70 Bizarre Facts about Historical Figures - mental_floss List Show Ep. 439

hi I'm John Green welcome to my salon this is Mental Floss video and you know that a 1948 famous computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing ran a marathon in two hours 46 minutes and three seconds the Olympic winning marathon runner that year only beat him by 11 minutes and that's the first of lots and lots of interesting facts about historical figures I'm going to share with you today in this video brought to you by our friends at Geico benito mussolini spent time as a teacher his students supposedly nicknamed him the tyrant mark twain was born and died in Halley's Comet years 1835 and 1910 he once said it would be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Howie's comment speaking of interesting quotes Charles Dickens once said Little Red Riding Hood was my first love I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood I should have known perfect bliss Amelia Earhart first saw an airplane in 1908 and described herself as indifferent toward the thing of rusty wire and wood Helen Keller loved dogs she actually introduced the Akita breed to Americans from Japan and speaking of dogs Frank Sinatra once gave Marilyn Monroe a Maltese which she named mafia honey John Dee Rockefellers dad had a similar title devil bill he was a snake oil salesman and con artist type Napoleon Bonaparte wrote a romance novella about a soldier which was published after he died Henry the eighth was also a writer he wrote a 30,000 word bestseller titled defense of the seven sacraments before parting with the Catholic Church Charlemagne had a pet elephant named Abu Abbas and perhaps more dangerous while at Harvard William Randolph Hearst had a pet alligator named champagne Charlie Martin Luther King Jr's birthday was Michael and Pocahontas had multiple names over the years including Metallica amanoot and Rebecca Claude Monet's real first name was Oscar and while we're on the subject of artist Pablo Picasso's first word peas was a shortened version of the Spanish word for pencil lapiz Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with water exploration he tried to invent an underwater breathing device shoes to walk on water and a life preserver in the 1860s a woman named Lizzie Doulton published poetry by Edgar Allan Poe she was a medium and claimed he'd visited her and she transcribed the poems that he told her they were notably Edgar Allen Poe's worst poem speaking of famous ghosts British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stayed at the White House in the 1940s and supposedly ran into the ghost of Abraham Lincoln there but bear in mind during Prohibition Winston Churchill arrived in the United States with a prescription for alcohol by the way Abraham Lincoln shared a birthday with Charles Darwin February 12th 1809 and Lincoln was a lawyer but he only had 18 months of formal schooling in his whole speaking of presidents in honor of the Bicentennial in 1976 George Washington was given the title General of the armies of the United States meaning no one has or ever will outrank him in the military Thomas Jefferson visited William Shakespeare's former home with John Adams and they broke off some of the writers chair for a keepsake it's believed by the way that Shakespeare's wife and children were illiterate when Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates he was offended by his low ransom and asked them to raise it and Cleopatra and Mark Antony once created their own club called the inimitable livers it revolved around feasts and drinking wine Jr our token on the other hand founded the Viking club while he was a professor at Leeds University in 2012 scientists named a prehistoric woodpecker the australopiths Nelson Mandela after Nelson Mandela Albert Einstein had a very weird divorce settlement with his first wife in 1919 he told her that one of his papers would eventually win the Nobel Prize and he'd give her the winnings and then in 1922 it happened speaking of Nobel Prize winners will him Ostwald made a special trip to see where Marie and Pierre Curie did their experiments he would describe the scene as a cross between a stable and a potato shed one person who never won the Nobel Peace Prize Mohandas Gandhi however that's probably due to the fact that you can't receive a Nobel Peace Prize posthumously no Nobel Peace Prize was given out in 1949 which was widely seen as the committee's way of honoring Gandhi during World War 2 the French cut the lift cables in the Eiffel Tower that way when Hitler visited he'd be forced to take the stairs if he wanted to go up which he didn't tope john paul ii once asked mother teresa if she would be a cardinal and she declined and speaking of clergy at queen victoria's coronation the archbishop put the ring on the wrong finger and it got stuck after the firework display at Marie Antoinette in the future Louie the sixteenth sweating went wrong and killed over a hundred people the couple gave their month's allowance to support the survivors she was a nice lady she never said that the meat cake she gave one of her month's allowances to the family of people who were killed by her fireworks what else do you want a queen to do she only got 12 allowances a year Wolfgang Mozart met Marie Antoinette in 1763 by the way they were both about 7 years old and he was playing music for her family in Via it's said that he proposed marriage to her and a teenage Beethoven performed for Mozart Mozart allegedly said afterwards keep your eye on him some day