In the past we’ve talked about some of the greatest impostors in history, but here’s another installment for your viewing pleasure. These are 10 of the greatest impostors and con men of the 20th century.

Our first entry begins in the final years of the 1800′s and carries over to the leading decade of the 20th century. Cassie Chadwick was born Elizabeth Bigsley in 1857, and it wasn’t long before she embarked on a long and incredibly successful con career. It only took fourteen years to lead to her first arrest—she was picked up after forging checks in Ontario under the claim they they were inherited from a long lost British uncle. The court released her shortly, claiming her to be insane—a dubious accomplishment for a 14-year-old.

As the years progressed, so did Cassie’s schemes. In 1882 she married her first husband, masquerading as a clairvoyant named Madame Lydia DeVere. The high profile wedding, however, brought her past victims out of the woodwork and to her front door, demanding payment for the money she had stolen from them. The marriage lasted less than a year.

Fifteen years and three husbands later, Cassie Chadwick embarked on her most ambitious scam to date, and the one that turned her into a legend—she convinced the world that she was an illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie, the ludicrously wealthy steel and railroad mogul. Over the next eight years, she scammed up to $20 million in bank loans under Carnegie’s name—while the banks themselves were too afraid to ask Carnegie to vouch for the loans for fear of stirring up controversy over his “illegitimate daughter.” The entire scheme collapsed around her in 1904 when she was arrested after one bank called her bluff. She was given 14 years in jail, but in 1907 she died due to heart complications.

It’s hard to fault a man for trying, no matter how devious their intentions may be. And it’s hard to find a man who tried harder than Stanley Clifford Weyman. Unlike most impostors, Weyman wasn’t in it for the money—he wanted the adventure, famously stating: “One man’s life is a boring thing. I lived many lives. I’m never bored.”

In between impersonating navy and military officials, journalists, and the actual U.S. Secretary of State, he also masterminded a meeting between an Afghani princess and Warren Harding, the President of the U.S. See, in 1921, Afghanistan and Britain were in talks to negotiate a peace treaty, and Princess Fatima, of Afghanistan, was visiting the U.S. However, the U.S. government wasn’t acknowledging her official presence.

So what did Weyman do? He visited Princess Fatima under the guise of a Liaison Officer for the State Department and promised that he would arrange a meeting between her and President Harding. All he asked was that she supply $10,000 as a complimentary present to the State Department. But here, where most con men would have taken the money and run, Weyman actually followed through on his promise—he used the $10,000 for first class transport and accommodations for the princess, then lied his way up through the chain of command at the White House until he got to the president himself. When the press released his photo beside the princess and the president, he was recognized and arrested. Why did he do it? Just to see if he could.

It’s rare that an impersonator will manage to make a positive impact on the world and save the lives of the people who come to depend on him. Most impostors are after money or, in the case of Stanley Weyman, excitement. For Ferdinand Demara, impersonation was about filling in gaps, picking up the pieces where a job was needed, whether he had the training for it or not.

Early in his “career,” Demara was a soldier in the military. Not happy with where that was taking him, he decided to fake his own suicide in 1942 and assumed the name of Robert French, then began teaching college psychology at a Pennsylvania university. Every now and then he would move to a different university position under a variety of names. Eventually, though, he was caught and given jail time—not for impersonating anyone, but for deserting the army years earlier.

Out of jail and with the headlines of the Korean War plastered across newspapers, Demara decided to assume the name of an acquaintance, a surgeon named Joseph Cyr. Under his new identity he got a job on the Canadian destroyer HMCS Cayuga and shipped off to Korea. Unfortunately, he turned out to be the only surgeon on the ship, and ended up performing more than sixteen major surgeries—with no formal training. All of his patients recovered. In the biography of Demara’s life, The Great Impostor, Demara claimed that he simply read a surgery textbook before operating.

George Dupre is an interesting case, in that his only real impersonation was of himself. However, the history he actually had and the history he claimed to have were so different that he inadvertently became one of the greatest Canadian war heroes in the years following WWII.

After the war ended, Dupre began traveling across Canada as a public speaker, describing his missions as a spy for the Special Operations Executive, a legendary espionage organization sometimes referred to as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Dupre wove intricate tales of life behind enemy lines in occupied Paris, working with the underground resistance to overthrow the Nazi Gestapo. He described his harrowing experience as a prisoner of the Gestapo undergoing weeks of physical and psychological torture yet refusing to divulge any information. His story became so widespread that a book was written about it, The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk, and Dupre became an international sensation.

Except that none of it ever happened. With the fame from the book came testimonies from people who had actually served with Dupre in the war. The truth was, Dupre spent the entire war behind a desk in London. It turned out that Dupre had just embellished a few stories for fun, and somehow the entire thing spiraled out of control. Aside from the fame though, Dupre never benefited from the book deal and the public talks—he donated all his proceeds to Scouts Canada. His biography was reclassified as fiction.

Most of the impostors on this list got their start at a young age—few of them achieved notoriety before the age of twenty. David Hampton is now considered one of the youngest successful con artists and impersonators, and his story has since been adapted into the play and film Six Degrees of Separation. His gimmick: impersonating actor Sidney Poitier’s son (Sidney Poitier actually has six daughters and zero sons).

In 1983, at the age of nineteen, David Hampton tried to get into a Manhattan night club with a friend. The bouncers refused to let them in, but when Hampton came back later and told them he was Sidney Poitier’s son, they immediately showed him to the VIP section. Thus, an identity was born. Hammond took to showing up at first class restaurants, claiming that he was meeting his “father.” He would dine, then act disappointed when his father never arrived while simultaneously signing the check in Poitier’s name.

Soon he began to target the wealthy citizens of Manhattan—including Calvin Klein and Gary Sinise, among others. Hampton would introduce himself as David Poitier, then make up a story about how he had been mugged and needed a place to stay until his father arrived the next day. In one of these homes he stole an address book, and took to calling first, claiming that he was a friend of their son/daughter from college.

After Hampton’s story became famous in Six Degrees in 1990, he began traveling the country under various other personas (“David Poitier” wouldn’t exactly fly anymore), playing the impersonation game until 1993, when he passed away from AIDS.

Christian Gerhartsreiter is a German who moved to the U.S. in 1979 in the hopes of getting a job as an actor. His plan worked—but not exactly in the normal sense. A mere eighteen years old with no money, no connections, and no legal visa to be in the States, he decided that the best thing to do would be to get married and obtain a green card through his wife. So that’s what he did—he found a young woman named Amy Duhnke and told her that if he were sent back to Germany he’d be conscripted into the German army to fight the Russians (this was during the Cold War). She agreed to marry him, but the day after the wedding Christian skipped out on the honeymoon and pointed his compass towards California, where his true calling lay.

His true calling, of course, was to become Clark Rockefeller—the faux multimillionaire social butterfly who spent the next two decades—from around 1985 to 2006—claiming to be a member of the illustrious Rockefeller family. The plan worked exceedingly well until his wife Sandra Boss (of 11 years we should add), began to get suspicious that he was not, in fact, a Rockefeller. The married couple had been living exclusively on Sandra’s income the entire time, while “Clark” pursued high profile social connections.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Sandra Boss discovered the lie, filed for divorce in 2006, and left with their daughter. Two years later, Clark was arrested for kidnapping his daughter in Boston, sparking a whirlwind investigation into this mysterious German’s true identity. As it turned out, he also killed a guy.

Stanley Kubrick is an American director who’s something of a legend among movie buffs. The words “greatest director in history” have been thrown around, along with the words “not British” and “heavily bearded.” Those last two are particularly important, because in the early 90′s the reclusive Kubrick began to show up in social clubs in London—only now, he was clean shaven and decidedly English. The “new” Kubrick was actually a man named Alan Conway, who had taken to using the name for the social status it imparted.

Despite the changes in his physical appearance, and reportedly having next to no knowledge of any of Kubrick’s films, Alan Conway (real name Eddie Alan Jablowsky) managed to keep the charade going. Since the real Kubrick hadn’t been seen in public more than a handful of times in the past 15 years, it couldn’t have been terribly difficult—and even people who had actually met Kubrick in real life were fooled by the act. The film critic Frank Rich was famously convinced and, based on Conway’s behavior, came to the conclusion that Kubrick was gay (which Conway was).

Unfortunately, this story would be hilarious if it wasn’t quite so tragic. Conway was a violent alcoholic, according to his son, and his impersonations were closer to fanatical delusions than any carefully calculated plan. Conway passed away in 1998 from heart problems.

In the past, masquerading as one of the captains of industry seemed to be the surest way to a quick million. These days, the Hollywood faces are the new American royalty. In 1992, Tehran native Anoushirvan Fakhran came to the States on a student visa, and spent the next several years living a lavish lifestyle, sprinkled with privileges usually reserved for celebrities and visiting royalty. That’s because nobody knew him by the name of Anoushirvan—to everyone who knew him, he was Jonathan Taylor Spielberg, nephew of director Stephen Spielberg.

In fact, he had even gone so far as to officially change his name to Spielberg in 1997. Then, in 1998, an anonymous woman placed a call to Paul VI high school in Fairfax, Virginia. She claimed to represent Steven Spielberg, and said that his nephew would be filming a movie in the area and wanted to research high school life. So the school allowed “Jonathan” to attend free of tuition, and gave him an official transfer from his previous school, the fictitious Beverly Hills Private School for Actors. Jonathan Spielberg was now a student.

