Five Families

Mugshot of Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno , boss of the Bonanno crime family from 1931 to 1968

An electric steam iron

Medieval English split tally stick ( front and reverse view). The stick is notched and inscribed to record a debt owed to the rural dean of Preston Candover , Hampshire, of a tithe of 20 d each on 32 sheep, amounting to a total sum of £2…

Plot of shear rate as a function of the shear stress. Dilatants in green.

At a single 1931 meeting following two assassinations, five men divided New York City into permanent criminal territories. The map they drew still traces the names of the Five Families used today.

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.

Unit 731

Prisoners renamed 'maruta' — logs — were vivisected, frozen, and plague-bombed by Japan's Imperial Army in Manchuria. At least 3,000 died inside the compound. Their data was traded to the US for immunity.

Tally stick

For 700 years, the English Exchequer split hazel sticks to record royal debts — the king kept one half, the creditor the other. In 1834, Parliament burned the old sticks and accidentally set Westminster on fire.

Russell Wasendorf

Russell Wasendorf Sr. forged every single bank statement for Peregrine Financial Group — alone, with a scanner and a P.O. box — for twenty years. He confessed in a suicide note left running in a car outside his Iowa headquarters in 2012.

Dilatant

Cornstarch stirred into water becomes a dilatant: press slowly and your finger sinks; punch it and the fluid hardens to concrete. BAE Systems built flexible armour panels from it that stop a knife in 8 milliseconds.

Battle of Adrianople

Gothic cavalry obliterated two-thirds of the Eastern Roman army in a single afternoon, killing Emperor Valens — whose body was never recovered. The battle proved infantry alone could not hold the empire. Rome began its long unraveling.

Mario Kart Wii

Nintendo packed a cheap plastic steering wheel into every Mario Kart Wii box, and 37 million families snapped it around their Wii remotes — suddenly the living room floor was a race circuit and everyone had a wheel.

2023 Tour de France

Over seven decades, press motorcycles weaving through the peloton have shattered collarbone, kneecap, and career — one cameraman's vehicle knocked Joseba Beloki into a fracture pattern that ended his season in 2003.