From the New England Historical Society:

The Great Brinks Robbery was the biggest armed robbery in U.S. history at the time. Thieves vanished after stealing $2.7 million, leaving few clues. It was almost the perfect crime. Almost.

It happened on Jan. 17, 1950 at the Brinks Armored Car depot in Boston’s North End. The gang of 11 that stole the money after two years of meticulous planning almost got away with it. They failed because they fell out over the division of the spoils. Police arrested all of them five days before the statute of limitations ended.

The Brinks Robbery

The idea for the heist came from Joseph ‘Big Joe’ McGinniss, but career criminal Anthony ‘Fats’ Pino. McGinness masterminded the crime. Pino also recruited a gang to watch the depot for 18 months to figure out when it held the most money.

The gang stole plans for the depot’s alarm system, and then returned them undetected. They also removed the cylinders from locks, one by one, and had a locksmith duplicate the keys. Planning for the Brinks robbery took two years and included six failed attempts.

The gang wore outfits similar to Brinks uniforms – Navy pea coats and chauffeur’s caps – and rubber Halloween masks. At 6:55 p.m. on Jan. 17, 1950, seven of the gang members entered the counting room. They surprised the five employees and bound and gagged them face down on the floor.

The thieves cleaned out everything except the General Electric payroll. It took them only 35 minutes to load 14 canvas bags with a half ton of cash, coins, checks, securities and money orders. Two of the gang members waited outside in the getaway truck.

3 Clues

They left but three clues: a chauffeur’s cap, the adhesive tape used to gag the Brinks employees and the rope used to tie them up. No one was hurt. The thieves divided up some of the loot and promised each other they wouldn’t touch the money for six years so the statute of limitations would run out. Then they split up to establish alibis.

They almost made it. Investigators had few leads and little solid evidence. Law enforcement officers interviewed hundreds of people who lived and worked near the Brinks depot and questioned known criminals. According to the FBI, “in the hours immediately following the robbery, the underworld began to feel the heat of the investigation.”

Police picked up and questioned well-known Boston hoodlums. From Boston, the FBI quickly spread the pressure to other cities.

“Veteran criminals throughout the United States found their activities during mid-January the subject of official inquiry,” the FBI reported.

The robbers’ truck was found cut to pieces in Stoughton, Mass., but it didn’t offer many clues. The FBI was flooded with unhelpful tips.

The Rat

One gang member blew it for all of them. Joseph ‘Specs’ O’Keefe left his loot with another member when he served a prison sentence for a different crime. While behind bars, he wrote angry letters to his cohorts demanding money and suggesting he might talk.

When O’Keefe got out of prison, Fats Pino sent a hit man to kill him. The hit man shot at O’Keefe with a machine gun in the Dorchester section of Boston. O’Keefe escaped with minor wounds and made a deal with the FBI to testify against the gang. All eight were caught and convicted. Two died before they were tried.

Police recovered only $58,000 of the $2.7 million stolen. The crime inspired at least four movies and two books, including The Story of the Great Brink’s Robbery, as Told by the FBI.

The History.com website had some added details:

Eight of the Brink’s robbers were caught, convicted and given life sentences. Two more died before they could go to trial. Only a small part of the money was ever recovered; the rest is fabled to be hidden in the hills north of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. In 1978, the famous robbery was immortalized on film in The Brink’s Job, starring Peter Falk.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/brinks-armored-car-depot-robbery-boston-1950

Lastly, Wikipedia had additional details which may or may not be true at this point.

Planning

The robbery was first conceived in 1947; however, in 1948, after months of planning, the group learned that Brink’s had moved to a new location. While the theft was originally intended to be a burglary, rather than an armed robbery, they could not find a way around the building’s burglar alarm. After observing the movements of the guards, they decided that the robbery should take place just after 7 pm, as the vault would be open and fewer guards would be on duty. Over a period of several months, the robbers removed each lock from the building and had a key made for it, before returning the lock. Two vehicles were stolen: a truck, to carry away the loot from the robbery; and a car, which would be used to block any pursuit. Vincent Costa was the group’s lookout, and signaled with a flashlight from a nearby rooftop when he saw the vault being opened. After five aborted runs, Costa finally gave the go-ahead on the night of January 17, 1950.