During this time, Jonathan and his mother were living in a posh apartment in Fairfax Village, and Jonathan drove a BMW to school, often parking in the school principal’s reserved space. Nobody complained; he was related to a celebrity. Eventually though, the scheme backfired—Jonathan stopped attending classes, and the school tried to reach Steven Spielberg to find out why. Jonathan was arrested and sentenced to 11 months in jail for forging documents.

Steven Russell is probably closer to an escape artist than an impostor, but the means through which he masterminded his many prison escapes are the stuff of legend. In 1990, Russell lost his job and, instead of searching for new work, faked an accident and sued the company. This landed him his first prison sentence, and his first chance to escape. In 1992, Russell impersonated a prison guard by changing his clothes and just walking right out of the prison.

On his second arrest, which was for embezzling nearly $1 million from a medical company, Russell was given a $950,000 bail—he couldn’t pay it, so he simply called the courthouse, told them he was a judge, and reduced the bail to $45,000, which he promptly paid. Unfortunately, he was quickly tracked down again once the error was discovered, and Russell found himself facing a 40 year sentence for the previous embezzlement charges.

So he escaped again—this time by coloring his prison uniform with several dozen green markers until it resembled surgical scrubs. Again, he walked right out the front door. And again, he was quickly found and arrested. So this time Russell typed up fake medical records on a typewriter in his cell, and, through judicious use of laxatives, convinced the prison guards he was dying of AIDS. Then he called the prison and said that he was a doctor looking for volunteers to test a new AIDS treatment. When the prison warden announced the news, Russell promptly volunteered.

The next time he was caught, he faked a heart attack and was taken to a hospital under guard of FBI agents. So he asked to use the phone—and called the very agents guarding him under the guise of an FBI detective to let them know that they no longer needed to guard him. Russell is currently back in prison, looking forward to his release date in the year 2140. The film I love you Phillip Morris is based on his exploits.

The Rockefellers just can’t catch a break. Before the German Clark Rockefeller, there was Christophe Rocancourt, the “French Rockefeller.” Christophe started his scams big, and kept the ball rolling his entire career—his first scam was faking a property deed in Paris, and then selling that deed for $1.4 million.

With his wallet freshly stuffed, he then hopped the ocean to the United States and began fraternizing with the Hollywood fat cats, claiming to be a French relative of the Rockefellers. Through this alias (and others), he convinced multiple people to fund his fictitious projects. Most of the time, he never even had to make any concrete claims—he would just show up at a party and make a vague mention of his mother, who might happen to be an actress one week, or a famous producer the next week.

In 2006, he was interviewed by Dateline, and claimed that he had, all said and done, scammed about $40 million in his lifetime. His modus operandi was to convince someone wealthy that he was working on a large investment, but needed some capital to get it off the ground. The person would give Rocancourt the money, and Rocancourt would disappear. He famously convinced Jean Claude Van Damme, the action star, to produce a movie of his.

He was arrested for fraud in 1998, but has continued his scams well into the 21st century. As of 2009 he was in jail in Vancouver, where he told reporters, “I never steal. Never. I lied, but I never stole.”

The post 10 Greatest Impostors Of The 20th Century appeared first on Listverse.

There may well be some awesome tales that didn’t make it into this list (any tale with a dragon in it is awesome, after all)—so please let us know in the comments.

It most often requires great cunning to defeat a dragon, and that’s the virtue which crops up again and again in stories about dragon slayers. We start the list, however, with a case of brute strength being the victor.

An unnamed dragon is said to have terrorized the area around the Austrian city of Innsbruck. It hoarded a massive treasure of gold, small pieces of which occasionally got swept away by the local river and found by villagers. Whenever the dragon noticed a loss of coin, it would devastate the surrounding countryside, smashing houses and killing locals in a fury of revenge.

Thankfully, a giant by the name of Haymo happened to live nearby. He was twelve feet tall, and of noble heritage. His strength was unmatched—and he believed that he could stand up to the dragon. So the giant put on his suit of armor, and marched with grim determination through the piles of rubble the dragon had created from what had been whole villages. 

Finding the dragon just as it was getting ready for another rampage, Haymo jumped onto it and began pounding it with his fists. The dragon writhed and squealed in pain, eventually breaking free and fleeing to its cave. Haymo followed it, ultimately stabbing it and cutting out its tongue, which he presented to the locals as proof that they no longer had to fear the terrible dragon.

Krakow, the ancient capital of Poland, is said to have been founded above the lair of a dragon known locally as Smok Wawelski. There are a number of versions of this tale, but the most popular has it that the dragon pillaged the countryside for many years, devouring livestock and terrifying farmers. The king sent out a call to noblemen and knights throughout the land, stating that whoever managed to slay the dragon would be rewarded with riches and marriage to his daughter. But none of the knights were able to get the better of the dragon, who quickly reduced all comers to a pile of ash.

A poor shoemaker’s apprentice named Skuba eventually volunteered his assistance. The king, who was by this stage rather desperate, agreed—though few people had much faith in the ability of the young lad. Skuba knew that he couldn’t kill the dragon with force, so he set a trap.

He killed three lambs, stuffed them with spices and sulphur, and left them lying outside the dragon’s cave. After the dragon had devoured this tasty morsel, he experienced a massive burning in his stomach. The pain became so great that he drank half of the nearby river in an attempt to quench it—eventually consuming so much water that he actually exploded.

Should you ever find yourself in Poland, you can still visit the dragon’s cave today.

According to various pre-Hindu religions, the asuras were a type of demigod or demon (direct translation is difficult as the pantheon is different to those familiar in the West). The most powerful of these demigods was Vritra, a dragon so big that his body covered the whole world. He would sometimes use his coils to block rivers, earning him the nickname “bringer of drought.” He eventually had the nerve to steal Earth’s entire supply of water, turning the planet into a desolate wasteland.

Vritra was slain by Indra, who would later go on to become king of the gods. Shortly after Indra was born, he set out and managed to demolish ninety-nine fortresses belonging to Vritra. Inevitably, a huge battle ensued. Indra was ultimately victorious, and “with his own great and deadly thunder smote [Vritra] into pieces,” thereby freeing the waters of the world.

The story of the Brno dragon is similar to that of the Wawel dragon above, except that this dragon is actually a crocodile. Yet its nickname—the “Brno dragon”—and its present-day resting place, hung by chains from the ceiling of the Town Hall, justify its place on this list.

Legend has it that near the beginning of the last millennium, the people of Brno were tormented by this beast, who lived in a cave and would eat anything that came his way. The frightened townspeople didn’t know how to deal with the problem, but they were luckily soon visited by a traveling butcher.

The cunning butcher, hoping to slay the beast, sewed a bunch of quicklime into an ox-pelt and left it out to be eaten. The dragon duly gobbled it up. Quicklime reacts rather vigorously with water—so when the beast washed its meal down with large swigs from the river, the contents of its stomach began to boil. The crocodile burst open, much to the delight of the locals, who sewed him back up and had him mounted on the ceiling for prosperity. The butcher earned a reward of one hundred gold coins, and presumably several xp into the bargain.

In Norse mythology, the dwarf Fafnir was one of three brothers. He didn’t begin life as a dragon, but became one after murdering his father for gold. He hid in the wilderness with the treasure, and became a dragon in order to better guard it. Unfortunately for the upstart dragon, he also happened to breathe poison around the land, which the locals understandably weren’t too happy about.

Fafnir’s brother, the blacksmith Regin, asked his own step-son—the young hero Sigurd—to kill the problematic dragon. Sigurd decided to dig a ditch, hiding there with the aim of suddenly leaping out and stabbing Fafnir in the heart.

Odin, King of the Gods, for his own reasons turned up and advised Sigurd to dig a number of other ditches to drain away the dragon’s blood, so that he wouldn’t drown. Sigurd listened to the advice, and when Fafnir showed up he duly attacked him. Though he missed the heart (instead plunging his sword into the dragon’s shoulder), the wound still turned out to be fatal.

Regin then asked Sigurd to cook the dragon’s heart. Sigurd, for some reason seeing nothing odd about this, did as he was told. He touched the heart to check if it was cooked, and burned his thumb in the process; and when he touched his thumb to his mouth in order to ease the pain, he suddenly found that he was able to understand the speech of birds. These birds told Sigurd that Regin intended to kill him, so the young hero killed Regin first, and made off with all of the gold himself.

The story of the dragon of Modiford starts out with a little girl named Maud. She was walking in the woods one day when she found a bright green baby dragon, smaller than a cucumber. She took it home with her and fed it milk, but as it grew in size, it began to consume chickens and other small animals. When it reached adulthood, it took to eating people—though throughout this process it remained friendly to Maud.

In what seems to be a recurring theme, the people living in the area weren’t too keen on having a man-eating beast in their midst—but they were at a loss as to how they might get rid of it.

There are a number of stories about how the dragon was killed. Most of them involve a convicted criminal who was offered pardon in exchange for slaying the beast. According to one story, he hid in a cider barrel and shot the dragon when it approached. Another story has it that he rigged the barrel with spikes and hooks, and the dragon impaled itself when it attempted to wrap itself around him. Two more stories involve the dragon being ambushed in its sleep—in one instance by the above criminal, and in another instance by a rabble of pitchfork-wielding villagers.

Perhaps the people of Modiford celebrated the dragon’s death a little too enthusiastically, and the details became blurry? We can probably forgive them for that.

