizinosaurus carried three-foot claws — longer than any animal's, ever recorded — and used them to rake leaves. The most terrifying hand on the planet belonged to a herbivore.

Daniel Inouye

After a German bullet severed his right arm, Daniel Inouye pried a live grenade from its dead fingers with his left hand and threw it. He later became a U.S. Senator. The arm was thrown away.

Jim Jones

Jim Jones rehearsed mass suicide with fake poison for years before making it real. On November 18, 1978, 918 died — 276 of them children. A gun was found in Jones's hand.

Werner Herzog

Herzog boiled and ate his own shoe — with garlic and duck fat — after Errol Morris finished a film Herzog bet he never would. The documentary of the meal runs 28 minutes. He called the shoe "quite acceptable."

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.

Battle of Adwa

Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1895 with 17,700 troops marching in four columns so widely separated they could not support each other. The Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II annihilated them at Adwa with 100,000 soldiers — ending European colonialism's air of invincibility.

Gabriel's horn

Gabriel's Horn — the surface generated by rotating y=1/x — holds exactly π cubic units of paint, yet its inner wall has infinite area. Pour the paint in; it fills. Try to coat the walls; you never finish.

Gas gangrene

Prisoners were tied to outdoor stakes, grenades were detonated beside them, and researchers measured gangrene spreading across the wounds — hourly, on a clipboard, in Manchurian winter air.