Robbery

Seven of the group went into the Brink’s building: O’Keefe, Gusciora, Baker, Maffie, Geagan, Faherty, and Richardson. They each wore a chauffeur cap, pea coat, rubber Halloween mask, and each had a .38 caliber revolver. At 7:10 pm, they entered the building and tied up the five employees working in the vault area. They spent about twenty minutes inside the vault, putting money into large canvas bags. Approximately a million dollars in silver and coins was left behind by the robbers, as they were not prepared to carry it. The total amount stolen was $1,218,211 in cash and $1,557,183 in checks and other securities. By 7:37, one of the Brink’s employees managed to free themselves and raise the alarm.

Investigation and falling out

Immediately following the robbery, Police Commissioner Thomas F. Sullivan sent a mobilization order for all precinct captains and detectives. Thirteen people were detained in the hours following the robbery, including two former employees of Brink’s. Brink’s, Inc. offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those involved in the robbery, with an additional 5% of recovered cash offered by the insurance company. Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, took over supervision of the investigation.

The only physical evidence left at the crime scene was a cap and the tape and rope used to bind up the employees. Most of the cash stolen was in denominations of $1 to $20, which made it nearly impossible to trace the bills through serial numbers. Any information police could get from their informers initially proved useless. The truck that the robbers had used was found cut to pieces in Stoughton, Massachusetts, near O’Keefe’s home.

In June 1950, O’Keefe and Gusciora were arrested in Pennsylvania for a burglary. O’Keefe was sentenced to three years in Bradford County Jail and Gusciora to 5-to-20 years in the Western State Penitentiary at Pittsburgh. Police heard through their informers that O’Keefe and Gusciora demanded money from Pino and MacGinnis in Boston to fight their convictions. It was later claimed that most of O’Keefe’s share went to his legal defense.

FBI agents tried to talk to O’Keefe and Gusciora in prison but the two professed ignorance of the Brink’s robbery. Other members of the group came under suspicion but there was not enough evidence for an indictment, so law enforcement kept pressure on the suspects. Adolph Maffie was convicted and sentenced to nine months for income tax evasion.

After O’Keefe was released, he was taken to stand trial for another burglary and parole violations and was released on a bail of $17,000. O’Keefe later claimed that he had never seen his portion of the loot after he had given it to Maffie for safekeeping. Apparently in need of money he kidnapped Vincent Costa and demanded his part of the loot for ransom.

Pino paid a small ransom but then decided to try to kill O’Keefe. After a couple of attempts he hired underworld hitman Elmer “Trigger” Burke to kill O’Keefe. Burke traveled to Boston and shot O’Keefe, seriously wounding him but failed to kill him. The FBI approached O’Keefe in the hospital and on January 6, 1956, he decided to talk.

On January 12, 1956, just five days before the statute of limitations was to run out, the FBI arrested Baker, Costa, Geagan, Maffie, McGinnis, and Pino. They apprehended Faherty and Richardson on May 16 in Dorchester. O’Keefe pleaded guilty January 18. Gusciora died on July 9. Banfield was already dead. A trial began on August 6, 1956.

Eight of the gang’s members received maximum sentences of life imprisonment. All were paroled by 1971 except McGinnis, who died in prison. O’Keefe received four years and was released in 1960. Only $58,000 of the $2.7 million was recovered. O’Keefe cooperated with writer Bob Considine on The Men Who Robbed Brink’s, a 1961 “as told to” book about the robbery and its aftermath.

I believe the assertion—that Biden got 81 million votes—is the BIGGEST HOAX ever perpetrated on the American people.  Sadly, it’s not the first, nor will it be the last hoax the public will fall for.  Throughout history, we’ve had some doozies!

