Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void

Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies

In August 1930, amid the early days of the Great Depression, a Massachusetts chef named Ruth Wakefield took a major risk: She decided to chase her dream of opening an inn and restaurant. It was touch and go at first: In the Toll House Inn’s first month, the money on hand dwindled to just $10, a little more than $180 today. But by the end of the year, the business had grown so popular it needed 12 employees to keep up with demand. By the end of the Depression, against all odds, Wakefield had to expand the inn to serve around 1,000 diners per day. Comfort food with complimentary second helpings along a busy road for auto travelers turned out to be a winning strategy.

Wakefield is widely credited with inventing the chocolate chip cookie, after stumbling on a recipe that proved to be a hit with diners at the Toll House Inn. Originally served not as a stand-alone dish but as an accompaniment to ice cream, the cookie became the restaurant’s most enduring creation, and Wakefield appeared in newspapers and radio shows to talk about the trendy treat. In its early days it was called the “Toll House cookie” or “chocolate crunch cookie”; the “chocolate chip cookie” name came around 1939 because the recipe called for literally chipping the chocolate off the bar.

Speaking of chocolate chipping: After Nestle got Wakefield’s permission to use the recipe, the cookie started appearing in ads, and it was so popular that it started influencing product development. Early on, Nestle released a semisweet chocolate bar scored into 160 pieces, and in 1940, the company debuted its “morsel” chips — the chocolate chips we know today. 

Every year, people in many parts of the world set their clocks forward an hour each spring at the beginning of daylight saving time (DST), and then back an hour in the fall. One of the first people to seriously advocate adjusting the clock seasonally was a British builder named William Willett, who had noticed that few people were out in the early morning light during the summer, and his golf games often ended early when the sky became dark. But his idea worked a little differently than the “spring forward” and “fall back” time changes many observe today.

In his 1907 self-published pamphlet “The Waste of Daylight,” Willett wrote, “The sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon, having already passed its western limit, when we reach home after the work of the day is over.” To maximize time spent during the daylight hours, he suggested changing the clocks at 2 a.m. on Sundays during the spring and fall — something we still do today. But, unlike today, the transition was to happen 20 minutes at a time over the course of four weeks, twice a year, for a total of eight time changes each year. And rather than an even hour, the time difference would be 80 minutes. Willett’s proposal was considered in the British House of Commons in 1908, but it was met with derision and soundly rejected.

During World War I a decade later, many countries were looking for new ways to save money. Inspired by Willett’s original proposal, which had included estimated savings in electricity costs, Germany and Britain implemented “Summer Time” in 1916, changing the clocks just one hour twice a year. The United States followed suit, first observing daylight saving time on March 31, 1918.

Abraham Lincoln: “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

It’s a very diplomatic phrase, but Lincoln never said it. Quote Investigator traced the expression to 19th century humorist Charles Farrar Browne, also known as Artemus Ward. In 1863, Browne created a series of fake testimonials for some lectures he was performing, including a fictitious blurb from one “O. Abe.” This “Abe” supposedly said: “I have never heard any of your lectures, but from what I can learn I should say that for people who like the kind of lectures you deliver, they are just the kind of lectures such people like.”

The testimonial was reprinted in multiple places, and versions of the saying became associated with Lincoln. Later on, a story arose that Browne had read a lecture to Lincoln, who responded with a version of the phrase. Later still, Browne’s name was dropped from the situation entirely. The writers George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, and Muriel Spark have all used the phrase — but long after it was already circulating.

By the way, other things Lincoln never said include: “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years,” and “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power,” among many other examples.

Einstein’s brain was preserved for scientific study. 

Albert Einstein was one of the most famous and influential physicists of the 20th century, and although he was widely revered in his life, he had complicated feelings about being the subject of such adulation. When Einstein died from a ruptured abdominal aneurysm at age 76 in 1955, he had already made it clear that he wished to be cremated so “people don’t come to worship at my bones.” Per his wishes, Einstein’s ashes were scattered by his family at a private spot along the Delaware River. But it wasn’t the entirety of the physicist’s body: Before cremation, his brain was removed and taken to be studied.

On the same day Einstein died, Thomas Harvey, a pathologist at New Jersey’s Princeton Hospital, conducted an autopsy, during which Harvey removed the scientist’s brain. Removing organs was common autopsy practice, as they were often kept by medical institutions for research. But Harvey decided to keep this one for himself. He claimed he wished only to conduct medical research on the genius’s brain, and promised Einstein’s family he would not use the organ for his own cultural cache. Over the next four decades, Harvey occasionally sent sections of the brain to other scientists to study, but most of it was stored in pieces in jars of formaldehyde at his home. While studies done on Einstein’s brain over the years did reveal differences from the average person’s, it ultimately remains unclear where his extraordinary intellect really came from. Today, samples of Einstein’s brain are kept at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., and the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.

The Lincoln and Kennedy Assassinations Share Many Strange Similarities

Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy are widely considered two of the greatest Presidents in U.S. history, and the coincidences surrounding their assassinations further link the two leaders. In fact, books have been written about them, and members of Congress have even discussed the topic. Both Presidents were killed on a Friday with their wives by their sides. Both were succeeded by men whose last name was Johnson (Andrew Johnson and Lyndon B. Johnson). There are also some parallels in the assassins: John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and was caught in a warehouse; Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from a window in a book warehouse and was apprehended in a movie theater. What’s more, both Booth and Oswald were themselves killed before they could face justice. Not everyone agrees as to whether these similarities have a deeper meaning or no meaning at all, but at the end of the day, the sheer number of coincidences is quite surprising.

At first glance, the base of the U.S. “Ghost Army” would have resembled a movie set, with artists painting dummy airplanes, actors reciting fake radio broadcasts, and soundtracks playing on repeat. But this was a real World War II military operation, officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. It had one mission: to trick German intelligence by any means necessary. The first of its kind, the 1,100-person covert unit was a mix of artists, radio broadcasters, sound engineers, actors, architects, and, of course, professional soldiers. This special unit staged no fewer than 22 deceptions in some of the most volatile areas of Europe between January 1944 and the end of the war in 1945. 

The Ghost Army operated near the front lines. They set up dummy artillery on Omaha Beach following D-Day, erected dozens of fake tanks to inflate troop numbers during sieges, and helped draw German forces away from General George Patton’s troops during the Battle of the Bulge. Sometimes, the con artists took their acting talents into local bars and cafés, spouting off inaccurate information for German spies to take back to their commanders. Loudspeaker broadcasts of military drills and rumbling tanks (which could be heard from 15 miles away) gave the illusion of massive numbers of troops. The army’s deception skills allowed them to mimic forces of 40,000 men, misleading German intel. By some estimates, these ploys saved the lives of up to 30,000 American troops. However, it wasn’t until recently that these heroic efforts were brought to light. Military records of the Ghost Army weren’t declassified until the mid-1990s, and it wasn’t until 2022 that the 23rd Headquarters Special Troopswere awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for their role in the Allied victory.