There are two versions of the battle of the Hittite Storm God with the dragon-like giant Illuyanka. I will recount my favorite one here, but you can read them both here if you wish. Sadly, we know very little about the details of Hittite mythology, so the story has a few gaps in it (we aren’t told, for example, why the Storm God and the dragon didn’t get along).

During their first battle, Illuyanka the dragon was victorious over the Storm God. The despondent Storm God went to see the Mother God, Inata, to ask for her help in getting revenge. Inata came up with a plan, but she needed some assistance to carry it out—and for this, she went to a human man called Huspashiya. 

Huspashiya agreed to assist the god in return for letting him sleep with her, which she duly did. They then put together a large feast, with quite a significant amount of alcohol, and invited the serpent Illuyanka and all of his family to have his fill. When he was too drunk to move, they proceeded to tie up the serpent and the rest of his family up, allowing the Storm God to come and finish him off.

Huspashiya’s fate wasn’t much better, either. He went to live with his newfound goddess-lover, but was forbidden from looking out of the window. After twenty days of resisting the temptation to do so, he finally couldn’t help himself—and when he looked out, he saw his wife and child. He begged to be allowed to return to them, and . . . that’s all we know for certain, as the original source of the story is damaged from that point onwards. Scholars suspect that he was either killed for disobeying, or granted his wish after being castrated.

The story of the Lambton worm begins in the thirteenth century with a rebellious young boy named John Lambton, the son of a local lord in Durham Country, England. One Sunday, John decided to skip church, instead deciding to go fishing. Despite being warned that skipping church would bring no good, John set himself up for some relaxed angling. After a couple of hours, he caught a small, black, worm-like creature, which had the features of a salamander. Thinking it strange but of little further interest, he threw it into a well and got on with his life.

In adulthood, John joined the crusades as atonement for his youthful transgressions. While he was gone, the worm—by now fully grown—had emerged from the well. It wrapped itself seven times around a local hill, terrorizing villagers by eating their livestock and even snatching small children. The elderly Lord Lambton was able to sedate the worm by offering it twenty gallons of milk a day—but the local impact of the worm’s presence was devastating.

Upon his return from the crusades, John Lambton learned of the giant worm. Many had already tried to slay the beast, but whenever a piece of it was cut away it would simply reattach and heal itself. John sought the advice of a local witch, who advised him to attach spear-points to his armor and to fight the worm in the local river. He did so—and when the worm tried to wrap itself around him, its flesh was torn by the spear points, and the mangled pieces were washed away by the river’s current.

John was able to vanquish the beast, but in doing so he incurred a curse against his family which would last for nine generations: not a single of his descendants was to die peacefully in bed, as long as the curse lasted.

While walking along the river one day, the Shinto storm god Susanoo came across an old couple and their daughter, a young girl. Noticing that both of the couple were in tears, Susanoo enquired as to the cause of their troubles. They explained that they had once had eight daughters, but in each of the last seven years the giant serpent Orochi had eaten one daughter—and was now due to return for their last.

The old man explained that the beast had eight heads, eight tails, and a body the length of eight valleys. If there’s one thing this list has taught us, it’s that the best way for a storm god to slay a dragon is to get it drunk. Susanoo advised the old couple to build a fence with eight gates, and behind each gate to place a bucket of refined liquor. They duly did so, and when the beast arrived, each of its heads gulped down the contents of the buckets, which resulted in the dragon becoming intoxicated. Susanoo proceeded to hack the beast into pieces, turning the River Hi into a river of blood.

This is the only African tale on this list, taking place in what is modern-day Ghana. In the town of Wagadu, in ancient times, the people had made a deal with a dragon called Bida. They fed the dragon ten young maidens each year, and in return Bida made it rain gold three times annually. The town chief Lagarre, grandson of the chief that had originally made the deal, was able to renegotiate this to just one maiden a year in return for the same three rainfalls of gold. Eventually, it became the turn of the most beautiful maiden in the kingdom, Sia Jatta Bari, to be fed to the beast. She was dressed in wedding garb, and led out to the dragon’s lair.

Sia’s lover, Mamadi Sefe Dekote, had other ideas. He rode dutifully with the procession, but secretly harbored a plan of his own. He knew that it was the dragon’s custom to stick its head out of his cave three times, before snatching its meal on the third. As Bida’s head came out for the final time, Mamadi struck the dragon, killing it, and saving Sia. Celebrations all round, right?

Not quite. It turned out that the people had become quite used to the rainfall of gold provided by Bida—so they chased both Mamadi and Sia out of Wagadu. Also, it seems that Sia didn’t love Mamadi quite as much as he loved her, and tricked him into cutting off a finger and a toe. She then declared that she couldn’t love anyone who didn’t possess a full compliment of digits.

Mamadi was understandably upset by this point. He presumably reminded Sia that he’d killed a dragon for her, but ultimately turned to a witch for a love potion, which made Sia fall instantly in love with him. Mamadi then tricked Sia into sleeping with one of his servants—and when she realized what she’d done, she died instantly of pure shame.

Alan is an aspiring writer trying to kick-start his career with an awesome beard and an addiction to coffee. You can hear his bad jokes by reading them aloud to yourself from Twitter where he is @SkepticalNumber or you can email him at mailskepticalnumber@gmail.com.

The post 10 Lesser-Known Dragon Slayings From Legend appeared first on Listverse.

The first standardized attempt to measure the human’s mental capacity was courtesy of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, who formulated a test to measure verbal ability. Binet and Simon only wanted to use the test to find those children who suffered from mental retardation. This experiment was furthered by William Stern in 1912 to compare a child’s mental age with his or her chronological age. Stern coined the term “intelligence quotient.” The score is calculated by dividing the mental age by the chronological age, then multiplying the quotient by 100. If a child of 10 years old has a mental age of 5, his IQ is 50. Determining his mental age is the difficult part.

Once an average person reaches the age of 15 or so, the IQ test is no longer important, since the mental age has reached maturity. But an average child of 5 should have a mental age of 5. If that child has a mental age of 1, he has a below-average IQ. The two most popular tests used today are the Weschler and the Standford-Binet. On the latter, Albert Einstein (who will make quite a few appearances in this list) scored a now famous 186 as a child. On the former, the same score registers as a 160. The problem with either number is that the tests were not originally conceived for the purpose of scoring this high.

Extremely high scores are routinely inaccurate. 180 on the Standford-Binet is typically the top of the scale, and anything measured over it has few precedents for comparison and should be taken with a grain of salt. Suffice to say, the test-taker has a high degree of adaptability, versatility, and fast retention of information. But is a 186 “smarter” than a 176?

All the various tests can do is discover the very low scorers among children, and these scores are quite accurate. The difference between a 79 and a 69 is highly noticeable, and the test can determine which is which and the reasons why. Given our current understanding of intelligence, the only feasible method by which to score extremely high IQs accurately is to make the questions harder. Spatial reasoning diagrams have many more moving parts and last longer; jumbled words are longer; arithmetical sequences have more gaps. But if you can perform these mental feats on simple challenges, the only difference between them and the more difficult ones is the time you require to solve them. If so, then disregarding the time you need to finish the test, your score ought to be the same. You did the same kind of work. If you deserve a bonus for the extra difficulty, then your score has become arbitrary.

Quite a few IQ tests measure “general knowledge.” Here’s an actual IQ question this lister came across when he was 5: “What color is an apple?” Well, the only apples this lister had seen in his first 5 years were green. Got that one wrong. There are quite a few colors of apples. Some are more than one color. Mensa’s test includes questions like, “2D is to mobius strip as 3D is to ______.” Google says the answer is “Klein bottle.” Now that we know, are we smarter? Einstein once said that he did not like to clutter up his memory with facts and numbers that he could just look up in a dictionary.

As general knowledge goes, the intent is to ask questions to which everyone on Earth, at an age of 5, should know the answers. There are some questions that fit the bill, like “What is 2 + 2?” but does a correct answer to this question indicate a higher mental capacity in the child? IQ tests have historically tried to eliminate all unfairness, and the only way to do so is to eliminate “general knowledge” questions. One question ths lister encountered on the Internet is, “If you unscramble the letters in CIFAIPC, you would have what?” The choices include the correct answer, “ocean.” This question measures vocabulary, reading, and visual reasoning. But suppose the person taking the test understands English and yet has never heard of the Pacific Ocean.

IQ tests were invented for the purpose of scoring children. We all know that children require a lot of parental discipline to ensure they don’t grow up to be criminals. It always starts innocuously enough with bullying, name-calling, and lording any advantage that can be found over a supposed inferior child. While the children with high IQs are usually deemed the nerds of a group and picked on by the larger, and usually dumber, bullies, the nerds frequently pick on each other as well. Size may not matter, but the group that knows everything about Star Trek will publicly ridicule the individual who wants to fit in but can’t.

Children are mean. They require maturity to grow out of this, and though good parenting is essential, it really only stops with age. This is why parents are usually told that it is a better idea not to inform their children of their IQs. If it’s even one point below the arbitrary average of 100, the child will feel inferior. If it’s well above average, the child will likely lord it over his peers. If it is average, the child will probably still feel inferior.

But then, adults seem to take their IQs very seriously—when it’s in their favor. We have groups around the world like Mensa, the Triple Nine Society, the Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society. The last of these is said to be the most exclusive intellect club in the world. Applicants must score at least 171 on the Standford-Binet test to be accepted. Mensa requires “only” a 132. But what good is it to be a member? The Mega Society does very little that can be described as helpful. They have meetings now and then around the world, and at these meetings, the members just schmooze and congratulate each other. More on this at #1.