The War of the Worlds

Orson Welles didn’t mean to mastermind one of the greatest hoaxes in history. Mass hysteria was simply a byproduct of a high-quality radio play in an era where world war loomed, the space race was in its early stages, and most people got news and entertainment from their receivers. According to History.com, the October 30, 1938, broadcast began at 8 p.m. with an introduction presenting the Mercury Theater’s update of H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, but unfortunately, many people were listening to a popular ventriloquist on another station until 8:12 and therefore missed the disclaimer. Welles take on Wells’ Martian invasion tale started with a weather report and a concert live from the Hotel Park Plaza before news alerts about explosions on Mars, a meteor crashing into a New Jersey farm, and eventually aliens with tentacles, heat rays, and poisonous gas broke in. Terrified announcers were then saying cylinders had landed in Chicago and St. Louis, 7,000 National Guardsmen had been wiped out, and that people were fleeing.

Only the panic part turned out to be real as potentially a million listeners thought Earth was under attack. People crowded the highways, armed themselves, begged police for gas masks, requested their power be shut off so the aliens wouldn’t see them, and were treated for shock at hospitals. A woman ran into an Indianapolis church during evening service to proclaim, “New York has been destroyed. It’s the end of the world. Prepare to die!” When CBS got wind of hysteria IRL, Welles went on the air as himself to remind listeners that it was fiction. The FCC investigation found no wrongdoing but networks agreed to be more cautious regarding programming going forward. The attention scored Welles a Hollywood contract, which enabled him to write, direct, and star in his 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane.

The Shed at Dulwich

For just six short months in 2017, The Shed at Dulwich, where patrons ordered entrees by mood, became the highest-ranked restaurant in London on TripAdvisor and the hardest reservation in town to get. Calls and emails poured in begging to be squeezed in for birthday dinners, romantic dates, and media coverage. All were ignored or told to call back as they were booked solid for more than half a year. Except that was a lie. The reason they couldn’t score a table was actually because the business was bogus. It was an experiment in algorithm manipulation and buzz creation by freelance writer Oobah Butler, who had been paid in the past by owners to review their restaurants positively without ever stepping foot inside on the site. To turn the South London garden shed he resides in into a fake fine dining experience, he bought a burner phone and a domain, created a website with soft-focus pictures of delicious-looking dishes made with ingredients you wouldn’t want to eat (paint, bleach tablets, shaving cream, the heel of his foot), and drummed up interest by providing minimum details, making it an appointment-only establishment, lying about it being full, and soliciting friends to write glowing reviews. According to The Washington Post, people contacted him looking for work and companies sent him free samples of their food products. He opened The Shed for one night and served canned soup—and some diners still asked to come again. Butler outed himself in an article and video for Vice a month after hitting the top spot and TripAdvisor removed the listing. 

The Cardiff Giant

This gentle giant remains one of 19th-century America’s most legendary hoaxes. Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols unearthed a ten-foot petrified “man” on October 16, 1869, while digging a well on the New York farm owned by William Newell. Word spread about the discovery and Newell put up a tent and started charging a quarter (and then 50¢ as business boomed) to take a peek at the ground Goliath. Hundreds of curious onlookers and amateur archaeologists made the pilgrimage, many believing it was an ancestor of the Onondaga people and some claiming it was proof of the giants mentioned in The Bible—even after most professionals like Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh said it a fake. The “mummy” was eventually sold to a group of businessmen who sent him on tour. Greatest showman PT Barnum offered to buy it for $50,000, and when they declined to sell, he made a plaster knockoff and arranged for it to be shown in a New York City museum. By December, Binghamton cigar salesman George Hull admitted this was a stone-cold swindle. He’d commissioned a German stone cutter in Chicago to carve it out of a block of gypsum he’d bought in Iowa before he and his cousin Newell buried the 2,990-pound statue. While it was a get-rich-quick scheme, Hull, an atheist, was also trying to prove a point about what he considered silly religious stories and how science could disprove most of them. Even after the hoax was revealed, the Cardiff Giant still made appearances and money. According to Archaeology.org, he showed up at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and was sold in 1947 to the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, where he’s on display today.