he'll give the world something to talk about in 1909 the famous hairdresser Monsieur Antoine invented the bob haircut while working in Paris he said that Joan of Arc was his inspiration so she's kind of a fashion icon did you know that Aristotle thought that women had fewer teeth than men he did Ernest Hemingway went undercover for the Soviet Union in 1941 and his code name was Argo speaking of which Mikhail Gorbachev won a Grammy in 2004 for a collaborative album in which famous figures read the fable Peter in the wolf and in 1963 Muhammad Ali released an album when he was still known as Cassius Clay it was titled I am the greatest and it was mostly spoken word and it was awesome let's talk about some other sport stars Jesse Owens was actually named James Cleveland Owens JC for short a teacher once misheard JC and started calling him Jesse he eventually just switched names before becoming a baseball player Babe Ruth was trained to be a tailor and a shirt maker and after life as a baseball player Jackie Robinson campaigned for Richard Nixon later in his life Christopher Columbus wrote that the apocalypse was coming and that he had caused it by traveling to the new world which you know still might not have been totally wrong I feel like it's a little too early to declare victory on that front Alexander the Great founded a city called Bucephalus after his horse that was kind of a nice change of pace actually from the over 70 cities he named after himself the first time a young Gloria Steinem spent a full year in formal school was when she was 12 Maya Angelou once said her favorite item of clothing were her ugh boots and speaking of fashion it's believed that Queen Elizabeth the first owned 2,000 pairs of gloves Princess Diana had to have multiple rehearsals before her wedding just to get used to the 25 foot long train on her dress Ben Franklin liked to take what he called air bags which was just lounging around in his house naked for about an hour and fellow inventor Thomas Edison proposed to his second wife in Morse code Leo Tolstoy also proposed in code by writing just the first letter of each word in his question which was over a dozen letters he recycled that idea in his novel Anna Karenina because you know why waste a great idea like that just on your spouse in the 1930s Nikola Tesla paid a hotel bill by promising the management he would give them one of his inventions a death beam he said it was worth ten thousand dollars in fact of course a death beam would be worth much more but when they went to fetch it it was just a bunch of random electronics in a box Rosa Parks sued the band outcast for using her name in one of their song titles someone removed Galileo's middle finger a hundred years after his death and it is now at the Galileo Museum in Florence Walt Disney gave his housekeeper of 30 years company shares for holiday bonuses and when she died in 1993 her estate was worth nine million dollars Karl Marx was jailed for drunkenness while at college Elvis Presley only ever performed in the United States and Canada Sigmund Freud had over 30 separate cancer related surgeries in his life and Mao Zedong was very good at calligraphy in fact his work is still on display all over China Malcolm X once copied the entire dictionary into his handwriting he also read each page out loud to improve his public speaking when he was 10 years old Neil Armstrong mowed the grass at his local cemetery Paul McCartney did a voice in the Simpsons episode Lisa the vegetarian he did this on the condition that Lisa would stay a vegetarian for the entire run of the show which she has and speaking of the Simpsons the reason mr. burns answers the phone with ahoy-hoy is because that's how Alexander Graham Bell thought his invention should be answered one of Genghis Khan's top generals once belonged to a rival tribe and almost killed Genghis in battle which impressed Genghis so much that he had him joined the Mongol army as an officer Elizabeth Cady Stanton wanted to donate her brain after her death to scientists at Cornell University but her children didn't let it happen when she died I guess now is as good a time as any to tell you that no matter what my children say I want my brain to stay inside of my rotting corpse Isaac Newton believed that the world would end no sooner than 2060 so we should have some time left and finally I return to my salon to tell you that Florence Nightingale was a frequent user of pie chart like graphs they were invented about 20 years before she was born but she helped popularize the format thanks for watching Mental Floss video which is made with the help of all of these lovely people and thanks again to our friends at Geico for making this video possible let me know in comments your favorite fact about a historical figure mine is that Nikola Tesla was in love for a little while with a pigeon anyway that's a story for a different time as we say in my hometown don't forget to be awesome you

Channel: Mental Floss

Views: 528,819

Keywords: John Green, Mental Floss, history, list show, trivia, bizarre facts, facts about historical figures, weird facts, strange facts, bizarre, historical figure facts, the list show, tls, mental floss youtube, idea channel, john green, nerdfighters, vlogbrothers, historical figuers, historical figures, facts about famous people, bizarre history, mental floss, bizarre facts about historical figures, weird facts about historical figures, strange facts about historical figures

Id: Oqf7eJPILHs

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2016