Charley Parkhurst

01Parkhurst voted in the 1868 U.S. presidential election in Santa Cruz County, the first known trans man to do so in America.
02Described by contemporaries as among the finest stagecoach drivers on the California-Oregon run, handling six-horse teams in mountain snow.
03At death in 1879, a coroner's examination revealed Parkhurst's birth sex — news that reached newspapers across the country within days.

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

The Zimmermann telegram as it was sent from Washington, D.C. , to Ambassador Heinrich von Eckardt , the German ambassador to Mexico .

The eight "Chicago Black Sox"

An electric steam iron

An illustration of Cantor's diagonal argument (in base 2) for the existence of uncountable sets . The sequence at the bottom cannot occur anywhere in the enumeration of sequences above.

Charley Parkhurst

Charley Parkhurst drove stagecoaches through the Sierra Nevada for decades — one-eyed, weathered, legendarily skilled — and cast a ballot in California in 1868, fifty-two years before women were legally permitted to vote there.

Xoloitzcuintle

The Xoloitzcuintli — hairless, wrinkled, warm to the touch — was bred by Aztecs to escort dead souls through Mictlan's nine treacherous underworld levels. Owners were buried alongside them. The breed is over 3,500 years old.

John Law's Company

John Law sold France shares in the Louisiana Territory — mostly swamp — by convincing Paris that the Mississippi River ran through mountains of gold. Share prices rose 3,600% then fell to zero in 18 months.

Zimmermann telegram

German Foreign Secretary Zimmermann telegraphed Mexico in January 1917, proposing a wartime alliance and the return of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. British codebreakers intercepted it; Congress voted for war within weeks.

Black Sox Scandal

Eight Chicago White Sox players were paid by gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series — then played the following full season undetected. Shoeless Joe Jackson, who batted .375 in the fixed series, was banned for life.

Clothes iron

Named from the Old English 'sæd,' meaning solid — not sorrowful — the sad iron was a 6-pound cast-iron slab heated directly on the stove. Women rotated three irons to maintain one usable temperature.

Cantor's diagonal argument

Cantor showed in 1891 that the infinity of real numbers cannot be listed — proving it by constructing one number guaranteed to be missing from any list. Infinity has a size hierarchy; most people never heard it.

Air Rhodesia Flight 825

ZIPRA guerrillas fired a heat-seeking missile at Air Rhodesia Flight 825 in 1978, then walked among the eighteen survivors and machine-gunned ten of them in the grass. The stewardess hid in a bush and lived.

Tiryns

Walls 17 metres thick at Tiryns conceal vaulted stone galleries within their mass — corridors carved not to defend but, ancient Greeks believed, to house the Cyclopes who built them.