Michael Jordan is dead

In February 2015, an article published on the Cronica MX website said that former Chicago Bull Michael Jordan had gone to that big basketball court in the sky after suffering a heart attack while he slept. It even quoted his wife, Yvette Prieto. They also posted a video clip designed to resemble a breaking news segment on YouTube with footage of a tearful ESPN reporter Rich Eisen saying goodbye. According to Snopes.com, the footage was real but recycled from a NFL Game Day episode from a month earlier when Eisen had learned that his longtime co-worker and friend Stuart Scott had lost his battle with cancer. It recirculates every once in a while, always trying to lure fans to click through to a spammy site or to provide their personal information. The same story was used again in 2017, this time by a site called Viral Mugshot, according to Inquisitr.com. Despite it containing the same spelling and grammar errors, it went viral on social media until debunking sites and news agencies reported it as fake news. And Jordan isn’t the only celebrity targeted by pranksters and hackers. If you believed everything you read on stars’ sites, fake Twitter accounts, or items reported by newspapers erroneously, many of your favorites would have been gone long before their time, including: former President Barack Obama (assassinated while campaigning in an Iowa restaurant), Will Ferrell (died in a 2006 paragliding accident), Nick Jonas (heart attack after a lap dance in a Dallas strip club), Justin Bieber (suicide twice, nightclub shooting, and an overdose), and, of course, Mikey from the Life cereal commercials (a deadly combo of Pop Rocks and soda made his stomach explode).  

 Piltdown Man

Since Charles Darwin released his evolution theories in 1859, scientists have been on the lookout for proof of the missing link—a phase between full ape and full man—and in 1912, Englishman Charles Dawson announced he’d found it in a gravel pit in Piltdown. He used the fossils to build a skull model with a human-sized brain and an ape-like jaw and England declared itself the real birthplace of modern humanity. But other scientists immediately took issue, mostly because it didn’t match other fossils found around the world including the Australopithecines one dug up in South Africa. In 1915, Dawson doubled down and claimed he retrieved a second similar fossil, which was enough evidence for many average Joes. The hoax was not revealed until 1953 when British scientists used new technology to date the Piltdown pair. They deduced that the remains were only 500 years old, not the 1 million years old needed to be the link. They also took a bite out of his claim by discovering that the jaw was from an orangutan whose teeth had been filed to resemble human wear patterns and that the bones had been stained to match each other. Most people involved were dead by the 1950s so the prank plotter was never identified. One whodunit theory, according to the BBC: The doer was none other than Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He lived near the pit and was a member of Dawson’s archaeological society. The motive was revenge for being constantly mocked by scientists for his belief in spiritualism.

The Cock Lane Ghost

Even royals can fall prey to paranormal pranks, according to The Daily Mail. In 1762, Prince Edward, Duke of York and Albany, visited a home on Cock Lane in London that was said to be haunted by Scratching Fanny, a woman who had died of smallpox in the rented house after her loan shark lover William Kent had lent their landlord money with a high interest rate. Kent took the landlord Richard Parsons to court over the loan and won. Strange noises that sounded like a cat scratching a chair were reported at the property around this time, and Parsons and his daughter Elizabeth, who the noises actually emanated from, claimed the ghost was Fanny. To prove it, they held séances regularly, which were written up in the newspaper and drew religious leaders, the prince, the mayor, and so many other onlookers that the street became impassable. At the time, people widely believed that a person would return from the great beyond to warn the living or seek revenge, so they quickly accepted that it was Fanny communicating via a system of knocks that Parsons and a preacher developed. During one such communing, the “ghost” accused Kent of poisoning her and requested he be hanged. To clear his name, Kent and two doctors who had tended to Fanny on her deathbed attended a séance, and again Fanny declared he was her killer. But during a later gathering, Dr. Samuel Johnson witnessed Elizabeth creeping from the bed where she was during encounters to pick up a piece of wood that she used to knock. She’d usually hidden the branch in her clothes. Parsons was trying to frame Kent after losing the case, but it was he who ended up behind bars for two years. (His wife also got a year in prison.)

The Hurricane Harvey freeway shark

Between social media sites and the 24-hour news cycle, it is impossible not to be bombarded with insane photos of daring rescues and heartbreaking destruction following any natural disaster these days. Hurricane Harvey hitting Houston in 2017 was no exception, with one image in particular proving you can’t always believe what you see. Twitter user @Jeggit posted a startling shot of a shark swimming in the floodwater that filled a Houston highway. It appeared to have been taken from the driver’s seat of a stalled car. It was retweeted almost 84,000 times and liked by 141,733 users fairly quickly. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Fox News host Jesse Watters was also fooled by the photo, even mentioning it during his show The Five. He later apologized for the mix-up on his Twitter account once Politifact tracked the doctored photo back to 2011. It appears to have first been circulated after Hurricane Irene struck Puerto Rico and posted on imgur.com. In 2012, social media users posted it saying it was taken in New Jersey during Sandy. It is believed that whoever created this fishy photo took the shark from an image that ran in Africa Geographic in 2005.