The Internet, and so-called “experts” before it, have long propagated some theoretical, famously high IQs across history. They are, of course, utter conjecture, since the IQ, as a notion of measured intellect, and its tests have only been around since the turn of the 20th Century. But if you google “famous high iqs,” you’ll find well known webpage(s) claiming that on the scale that measures an average as 100, and Einstein’s as 160, Leonardo da Vinci “scored” 220. That’s an outright lie for a number of reasons: da Vinci didn’t score anything on a test that had yet to be invented; he might have had a 220, but not because the webpage says so—nobody knows; the numbers on these sites seem to be estimates based on the person’s significance to history, as well as the diversity of their exploits.

Everyone knows da Vinci had his hand in everything. But is that why Einstein scores lower at 160? Einstein is less creative? If you think it’s difficult to measure intellect in terms of the black-and-white mathematics and sciences, imagine measuring a person’s skill in liberal arts. You pick the single genre of the arts. Let us say “literature.” The tests usually measure skill in spatial reasoning, reading, vocabulary, arthmetic, memory and sometimes general knowledge. So in terms of vocabulary, would Shakespeare have a higher IQ than Ernest Hemingway, because Shakespeare uses bigger words in his work? Hemingway had this to say about it, “William Faulkner is of the opinion that because I do not use the 10 dollar words, I don’t know them. Well, we both have Nobel Prizes, so I assure you, I do. But there are older ones, simpler ones, better ones, and those are the ones I use.”

And how do we measure the IQ of Ludwig van Beethoven? He was good at music, but not good at mathematics. His mathematical education stopped at arithmetic. He couldn’t even do intermediate algebra. If he were to take the test, he would probably score low, but the absence of math and science from his mind didn’t hurt his career much. Charles Dickens is said to have had a 180 IQ. Why? Because Nicholas Nickleby is a good story? It is impossible to judge this literature as better than that (within reason), because all liberal arts are subjective endeavors. Justin Bieber has a lot of fans, and a lot of them probably think his music is better than Mozart’s.

Is it fair to say that Stephen Hawking’s estimated 160 deserves to be lower than Isaac Newton’s 190? They both worked in the same fields. But Newton “created” the calculus. Hawking simply works with it. Is that worth a 30 point drop? Andy Warhol was a rather good painter for someone with an 86, although to be fair, he may have answered the questions wrong on purpose, in protest. Who was smarter, Warhol or Jackson Pollock?

Einstein is typically remembered as a poor student when he was young, but that is grossly unfair. By the time he graduated from high school, Einstein had made his poorest showing how fast he answered questions. The German teachers were trained to drill the knowledge into the students by rote, and this was not how Einstein’s brain worked. When asked a question, he thought for a while to remember the answer, then thought some more to be sure of it. This was all it took to come close to failing several times, but he never did. His teachers considered him retarded. One of them just shook his head while Einstein was thinking and said, “Einstein, you will never amount to anything!”

Most IQ tests are timed, which means your speed is part of the score. Even if you answer every question correctly, your slow speed will pull your IQ down a few points, sometimes many. But is speed important in life? If you’re an astronaut working calculus to correct your decaying reentry trajectory before you burn to death, time is more than money, but how many of us will experience such a problem in life? And besides, why not get the math right before you reenter?

We know by now that the popular legend of Einstein the F-student is not true. He never flunked a course in his life, and in high school, he got very good grades. But for someone who redefined the entire 20th Century, whose last name has become a byword for “genius,” you would expect straight As, and Einstein did not get them. His report card for junior/senior year in high school is well know across the Internet, and it shows grades of 6, or A, in algebra, geometry, applied geometry, physics, and history. He scored 5 in chemistry, Italian, and German, a 3 in French, and 4 in geography and art. Most of them fair grades, but then, his strongest suits are obvious.

IQ tests typically measure the scientific and mathematical disciplines very well because you’re either right or wrong. There is no gray area. In this regard, it makes sense why Einstein would score a 186. He had a lot of talent for math. But while in elementary and middle schools, he scored a solid 3 to 4, or about a C, in most linguistic subjects, even his own language. If the test he took was balanced, with focus given to the liberal arts, his scores in these subjects certainly pulled his overall score down, which means his mathematical brain probably scored a lot higher than 186. On top of all this, Einstein failed his entrance exam to get into the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School. He aced the math and science sections, but failed French, Italian, history, and geography. He had to spend a year in a run-of-the-mill vocational college until they let him retake the exam. So how can we trust the single number?

If Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali were to have taken the same IQ test, which one would have scored higher? Ali seems the more reasonable answer, but this is strange inasmuch as we know very little of the mens’ intellectual capabilities. They didn’t work in mathematics or mechanical engineering. They were boxers. They made millions by beating people up. Ali won two of their three encounters, but don’t count Frazier as a footnote to Ali’s glory. Frazier was the only man to beat Ali in his prime. He did it on points and he knocked Ali down.

What do you think Frazier would have scored on an IQ test? An average 100? But a high IQ doesn’t enable a person like Einstein to box well. Einstein had no desire to box, or do very much that is physical. Perhaps it is fair to say that there is such a thing as a “physical IQ.” Boxing is a sport of motor skills. These are controlled by the brain, and some people are born with an incredible knack for refining them with ease. Franz Liszt had extreme motor skills in his hands and feet.

If two boxers train in the same way, and one of them very quickly learns how to duck, jab, dance, and counterpunch, while the other simply can’t get it, we see the existence of “talent.” IQ tests are used to measure universal truths in mental acuity. Is it fair to say that the boxer with more aptitude for the sport is the more intelligent of the two? IQ tests do not root out such natural prodigies.

Of course intelligence is rather important to life as a human, and the higher one’s is, the better, but only if it is put to good use. The film Good Will Hunting deals with this requirement to use one’s “gift” for the improvement of mankind and the world. Everyone knows Einstein was a genius. But is he famous because of his 186 IQ? Or did his papers on Relativity and the photoelectric effect have anything to do with it? He was also rather involved in the creation of the atomic bomb. Time Magazine calls him the Man of the 20th Century.

Ever heard of William James Sidis? He lived from 1898 to 1944 and is reputed to have had a “ratio IQ” between 250 and 300. This IQ is a matter of very heated debate to this day, because the sources don’t agree and all of them are hearsay. There is, however, no doubt that he had an extremely fast aptitude for learning anything. By his 20s, he was able to speak in over 40 languages, and claimed to be able to learn one in a day. He invented his own language, called Vendergood, which was a mishmash of Ancient Greek, Latin, and about 8 other European languages. J. R. R. Tolkien did the very same thing with Elvish, and spoke at least 30 languages. But we don’t think of Tolkien as having an IQ above 250, and yet he wrote a lot more than Sidis, and Tolkien’s literature is popular. Sidis invented a rotary calendar that would always be accurate even to the leap year. But why is that important? We already have working calendars. With a 300 IQ, it’s a shame he didn’t invent the time machine or a real lightsaber.

Rene Descartes, probably another high IQ holder, famously wrote, “Cogito, ergo sum.” “I think, therefore, I am.” While this lister definitely agrees, he has always thought of this statement as incomplete. William Sidis proves it. He squandered his natural talents on the trivial. Einstein reached the heights of his greatness with “only” a 186. What could Sir Isaac Newton have done with a 300? Perhaps the phrase should be, “Cogito, ergo sum. Facio, ergo recordaremur.” “I think, therefore I am. I do, therefore I will be remembered.”

FlameHorse is a writer for Listverse. He has no idea what his IQ is.

The post 8 Reasons The IQ Is Meaningless appeared first on Listverse.

Famously, the Egyptian pyramids were built to host the body of the king. They became temples to the dead, and a new source of worship. That’s all very nice—but perhaps a little elitist. That was the thought of Thomas Willson in 1829, when he proposed a new solution to London’s ongoing problem with graveyard overpopulation: a pyramid mausoleum which could contain the corpses of five million people, and which, if completed, would have been ninety-four floors high (by comparison, the Chrysler Building has just seventy-seven floors). And it would have been located in the middle of London.

Willson thought the idea compact, hygienic, and ornamental, and he hoped that people would come from afar to have picnics and admire it. He also calculated that it would bring in a tidy profit of around ten million pounds. Not all envisaged the idea in the same way, however: one historian has described it as a “nightmarish combination of megalomaniacal Neo-Classicism and dehumanized Utilitarian efficiency”, which is an old-fashioned way of saying “this stinks.” In the end, public opinion turned against it—Londoners most likely deciding that they would rather picnic a park than beneath a colossal pyramid of death.

We associate the Romans with amphitheaters, temples, and statues—but one thing we don’t tend to think of is pyramids. Well, think again. Smack-bang in the middle of Rome is a two-thousand-year-old, 121-foot (37m)-high pyramid.

The Romans had only recently made Egypt a province, and were obviously impressed with their huge tombs to ancient kings. “I like the sound of that,” a Roman magistrate called Gaius Cestius probably said—and had one built for himself, Roman-style, upon his death. Alas, as with the Egyptian pyramids, advertising your tomb in such grand style isn’t always a good idea; both his body and the pyramid’s other contents were plundered in antiquity.

