Bloodgate

1920 advertisement for the Thor electric washing machine.

A tulip, known as "the Viceroy" ( viseroij ), displayed in the 1637 Dutch catalogue Verzameling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen ("Collection of a Crowd of Tulips"). Its bulb was offered for sale for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders (florins)…

A physio bit open a fake blood capsule on the sideline so a player could be illegally swapped out. The capsule left red stains on his teeth. The entire scheme unraveled in 22 minutes.

Thor washing machine

The 1908 Thor washing machine married bare copper wiring to a full tub of water and called it progress. Its inventor, Alva Fisher, left the ground wire out entirely. It sold briskly.

Braid (video game)

Braid's final level reverses time to reveal the princess the player has been chasing is not a captive — she is running from the player. The epilogue text identifies her as the atomic bomb. Jonathan Blow hid this in 2008.

Diocletian

In 305 AD, Diocletian became the first Roman emperor to voluntarily abdicate — then rejected offers to return and spent his final years at his Split palace growing cabbages, apparently content.

Tulip mania

In 1637 Amsterdam, a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb sold for 10,000 guilders — enough to buy a canal house. Within three months the market collapsed; bulbs sold for the price of onions.

Copper Scroll

Inscribed on a sheet of copper rolled up with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Copper Scroll lists 64 treasure locations holding tons of gold and silver. Scholars dispute whether any of it was real.

Greek fire

Byzantine warships sprayed Greek fire through bronze siphons — it burned on water and could not be extinguished. The formula died with the empire in 1453, and no chemist has fully reconstructed it since.

Sicilian Expedition

Athens voted in 415 BC to conquer Sicily — 38,000 men, 200 ships — based on flawed intelligence and civilian fever. Every ship and every soldier was lost; the expedition ended the Athenian Empire.

Michel Foucault

Foucault spent his last years cruising San Francisco bathhouses while dying of AIDS — a fact he reportedly knew. The man who said power invented sexuality lived the argument to its end.