Hitler’s fake diaries

In 1979, Der Stern Magazine reporter Gerd Heidemann met with Nazi memorabilia collector Fritz Stiefel, who claimed to have a diary penned by Adolf Hitler. Stiefel said it’d been recovered from a 1945 crash of a plane transporting Hitler’s personal effects. (Records indicated the crash was real and that a chest was also recovered likely containing other journals.) After a couple of handwriting experts authenticated the script, more volumes turned up through Konrad Fischer, who’d procured them from an East German General who was planning to smuggle them out of Germany in pianos, according to the UnMuseum.org. Heidemann convinced his outlet to pony up 9.9 million marks (almost $4 million) for 60 diaries. The magazine knew it could make their money back and then some from reprints. In April 1983, Stern broke the story and then Newsweek and London’s Sunday Times ran excerpts.

Historians immediately balked, as Hitler loathed writing and there had been no indication from those close to him that he’d kept notes. Also, the content sparked skepticism as they portrayed Hitler as having little knowledge of concentration camps and wanting to deport, not exterminate, Jews. After many experts questioned the handwriting, the West German Federal Archives ran more tests. They concluded that the paper, ink, and glue were manufactured after the war had ended and Hitler had died. Heidemann, who always maintained he wasn’t in on it but had inflated the asking price and skimmed money off the top, was fired. Fischer turned out to be Konrad Kujau, a criminal specializing in forgery. He faked memorabilia first and worked his way up to whole documents and paintings. (In fact, a quarter of the works that were featured in the 1983 book Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist were done by Kujau.) Both Kujau and Heidemann were sentenced to almost five years in prison. Most of the money was never retrieved. While Heidemann was a pariah after serving, The Guardian reports that Kujau made regular appearances on talk shows and became a minor celebrity.

Balloon Boy

On October 15, 2009, the nation could not take its eyes off the non-stop news coverage of a homemade silver helium-filled balloon that looked like a UFO floating around the Colorado skies. After releasing it from Fort Collins, Richard and Mayumi Heene called 911 to report that their six-year-old son Falcon was trapped aboard. National Guard helicopters and local police followed the blimp, which topped out at 7,000 feet, for 90 minutes and 50 miles until it landed 15 miles from the Denver airport. Falcon was not inside, but as some had seen something fall from the balloon, a land search ensued. That too turned up nothing. Several hours later he came out from hiding in the attic at home. When interviewed on air by Wolf Blitzer, the kid slipped and said his father had told him they were doing it to get a reality show. The first responders didn’t like their time or money wasted and the Heenes were arrested for the hoax. According to CNN, the Larimer County Sheriff’s Department tallied the cost to be at least $47,000. In addition, the FAA imposed an $11,000 fine because airport traffic was delayed because the balloon had flown and landed close to it. The case’s judge decided it was “clearly a planned event done for the purpose of making money” and that it was “exploitation of the children, exploitation of the media, exploitation of the emotions of the people.” Both parents were sentenced to jail, four years probation, and more than 100 hours of community service and agreed to pay restitution of $36,016. On the five-year anniversary, USA Today found the family living in Florida and the sons had started a heavy metal band. One of their CDs has a song called “Balloon Boy No Hoax.”

Russian royal or insane Polish factory worker?

The 1918 grisly basement execution of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children aged 13 to 22 in the dead of night by bullet and bayonets by Bolshevik revolutionaries is hardly the stuff of fairy tales. Which is likely why so many people wanted to desperately believe the rumors that the youngest daughter, Anastasia Romanov, had escaped. The mystery and hope were fueled by the fact that no bodies had been found. Women popped up all over the world claiming to be her, the most believable of which was Anna Anderson, according to Refinery29. She had tried to kill herself by jumping off a Berlin bridge two years later and landed in an asylum for two years. She was the right age, had scars on her body, and a Russian accent. Some relatives and former Romanov friends and servants confirmed her identity while others denounced it. The murders had become common knowledge and Soviet counterintelligence did nothing to quell survival rumors. Her tale inspired multiple books, tabloid fodder, an Ingrid Bergman classic, an animated film, a stage musical, and an Amazon Prime TV series.