What do you do when you want to build a sixty-five-floor pyramid in the middle of crowded Mexico City? Why, you turn it upside-down and build it underground, of course. That’s the proposal of a Mexican architectural firm. They want to give the city’s main square a glass floor, and build a pyramid of offices, homes, and shops underneath it.

Mexico has a rich history of pyramid building from the Maya civilization, and according to one of the architects, the proposed pyramid would “dig down through the layers of cities to uncover our roots.” Because there’s nothing like building a vast, hi-tech underground shopping centre to discover your roots. At a projected $800 million, the city hasn’t yet expressed much enthusiasm for the idea.

What’s the biggest pyramid in the world? The Great Pyramid of Giza? No—there’s actually one that’s twice as big.

Though not as tall as the Great Pyramid of Egypt, the Great Pyramid of Cholula—which also has the less catchy name of Tlachihualtepetl—is much wider. It can be found in central-east Mexico, and was built over a period of a thousand years, from the third century B.C. to the ninth century A.D.  

Some say that it was built by a giant called Xelhua, but archaeologists, predictably, disagree. They claim that the pyramid was constructed by a series of ancient Mexican civilizations, who added layer upon layer over the years. These days it’s quite overgrown, and doing its best impression of a hill—so much so that the Spanish built a church on it in the sixteenth century.

Everybody thinks of Egypt as the pyramid capital of the world, but there’s another country that has twice as many pyramids: Sudan. Located directly to the south of modern Egypt, they were mostly built around the third century B.C.—around eight hundred years after the last Egyptian pyramids were built.

There are more than two hundred and fifty of them, ranging from twenty feet (6m) to one hundred and twenty feet (36m) high. Many of these have only been discovered in the last few years, suggesting that either the Sudanese were fantastic at hiding their pyramids, or that archaeologists prefer more glamorous locations in which carry out their digging.

It may not be much to look at these days, but the mausoleum pyramid of the first Emperor of China is deadly. It was built from 246 B.C. to 208 B.C., supposedly by as many as 700,000 men—and it was filled with more traps than would fit into an Indiana Jones movie.

It was supposed to be a representation of the Emperor’s palace and universe, and in this vein he had all his childless concubines killed and buried with him. Lovely. Workers, too, were buried alive, in order to preserve the pyramid’s secrets, and trees and grass were planted to make it seem like a hill. The Chinese are yet to excavate, claiming that archaeology isn’t sophisticated enough to do the job properly. But it could well be that they’re simply scared of the traps; for instance, it’s known that the pyramid was filled with a moat of mercury. More than two millennia later, mercury readings from the site are still dangerously high.

Being an architect is tough work. You spend months getting your drawings and measurements perfect—only to have the builders read your plans the wrong way round. That looks like what happened in 1983, for the construction of the 262-foot (80m)-high Slovak Radio Building, in Bratislava, Slovakia. Inside is a concert hall—and it proudly boasts one of the largest organs in Slovakia. If you’re visiting in a group, make sure everyone is spread around evenly; it looks like it could topple at any moment.

Sure, it didn’t last long—but for a while, New York had its own pyramid. At the end of World War One, thousands of helmets from captured German soldiers were taken back to America, and in a somewhat macabre victory display, they were piled up into a pyramid at Grand Central Terminal.

Somehow, we don’t think this would be received very well today. Still, it’s a touch more civilized than the similar actions of fourteenth-century Central Asian emperor Tamerlane. During one siege, he built a pyramid of 90,000 human skulls in front of a besieged city to intimidate them. We imagine that it worked.

Pyramids of death don’t die that easily. In 2007, a group of German entrepreneurs unveiled their designs for a 1900-foot (580m)-tall pyramid to house the bodies of up to forty million dead people. It would also be multi-colored, as if to compensate for the fact that it would be filled with dead bodies. For around $1000, anybody could sign up to have their ashes encased in a block after they die—and the color would be of their choosing. At around ten times the size of the original Great Pyramid, it would have almost literally cast a shadow over the neighboring villages.

Remarkably, the group were given $115,000 of funding from the German government to pursue the idea; since then, however, the plan seems to have faded due to lack of interest and local objection to having a gigantic multi-colored pyramid full of dead people on their doorstep. But don’t worry: if you’re interested, you can still sign up here.

Why restrict pyramid building to our own planet? The Curiosity rover sent by NASA to examine Mars found something rather curious. This pyramid looks like it’s been copied from the ancient Egyptian ones—or perhaps it’s the other way round.

NASA scientists say that the pyramid is most likely the product of wind erosion; but in the minds of ancient aliens theorists, it’s “hard evidence” that our world today has been shaped by mystical space aliens from Mars. One thing is for sure, however: if the aliens who built this rock were the ones who visited Earth, they must have been pretty tiny. The Pyramid of Mars is about the same size as a football.

N. Christie is currently traveling the world to determine once and for all what the Seven Wonders of the World really are.

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There are some animals so bizarre and disturbing that we begin to question how evolution managed to create such creatures. The four species of babirusa possess exceedingly bizarre weaponry, with which they carry out acts of aggression.

Native to Indonesia, these “Deer Pigs” not only possess massive lower canines that curl, fang-like, over the upper jaw—but their upper canines also come in backwards, pairing with the lower tusks and curling back towards the head. Males slash each other with their sabers during vicious mating disputes. The upward direction allows them to be effective in combat, but if the Babirusa fails to grind them down, they may grow into the animal’s skull—with fatal results.

Yes—saber-toothed deer. The thought is so strange and terrifying that one might be tempted to dismiss it as fantasy. In fact, several species of ungulate known as “musk deer”, native to Eurasia, possess massive fangs, which develop from outgrowths of the canine tooth.

Musk deer fangs extend several inches past their lower jaw. Unlike the infamous cats of the distant past, musk deer go to battle against other males with their canine sabers, sinking them into each other during mating disputes. The creatures are genetically distinct from true deer (cervids), and are named after the powerful scent they produce to mark their territory.

Back when the saber-toothed tiger was still roaming around on land, the terrifying payara was evolving exactly the same weaponry for domination of the rivers—but in reverse. Growing to lengths of more than four feet (1.2m), payara stalk the waters of the Amazon, sinking their three-to-four-inch fangs through the vital organs of their prey.

As the stricken prey sinks towards the bottom, the payara’s cavernous jaws engulf it. Unlike most saber-toothed animals, its fangs remain entirely inside its mouth, sliding into two holes in the upper jaw. The ghastly appearance and potential danger of a bite from the “vampire characin” sends chills through the spine of even the most seasoned fisherman.

At first glance, the goosander looks like a typical waterfowl; but when feeding ducks at the pond, you might not want to offer your hand to the members of this unusual species. As the largest of the “Sawbills” of the genus Mergus, the goosander inhabits rivers, estuaries, and park lakes throughout Eurasia, Canada, and the USA.

Extending from its bill are more than one hundred and fifty razor-sharp teeth, curved backwards, which can slice through the bodies of fish like a hot knife in butter. A bird with teeth is always going to be an anomaly—but even more eerily, this dinosaurian “devil duck” may at times saw up small mammals, and even other birds, as though it were some form of aquatic raptor.

The fact that an animal is a herbivore should never tempt you into the belief that it poses no danger to you. Some plant eaters still have particularly wicked canine teeth.

Take the familiar and apparently blasé dromedary camel, for instance. Although this species has long been used as a pack animal and grazer, those thick lips hide impressive teeth that reach over three inches (7.5cm) in length. With such massive jaws and sharp teeth, it is easy to understand how owners have been killed—sometimes in their sleep—by camels with a mind for revenge. It is well within their power to crush a human skull. Fatal bites, such as the one recently reported in China, may also occur during mating season, when the animals are defensive and territorial.

This is the only extinct species on this list. The helicopron was a shark, twenty feet (6m) in length, which used its enormous teeth in a manner unlike that of any known living creature. Attached to a circular muscle, the shark’s mouth apparatus would shoot out and shred prey into bite-sized pieces, much like an actual chainsaw.

The shark’s bizarre form of dentition was misunderstood by scientists for years, before the strange and disturbing truth was eventually revealed. The two-inch (5cm)-long teeth were tightly packed in a descending spiral, ensuring that the prey was torn to pieces with great speed.

The “unicorn of the sea” was afforded mythical status by explorers and researchers—until the moment when the bizarre creature was properly documented and found to be real.

In a bizarre twist of physiology, this relatively small, thirteen-foot (4m)-long whale developed a lethal “spear” atop its head, which could be used during territorial disputes and in self-defense. Occasionally, it is used to break up ice in the whale’s arctic habitat.

In a departure from the norm of symmetry in the animal kingdom, the narwhal’s enormous weapon is actually a modified right canine tooth that angles forwards and extends through the animal’s forehead. The narwhal has no other teeth in its oddly-shaped jaws, but on occasion, the left canine socket may sprout a second “tusk,” sometimes of equal length to the first.

Baboons are the largest monkeys on Earth, filling out at more than eighty pounds (36kg). Despite being around half the size of most humans, the average baboon’s fang-like canines often reach two inches (5cm) in length—even longer than the teeth of most adult lions. Although these simian sabers appear fit to kill even the most intimidating prey, they are more often used in mating season fights among rival males—suggesting that it was sexual selection which led to the development of oversized fangs. But this doesn’t afford much comfort to those who stray into baboon territory.