After leaving the hospital, Anderson bounced around Europe, staying with distant relatives and wealthy supporters, but she was usually uncooperative, even malicious, when people tried to prove or disprove her identity. She also knew things the late royal would have known, which is how the son of a doctor who was killed with the family became her most ardent defender. Together they hired an attorney to try to get legal recognition of her title and access to the Tsar’s estate. The case lasted 32 years, the longest in German history, and ended without any conclusions. During the investigation, her detractors posited that she was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish worker who disappeared after being declared insane after being injured in a factory explosion shortly before the incident at the bridge. Anderson died in 1984. Seven years later, five skeletons were found in a forest near the town where the family was executed and DNA testing identified them as Romanovs. With two bodies still missing, people argued she had been telling the truth all along. But that did not last long, as they tested their DNA against an intestinal sample from a prior Anderson surgery. No match. In 2007, the final two bodies were found at a different gravesite.

Source: https://www.rd.com/list/famous-hoaxes-almost-fooled/

It’s no secret that one of the most popular destinations in the world for the most highly anticipated night out of the year – New Year’s Eve – is New York City. It’s all about the sights, sounds, and unique entertainment that this city has to offer—centered, of course, on the Times Square Ball. When you gather in Midtown to watch the Ball Drop, you’re part of a long, rich history of partying!

In 1903, The New York Times newspaper was about to open their new headquarters, the city’s second tallest building, in what was then known as Longacre Square. The paper’s owner, Adolph Ochs, decided to commemorate their opening with a midnight fireworks show on the roof of the building on December 31, 1903. After four years of New Year’s Eve fireworks celebrations, Ochs wanted a bigger spectacle at the building to draw more attention to the newly-renamed Times Square. An electrician was hired to construct a lighted Ball to be lowered from the flagpole on the roof of One Times Square. The iron Ball was only 5 feet in diameter! The very first drop was on New Year’s Eve 1907, one second after midnight. Though the Times would later move its headquarters, the New Year’s Eve celebration at One Times Square remains a focal celebration for the world.

The Ball has gone through some major transformations in its 100-plus years of partying. The original Ball was replaced in 1920 with a 5-foot, 400-pound iron Ball. This Ball lasted to 1995, when a third Ball debuted, adding rhinestones and a computerized lighting system featuring strobe lights. For the arrival of the new millennium, an entirely new Ball was constructed. Weighing 1,070 pounds and measuring 6 feet in diameter, the fourth ball was covered with 504 Waterford Crystal triangles illuminated with 168 halogen bulbs outside. Internally, 432 bulbs of clear, red, blue, green and yellow colors along with strobe lights and spinning mirrors lit up the night. It was retired on December 31, 2006 newly rigged with light-emitting diodes.

In honor of the Ball Drop’s 100th anniversary, a fifth design debuted New Year’s Eve 2008. Manufactured again by Waterford Crystal with a diameter of 6 feet, weighing 1,212 pounds, it used LEDs, computerized lighting pattern, and can produce over 16.7 million colors, but only consumes the electricity of 10 toasters! The 2008 Ball was only used once— a sixth new Ball debuted on New Year’s Eve 2009 and is still in use.

Today’s Ball is 12 feet in diameter, weighing 11,875 pounds. While retaining the 2008 design, this Ball was rebuilt double its previous size. To accommodate this new Ball, the flagpole was also enlarged, now rising 475 feet above the street. It remains atop One Times Square year-round, reminding the people below of the most exciting night of the year, and building the anticipation. Where will you be this New Year’s Eve? How will you become a part of the Ball’s history?

Source: https://www.balldrop.com/article/history-of-times-square-ball-drop

Here at our house, we do things differently.  We celebrate New Year’s promptly at 9:00 pm…if we’re still awake, because it’s usually a contest to see what drops first…the ball or our eyelids and our eyelids are undefeated at this point! 

ROCK ON…LOL

I came across this article from Reader’s Digest…Historical Facts You’ll Wish Weren’t Really True by Meghan Jones. I thought I’d share it with you.

King Tut’s parents were most likely siblings.

Once you’ve finished shuddering with disgust, here’s what researchers know about the boy king and his family. His father was almost definitely Akhenaten, who preceded Tut as pharaoh in the fourteenth century BC. The identity of his mother is pretty much unknown, but recent DNA samples from his and other mummies have revealed that she was probably one of Akhenaten’s sisters. King Tut was rather frail and suffered from a bone disorder, perhaps due to his parentage. Incestuous relationships, though, weren’t out of the ordinary in ancient Egypt, a fact which is not exactly reassuring. Despite Tut’s health issues, and his short life even by the standards back then (he died at 19), he’s gone down in history as one of Egypt’s most famous and wealthiest pharaohs.

Someone tried and failed to save Abraham Lincoln—and his life just got darker from there.

You’re probably familiar with the 1860s illustration The Assassination of President Lincoln. But who’s that pair sharing the private box with the ill-fated president and his wife? The man on the far left, rushing into action, is Major Henry Rathbone. President and Mrs. Lincoln specifically asked him and his fiancée, Clara Harris, to accompany them to the theater. After Booth fired the shot, Rathbone tried to tackle him to the ground, but Booth was able to get free by slicing Rathbone in the arm with a dagger. Rathbone was never free of the memory and guilt of that night, and he reportedly felt responsible for letting Booth get away. In the years to come, he experienced a myriad of health issues, from stomach ailments to heart palpitations, and his mental state deteriorated as well. On December 23, 1883 (18 years after the assassination), he attacked and killed Clara, now his wife, and attempted to kill himself. He would spend the rest of his life in a mental institution.

In 1494, Europe experienced the closest thing to a real-life zombie outbreak.

Italy’s Renaissance period has a major, though little-known, dark side. Sailors returning from the New World brought with them a massive outbreak of syphilis, which spread through an entire French army. The troops then brought what would become known as “the great pox” to the rest of Europe. With no such thing as antibiotics back then, the disease was able to spread unchecked—and its effects were nasty. The skin on victims’ faces would essentially rot away from the disease’s grisly ulcers. In some cases, the noses, lips, or other body parts of the affected people were essentially gone, and several of the victims eventually died from the disease. So while there was a lot to love about the Renaissance in Europe, the concurrent syphilis outbreak was basically the real-world version of the zombie apocalypse. No big deal.

19th-century New Englanders dug up a young woman’s body… because they thought she was a vampire.

You’ve undoubtedly heard of the Salem Witch Trials, but what about the “Rhode Island Accused Vampire”? In the late 1800s, a bout of tuberculosis (then called “consumption”) struck Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont, and the residents didn’t know what to make of it. Since its victims tended to look sunken, pallid, and drained, people assumed that they’d fallen prey to vampires. So, naturally, a “vampire hunt” soon commenced. When members of an Exeter, Rhode Island family began dying of consumption one after the other, the other townspeople decided that someone in the family must be “feeding” on the others. Even after the mother, Mary Brown, and her two daughters had died, the townspeople decided to exhume the dead bodies, suspecting that one might, in fact, be “undead.”

Brown’s 19-year-old daughter Mercy had died much more recently than her family members, so her body was in much better condition. Her heart even still contained some decayed blood—a sure sign of vampirism, in those days. So, to prevent her from “striking” again, they burned her heart and liver and mixed the ashes with water. They then gave the concoction to another affected townsperson as a “cure.” Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.

Thomas Edison created a seriously creepy baby doll.

For all of his successful inventions, Thomas Edison did experience a pretty major failure when he tried to create the first-ever talking dolls. His 1877 development of the tinfoil phonograph was a major breakthrough in terms of sound recording, and the endless possibilities for this technology were not lost on Edison. In 1890, thanks to the development of the wax cylinder, he was able to produce a line of baby dolls. With wooden bodies, porcelain heads, and miniature phonographs in their chests, the dolls were unlike anything the world of toys had ever seen—or heard—before. The phonographs played back recordings of young women reciting nursery rhymes like “Hickory Dickory Dock” and “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.”