The hippopotamus may reach a length of more than sixteen feet (5m), and can put on an incredible nine thousand pounds (4000kg) in weight, making it the third-most massive land animal. The hippopotamus (to avoid the contentious plural) also has the largest canines of any land animal, with two sword-like teeth that reach a whopping sixteen inches (40cm) in length.

Essentially, we are dealing with a truck-sized river monster with teeth capable of running through two humans in one bite. And we grew up thinking that crocodiles were our biggest enemies on the Nile… 

In one notable case, a tour guide was partially swallowed by a hippopotamus, and his arm was lost. And in a final fascinating twist, genetic research has shown that these saber-toothed creatures are relatives of whales, rather than pigs as once thought.

With a name like that, anything is possible—this is one fish you do not want to meet on a diving trip. Reaching well over two feet (60cm) in length, these tropical reef inhabitants can be found in shallow waters. They are known to fiercely defend their territories against intruders, including human explorers. Triggerfish teeth—their purpose being to crush rock-hard coral—are shockingly sharp and powerful, and appear almost human-like.

Triggerfish teeth are unusual in that they are straight yet extremely thin. This makes them exceptionally sharp, yet they’re also extremely strong, and resilient to damage.

Ron Harlan investigates of the mysteries of nature and the bizarre findings that often crop up on this planet. He is a freelance writer and student of science.

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In late 1957, the Soviets needed a snappy follow-up to Sputnik. Given thirty days by the Kremlin to come up with something impressive, or else to get packing for Siberia, Russian scientists decided to do the only logical thing: send a stray dog into space.

On October 31 that year, “Laika” was placed into a narrow rocket and left on a frozen launching pad for three days. In all likelihood, this was the highlight of her trip; the actual lift-off subjected her to enough G-Force to push her heart rate into the ‘danger’ area. At the same time, a malfunction caused the rocket’s thermal control system to shut down, essentially turning the cabin into the space-borne equivalent of a sealed car in a sun-baked parking lot. Within five hours, Laika had become both the first creature to reach orbit, and the first creature to die in orbit: a bitter consolation prize rendered even worse by her patent inability to understand it.

During the Winter of 1719, Swedish Lieutenant-General Carl Gustaf Armfeldt was stuck in Norway with 6,000 battle-weary soldiers. In a desperate attempt to make it home, Armfeldt ordered his men back across the Tydal Mountain range—a useful shortcut into Sweden, provided it isn’t midwinter and your troops aren’t carrying summer equipment.

What followed was one of the biggest logistical screw-ups in military history: the first leg of the journey saw two hundred men die of exposure as the army scrambled for shelter in a tiny village. Rather than be put off by the screaming agony all around him, Armfeldt decided that the best course was to carry on—right into the heart of a blizzard.

In the horror that followed, frostbite set in, horses perished, equipment was burnt for warmth, and wolves descended on hapless victims. By the time the remnants of the army had finally reached Sweden on January 15, nearly four thousand men were dead, with another six hundred maimed for life. Because life laughs in the face of justice, Armfeldt was “punished” for his incompetence with a massive promotion.
   

Burke and Wills were the Laurel and Hardy of exploration. Tasked in 1860 with finding a land route from Melbourne to Australia’s north coast, the duo set out with such ‘essential’ supplies as 1,500 pounds (680kg) of sugar, a filing cabinet, a heavy wooden table and matching chairs, and a giant gong. In normal circumstances, you’d like to think that God would have taken pity on their amusing incompetence. But Victorian Australia was not “normal circumstances.”

Having timed their trip to coincide with a blisteringly hot summer, the two quickly ran out of supplies, temper, and luck. The original party splintered, with mass-desertions leading to Burke and Wills running for the coast almost entirely by themselves. When they finally got there, their goal was obscured by miles of mangrove swamps – meaning they technically failed, as well as dying in the process. A year or so after setting out, the two explorers expired over ninety miles (145km) from safety, having accomplished nothing and wasted £60,000 of public money in their very successful suicide attempt.

Any trip that ends with you eating a significant proportion of your loved ones is never going to wind up on a list of “10 Loveliest Journeys.” But did you know the Donner trip was awful even before the cannibalism began?

It’s true: the party had every sign of being totally doomed from the start. For one thing, the guy they were meant to be following across the brand new trail turned out to be a fruitcake. Rather than guide them through the mountains, he left letters tacked to trees and generally led them into areas so dangerous you’d swear it was an assassination attempt. This included the Great Salt Lake Desert—an area of the world so inhospitable that even the Elder Gods fear it. Unsurprisingly, this slowed them down.

Secondly, local native tribes decided to start killing their animals like crazy—an inconvenience made worse by the simmering tensions within the group. This leads nicely to number three: they all hated each other. No kidding: two members of the group even had a whip/knife duel at one point. With that sort of animosity, the cannibalism was probably something of a relief.

We all know the phrase “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” But what you probably didn’t know was the full extent of misery Livingstone had undergone before he heard it.

In 1866, Livingstone became determined to find the source of the Nile. How determined? Well, he leapt in a boat for Africa, leaving everything he loved behind, and vanished for six years—eventually resurfacing up as the comical “pet” of a local tribe. And he really was something like their pet: despite the fact that he was riddled with dysentery, suffering from malaria, and bleeding internally, the tribe who found him would only offer him food on the condition that he eat it in full view, for their amusement. They were certainly amused, falling over themselves with hilarity while watching this stuffy white man scrabble for survival—much as we now watch Bear Grylls sleep inside a camel for cheap kicks.

Those six years didn’t exactly end well, either; shortly after the famous words above were spoken, Livingstone plunged back into the jungle and promptly died—seven years after setting out, and no closer to discovering the source of the Nile.

You know those days when nothing goes your way, and life feels hopeless? Well, Robert Falcon Scott had roughly sixty of those—consecutively. They also culminated in his death, which is something we can’t often say about our own bad days.

The year was 1911. No one had yet reached the South Pole, and the race was on to claim it in the name of one or another superpower. In the British corner was Scott: a Navy officer and scientist with some decidedly odd ideas about Antarctic travel. In the Norwegian corner was Amundsen: an expert in cold weather exploration, and one of the greatest explorers of his day.

Despite being clearly fated to lose, Scott made a game effort for the pole: by which I mean he wasted days collecting rock samples, and arrived five weeks late. The return journey was even worse: the weather reached previously-unrecorded savageness; temperatures dropped so low that the snow became like sand; and an unprecedented super-storm pinned down and killed the team just a few miles from safety. In the end, Scott’s pole attempt achieved nothing, killed everyone involved, and made the British look like fools.

Mungo Park was one of the first Europeans to properly explore central Africa. In the process, he managed to set a standard for awful journeys, against which all future disasters could be measured.

Planning to sail down the Niger River and into the Congo (thought at the time to be joined), Park’s expedition was crippled by dysentery even before it reached the river proper. What followed was an exercise in how not to navigate through nineteenth century Africa. Park’s river boat cruised into various territories where it really wasn’t wanted, often resulting in ferocious attacks. Luckily, the Europeans had enough firepower to save their skins—at least until the boat got snagged on a rock.

Thousands of miles from safety, outgunned and outnumbered, Park’s crew were massacre by arrows, leaving Park no choice but to jump into the rushing river. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in his immediate death by drowning—a fact which sadly escaped his son, who died on an expedition to rescue his father some eleven years later.

This is it: the granddaddy of all nightmare journeys. In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set off for Antarctica. Before long, his ship became trapped in pack ice, which forced the crew to make a perilous journey across the ice to the only solid ground for miles: a desolate lump of rock called Elephant Island. And that’s when shit got real.

With no other options, Shackleton organized a desperate expedition to the island of South Georgia: eight hundred miles north, across storm-lashed seas. Not your ordinary storm-lashed seas, either: Shackleton reported waves bigger than any he’d seen in two decades of sailing. Ice gripped the boat and sea-spray drenched the occupants, and sleep was impossible. It took fourteen days to reach their destination—and the journey wasn’t over yet.

Thanks to the unfavorable ocean currents, the team was forced to land on the wrong side. Since it was impossible to sail round to safety, they were forced to cross the harsh interior on foot, without maps, more or less navigating through guesswork. After fighting their way for three days through thick fog over mountains, they finally reached humanity—at which point Shackleton very nearly slipped and fell to his death. But he didn’t, and here we come to the uplifting bit: everyone survived. In the face of the harshest conditions on Earth, Shackleton managed to keep every single one of his men alive and to bring them home. So remember that next time you’re having the “journey from hell.”

The post 8 Worst Journeys Ever Undertaken appeared first on Listverse.

The Angora rabbit is the product of hundreds of years of domestic breeding; generation after generation of humans have bred it for its wool. Its appearance can be described with any number of metaphors: a cat that touched a power line; a cotton ball with a face; and a sheep with a straightener, among them.

There are actually multiple breeds of this rabbit, and they were very popular among French royalty.

The dumbo octopus can be found at really, really deep parts of the ocean. Seven thousand meters deep, to be more precise. It’s not called the dumbo octopus because of its intelligence, either; it’s thus named because it actually uses its ears to swim. 

Despite being one of the only octopus species that swallows its victims whole, we have to admit that these guys are pretty cute. We don’t need to fear for ourselve,s either; he’s only about twenty centimeters in length at his full size. Apart from that, scientists don’t know much else.

The rather hideous blobfish isn’t a particularly fast swimmer. In fact, it doesn’t really have much going for it at all; it hangs about at the bottom of the ocean, waiting for its micro-organism dinner to drift by. It doesn’t even have to swim most of the time, as its body tissue is slightly less dense than water, allowing it to float at the bottom of the ocean.

But how does it avoid being eaten? Well, it turns out that the blobfish doesn’t even taste very good; in fact, it’s inedible for humans. They’re still endangered, however, since overfishing leads to large numbers of them being hauled out of the ocean at a fast rate. We can’t help but feel a little sorry for the blobfish.

The kakapo is a New Zealand parrot, which owes its existence to the lack of native mammalian predators on the islands. Among its numerous qualities, the kakapo smells weird, barks like a dog, and is nocturnal. Its numbers have been declining ever since Europeans brought dogs and cats to New Zealand, and it is now critically endangered.

Let’s list some general characteristics of the olm: it has three toes on its front limbs, and two toes on its back limbs; it is blind; it lives to one hundred; and it can go ten years without food.

That’s one remarkable creature. In addition to all that, olms have great hearing and olfactory systems. Its olfactory system is so well made, in fact, that it can sense quantity of small organic organisms around it. Many fisherman are said to have developed a belief in sea monsters, after catching one of these creatures.

The matamata turtle’s shell and head may look extremely tough—and probably are—but they are actually designed primarily for camouflage. Just imagine if you were looking at this guy from above; he would be very difficult to distinguish from the bottom of a creek. You would also get a fairly nasty surprise if you were to step on one; although they’re rather harmless, the creep-factor of camouflaged matamata turtles surely approaches that of spiders or snakes.

The barreleye in the picture above is one of the only ones ever seen alive. They have been documented since 1939; but most of the time, nets or lines have pierced the fluid bubble that makes this fish so unique.

So why exactly does this fish have a transparent head? Well, it essentially functions like a cockpit. Its advanced eyesight can be directed backwards and upwards through a swiveling of the eyes, allowing it to see prey and predators alike.

Tarsiers are peculiar creatures, which stand at a diminutive height of five inches. Most of their diet is comprised of insects, but they have been known to jump from tree to tree in search of heedless birds. They’re also nocturnal, and move incredibly fast with the help of their dextrous fingers (and long tail). Females usually have about one little baby tarsier per year. Much like owls, they’re able to swivel their heads 180 degrees.

I couldn’t find much information on the flying squid, because many people mistake it for flying fish. Only within the last twenty years has the flying squid begun to be seriously discussed in academic circles.

It has been recently confirmed by scientists that a kind of flying squid indeed exists, and is known as the red, or neon, flying squid. We don’t know how they jump out of the water, or why. It’s possible that their motives are similar to those of regular flying fish—but they’re very hard to track down, so we can’t be sure just yet.

Darwin’s bark spiders were discovered as recently as 2009. Interestingly, their silk is much stronger than the silk of other spiders that have previously been studied. It is even ten times stronger than kevlar (which is used to make bulletproof vests).

Somehow, these spiders manage to string their webs across rivers. One can only guess at how they manage to do so; it’s possible that they float across in the breeze.

The best way to study them is by boat, because that’s the only way scientists can analyze their behavior up close. They eat bees, dragonflies, and mayflies (up to thirty-two mayflies have been found in one web at the same time).

Kevin Shaw is a not-so-intelligent student who is trying desperately to understand the cause of oppression and hatred all over the world.

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Well, the twentieth century certainly wasn’t short on innovation—and it should come as no surprise that we’ve made a few decent attempts at flying cars over the years. Some were genius, others hilariously misguided, but they all add an extra little pinch of flavor to the legacy of our era. Here are ten amazing examples of flying cars from over the years.

The Curtiss AutoPlane is pretty much the first glimpse the world got of a flying car, outside the pages of fiction. In 1917, an aviation engineer named Glenn Curtiss dissected one of his own airplane designs and slapped some of the pieces onto an aluminum Model T. The airplane it was based on was called the Curtiss Model L trainer, a triplane (three rows of wings) with a one-hundred-horsepower engine (which is about as powerful as a decent tractor).

Like a car, the front two tires could be turned with a steering wheel inside the cabin, and it was propelled on the ground and in the air by a propeller attached to the back. Unfortunately, the “limousine of the air” never really flew—by all accounts, the most it could manage was a series of short hops before it was discontinued at the start of WWI.

This flying car is almost a legend, and besides this photo and a brief mention of the vehicle in a newspaper clipping from Andalusia, Alabama, it might as well have not existed at all. According to the story, the photo above is of Jess Dixon; it was supposedly taken sometime around 1940. Although it’s considered a flying car by aviation history buffs, the machine is actually closer to a “roadable helicopter,” due to the two overhead blades spinning in opposite directions. In other words, it’s a gyrocopter that can also roll.

The Flying Auto was powered by a small forty-horsepower engine, and foot pedals controlled the tail vane on the back, allowing Mr. Dixon to turn in mid-air. It was also supposed to be able to reach speeds of up to one hundred miles per hour (160 kph), and was able to fly forwards, backwards, sideways, and hover. Not bad for a flying car that was never heard from again.

The Convair Model 116 Flying Car took flight for the first time in 1946, and looked like nothing more than a small airplane welded onto a car. And essentially, that’s exactly what it was. The wings, tail, and propeller could be detached from the (plastic) car, allowing it to be driven like a regular vehicle on the road. When it needed to go where no roads could take it, the plane attachment was fitted on.

The 116 model only had one prototype, which itself managed a whopping sixty-six flights. A few years later, designer Ted Hall recreated the machine as the Convair Model 118, bumping the engine from a 130-horsepower model to a 190-horsepower beast that gave it more power in the air. Convair planned to build 160,000 for their first production run—but that never panned out, thanks to a tragedy which saw one of the prototypes crash in California. When the pilot took the car into the air, he had assumed that the fuel tank was full. But the ConvAirCar had two fuel gauges—one for the car’s engine and one for the plane’s—and while the car still had plenty of gas, the plane engine ran dry in mid-air. Such are the dangers of multi-tasking.

The Curtiss-Wright VZ-7 resulted from one of the first attempts by the US military to get involved in the flying car industry. Ideally, the VZ-7 was meant to be a type of flying jeep. Like a jeep, it allowed the pilot to maneuver through rough terrain on the ground—but with the not-insignificant bonus that it could also fly. It was developed by Curtiss-Wright, which, interestingly, formed through the merger of the Wright Company (the Wright Brothers) and Curtiss Aeroplane (Glenn Curtiss). Curtiss and the Wright Brothers had been fierce rivals during the early days of aviation.

The VZ-7 was designed as a VTOL craft—Vertical Take-Off and Landing. It flew with the aid of four upright propellers, which were positioned behind the “cockpit,” more or less just an open-air seat. In order to maneuver, the pilot could change the speed of individual propellers, tilting the craft forwards, backwards, or to the side. Technical aspects aside, the entire thing was a death trap, since none of the propellers were covered—and in 1960, the army cancelled the project just two years after its commencement.

With the VZ-7 grounded forever, the army turned to a very different prototype: the Piasecki VZ-8 AirGeep. Bear in mind that helicopters had already become popular by this point; but it turned out that the military was interested in something smaller than helicopters, which could be successfully flown with less training.

The AirGeep went through seven different versions before it was finally deemed “unfit for military use,” but they all kept the basic design: two large vertical propellers in the front and the back of the craft, with a seat in the middle for the pilot and either three or four wheels for ground use. While the first model was flat, later ones curved upwards at the front and back to form a flattened V-shape. The navy even tried to fit one model with floats, with the hope of using it at sea—but that idea was eventually abandoned, along with the rest of the program.

In 1971, the Advanced Vehicle Engineers company in California decided to design a flying car that was reminiscent of the ConvAirCar of the 1940s. They took a Ford Pinto, welded a Cessna Skymaster to the top, and essentially called it a day. The bizarre hybrid monster that resulted was dubbed the Ave Mizar.

The car-half of the craft was fairly similar to any normal Ford Pinto on the street. The Pinto’s engine brought the plane up to speed for take off, at which point the plane’s propeller took over. Upon landing, the car’s brakes were responsible for slowing it down. Unfortunately, in 1973—just a year before the car was scheduled to begin mass production—the right wing of one prototype crumpled in mid-air. The car plummeted to the ground, taking any future it might have had with it.

As we broach the modern era, it’s surprising to see how far we still are from developing a practical flying car. Case in point: the Butterfly Super Sky Cycle, which doesn’t look much different to Jess Dixon’s fabled Flying Auto. Like the 1940s incarnation, the Super Sky Cycle is technically a road-able gyrocopter, with a single folding propeller and a swiveling tail to steer the craft in flight.

The Super Sky Cycle was built in 2009 and is now (as of 2012) fully legal to drive, provided you have a motorcycle license and a pilot’s license. It even folds down to seven feet (2.1m), allowing it to fit into most garages. The gyrocopters are manufactured by Butterfly Aircraft LLC, and sold as kits that you assemble at home. It may not be what most people envision when they think of flying cars; regardless, they’re available to anyone with an spare $40,000.

In 2009, the Terrafugia Transition had its first successful test flight. Since then, it’s gone through a whirlwind of upgrades and remodels, resulting in several completely new designs and a second successful test flight in 2012. In any case, the Transition finally offers something that at least looks futuristic. It has the aerodynamic shape of a plane, with wings that fold in and then swivel into a vertical position while on the ground. It can reach up to seventy miles per hour (110 km/h) on the highway, and 115 miles per hour (185 km/h) in the air.