And if ever there were dolls that deserved their own horror flick, it was these. The old, garbled technology, the shrill voices, and the dolls’ eerie faces combine to make them into nightmare fuel for us today. But that’s not actually the reason the dolls were unsuccessful. Their failure was due more to several different things; the pieces were easy to lose, the sound didn’t last long and was hard to understand, and the mini phonographs were highly breakable. And, finally, the dolls were simply expensive.

Dentures used to be made from the teeth of dead soldiers.

Why have false teeth when you can have real teeth?! That must have been the mentality of nineteenth-century dentists. They combated the outbreak of tooth decay with makeshift dentures—ivory base plates with real human teeth attached. Scavengers were already looting corpses from the Battle of Waterloo for their teeth, and now they could sell the teeth to dentists. The dentists would boil the choppers, cut off the roots, attach them to ivory plates, and sell them to customers. Mental Floss doubts that the customers had any idea where the teeth came from. Whether that makes it more or less creepy is up to you to decide.

Researchers once turned a cat into a telephone. A live cat.We know what you’re thinking: “You’ve got to be kitten me!” Well, unfortunately not. In 1929, a pair of scientists at Princeton University wanted to test how the auditory nerve perceives sound. Their test subject was a heavily sedated, but alive, cat. The scientists, Ernest Wever and Charles Bray, cut out part of its brain and attached one end of a telephone wire to its auditory nerve and the other end to a receiver. When Bray said something into the cat’s ears, Wever could hear him through the receiver in a soundproof room. Though it might just seem like a sick experiment, it actually did have some beneficial effects; many researchers believe it helped lead to the development of cochlear implants. As for the feline-turned-phone, it incredibly survived the experiment… but Wever and Bray didn’t release it back into the world. Instead, they killed it to see if the experiment would work on a dead cat. It didn’t.

Boston experienced a deadly molasses flood.

This makes the Boston Tea Party look tame. In January of 1919, an enormous molasses tank burst in the North End of Boston. While a molasses flood might sound like a scene from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, it was no laughing matter. The tank contained—and released—nearly two and a half million gallons of the sticky substance, which surged through the streets at a whopping 35 miles per hour. It was essentially a full-on tidal wave, reaching nearly fifteen feet tall and killing twenty-one people. A hundred and fifty more people were injured, and buildings and houses were knocked from their foundations. Emergency responders had trouble reaching the victims since they had to clamber through the sticky sludge. It took Bostonians weeks to clean up the mess, and many residents would claim that, in the summer heat, they could smell the sickly-sweet odor of molasses even years later.

A computer once did in 40 seconds what took a mathematician an entire lifetime.

Say it isn’t so! While not gross or scandalous, this history fact is still something of a downer. William Shanks, a nineteenth-century mathematician, spent his entire life calculating the digits of pi. He successfully calculated the first 527 digits, and found another 180 digits, though those calculations were incorrect. But calculating the first 527 digits is still impressive… or, rather, it was in 1873. In 1958, a computer calculated that same number of digits in less than a minute…and then calculated another ten thousand. Perhaps it’s better poor Shanks wasn’t alive to see that. If it’s any consolation, though, humans did invent that computer.

A king made his subjects worship the corpse of his beloved.

This case of star-crossed lovers got weird fast. In fourteenth-century Portugal, the king’s son, Don Pedro, fell in love with Inês de Castro. There were only a couple of problems with this: for one, his father, King Afonso IV, did not approve, because Inês was illegitimate. For another, Don Pedro was married. His father had arranged for him to marry a noblewoman named Constanza, and Inês was Constanza’s lady-in-waiting. When Don Pedro refused to stop seeing her, the king had her killed. When Don Pedro acceded to the throne two years later, he exhumed her body, had it clothed in royal dress, and “crowned” her queen. According to historical legend, he made the other nobles all kiss her hand as a sign of their devotion.

Source:

Readers Digest

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/historical-facts-youll-wish-werent-really-true/ss-AATdROS