One problem that the company faced in designing the Transition was that it was too heavy to comply with FAA regulations, due to all the extra parts needed to be safe on the road—such as bumpers and airbags, for instance. In 2010, the FAA decided to let the flying car slide through the regulations, which changes its classification and makes it easier to get the appropriate pilot’s license. Unfortunately, it still costs more than a Lamborghini.

Bringing some much needed style to the world of autogyros, the PAL-V One is a Dutch design, which makes some huge changes to the traditional format. For starters, it only has one engine; the power is automatically switched between the tires and the propeller, depending on whether or not it is making contact with the ground.

What’s especially interesting about the PAL-V craft is that it’s only meant to fly below four thousand feet (1,200 m), which essentially means that you don’t have to file a flight plan to use it—a huge hurdle for flying cars in modern times. This could well lead to GPS-guided “digital corridors,” invisible highways in the sky that would allow airborne traffic to remain organized, like cars upon a regular highway.

The AirMule is more like an airborne ambulance than a car—but the idea is still the same. It’s being developed by the Israeli company Urban Aeronautics, and its main purpose would be assisting search and rescue missions. While it could feasibly reach the same speeds as a regular helicopter, it uses less than half the airspace, so it can also squeeze into areas that would be impossible for a helicopter.

If you’ve been reading, you can probably tell that it looks a lot like the AirGeep designs the military tried to hatch in the 1970s. But it has one crucial difference: it’s flown remotely. That’s right, the AirMule is unmanned, which either means it’s going to be instrumental in saving lives, or—based on the way UAVs have been used in the past—taking them. Even so, it won’t necessarily be on autopilot—Urban Aero plans to use a remote pilot with flight controls and a bank of monitors to control the AirMule in real time—a little like the way we might control planes in a complex video game.

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The hottest man-made temperature ever recorded is 7.2 trillion degrees fahrenheit, or about four billion degrees celsius. Since we hope to minimize the use of superlatives in this list, let’s just say: that’s pretty hot. 

In fact, it’s about 250,000 times hotter than the temperature at the core of the sun. The extreme recording was made at the Brookhaven Natural Laboratory in New York, in their 2.4-mile-long Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Scientists had been smashing gold ions together, in an attempt to recreate big-bang like conditions by creating a quark-gluon plasma. In this plasma state, the particles that make up the nucleus of atoms—protons and neutrons—break apart, and create a “soup” of their constituent quarks.

We’ve already made mention of the Bose-Einstein condensate. It’s a phenomenon that occurs to matter at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Though previously seen only at these super-cold temperatures, scientists were able to recreate the effect at room temperature, by using light instead of matter.

They managed to do this because of the relative density of the matter and the light; one of the scientists involved, Jan Klars, explained that “Our photon gas has a billion times higher density, and we can achieve the condensation already at room temperature.” They forced light to travel through two mirrors with particles of dye between them. As the light bounced back and forth, it lost a little bit of energy each time it passed through some dye. And when it reached room temperature, the light effectively began to behave like an ultra-cold gas made of traditional matter. 

This result takes on a whole new relevance when we learn that it could lead to new types of lasers—which, after all, should be the ultimate goal of all physics research.

Some of you may be familiar already with the following comparisons—but take a moment to think about what they really mean, in relation to the normal temperatures of human experience. 

The sun—to borrow an understatement from an earlier entry—is pretty hot. It’s at its hottest in the centre, which reaches around twenty-seven million Fahrenheit (fifteen million Kelvin). In comparison, it’s actually less than ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit at its surface (about 5,700 K).

The centre of the Earth stands at about the same temperature as the surface of the sun. Apart from the sun’s centre, the hottest part of our solar system is the core of Jupiter, which, remarkably, is five times hotter than the Sun’s surface.

And the coldest-known place? That’s actually on our own moon, where temperatures in the shadows of some craters are only thirty Kelvin above absolute zero. The temperatures, measured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, are even colder than those on Pluto.

The SI unit of temperature is the Kelvin. The temperatures used to define this are absolute zero—the bottom limit of temperature—and what known as the triple point of water. A triple point is defined as the temperature by which a substance’s traditional three states of matter exist in an equilibrium. At this point, the most infinitesimally small alteration to temperature or pressure can be used to alter its state one way or another.

To define one Kelvin, you take the difference in temperature between the triple point of water and absolute zero and divide it by 273.16. There are limited practical applications of the triple point of water, but its proximity to the melting point is key to causing the watery cushion needed to allow people to ice-skate.

The rules of nature that govern temperature are known as the Laws of Thermodynamics. Originally there was only a first, a second, and a third law—but then scientists came up with a fourth law. The newest law stated that “if two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other.”

That basically means that if two objects don’t have a net exchange of heat with a third object, they’d not do so with each other—which is how we define them as being at the same temperature.

Scientists soon realized that this law is fundamental to the whole field of thermodynamics; they also realized that it should have been the first rule they formulated. Because “first law” was already taken, they gave it due respect by calling it the “zeroth law.”. It was around 1935 when the law was coined—meaning that scientists didn’t get around to formally defining what temperature meant until a couple of hundred years into the development of the field.

Some people have established their homes in the most unlikely of places. The coldest permanently inhabited places in the world are the towns of Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk in Siberia, which we’ve mentioned before. During winter, temperatures there average below minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

The coldest city in the world is also in Siberia. Yakutsk, with a population of 270,000, is not much warmer in the winter than its smaller cousins—often dropping below minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. But at the height of summer, temperatures can swing all the way up to the other end of the scale, to almost ninety degrees Fahrenheit.

The highest recorded average temperature belongs to the abandoned town of Dallol, in Ethiopia, which recorded an average temperature of ninety-six degrees in the 1960s. The record for hottest city is Bangkok, with average air temperatures breaking above ninety-three degrees between March and May.

But the record for hottest workplace likely goes to Mponeng gold mine, in South Africa. At two miles below the surface, rock temperatures can reach 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice must be pumped into the mine—and the walls insulated with concrete—to allow people to work there without perishing.

Making things cold has produced a lot of interesting and important results in science. Humans make the coldest known things in the universe, many orders of magnitude colder than anything that occurs naturally. Refrigeration allows temperatures of a few milliKelvin to be accomplished. The coldest temperature ever achieved is slightly below one hundred picoKelvins, or 0.0000000001 K. It’s necessary to use a type of magnetic cooling to achieve temperatures this low. Similar temperatures can be achieved on a small scale using lasers.

At these temperatures, matter behaves differently to the way it does normally (see Bose-Einstein condensate above as an example)—a fact which is key to revealing the many odd quirks of quantum mechanics.

If you were to take a thermometer out into deep space and leave it there, far from any source of radiation, it would read 2.73 Kelvin—a little lower than minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit. That happens to be the coldest naturally-occurring temperature in the universe.

Space is kept above absolute zero by background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Although space is nevertheless very cold, it’s interesting to note that one of the biggest problems encountered by astronauts is actually heat. Bare metal on orbiting objects can reach five hundred degrees Fahrenheit (260 C) due to the unimpeded heat of the sun, and needs to be covered in special coatings to lower the touch temperature to “only” 250 Fahrenheit (120 C).

Outer space itself, however, is constantly getting cooler. Theory has long predicted this, and recent measurements have confirmed that the universe is cooling by around one degree every three billion years.

It’ll continue heading towards absolute zero, though it will never quite reach it (an impossible feat). The background heat of the universe makes little difference to us; the effect of celestial bodies in our solar system and galaxy dwarf it. So it’s not going to counteract global warming, in case anyone has ideas.

Heat is a mechanical property of matter. Put simply: the hotter a thing is, the more energy its particles have as they move around. The atoms in a red-hot solid are vibrating more quickly than the atoms in a cold piece of material. Likewise, those in a liquid or gas whizz about with a speed which depends on how hot they are. That’s pretty basic stuff, which you probably learned in high school—but for hundreds of years until the late nineteenth century, scientists believed that heat itself was actually a substance. This is known as the caloric theory.

The gas of “heat”, scientists believed, would evaporate from a hot substance, thereby cooling it. It would flow from a hot object into a cooler one. Many of the predictions arising from caloric theory actually hold true, and a lot of scientific progress was possible in spite of this fundamental misunderstanding. Caloric theory even had proponents up until the late nineteenth century, at which point the mechanical theory of heat was established beyond dispute.

This list has made many mentions of absolute zero. We’ve even mentioned it on Listverse before. But what about the other end of the scale? How hot can things get? 

The short answer is that we don’t know for certain; and it’s a question at the forefront of modern fundamental physics.

The hottest temperature commonly mentioned in science is known as the Planck Temperature. It’s the hottest temperature believed to have occurred in the universe, a mere fraction of a moment after the Big Bang. It’s about 10^32 Kelvin. To give you some perspective, that’s about ten billion billion billion times hotter than the temperature mentioned earlier, which was itself 250,000 times hotter than the core of the sun. And you thought your bath water was hot. The Planck Temperature is the highest temperature possible, according to the Standard Model. Any hotter, and conventional laws of physics begin to break down.

It’s possible that temperature might continue to increase even after this point; and we simply don’t know what would happen if it did so. Anything hotter than that is basically too hot to exist in our current model of reality.

Alan is an aspiring writer trying to kick-start his career with an awesome beard and an addiction to coffee. You can hear his bad jokes by reading them aloud to yourself from Twitter where he is @SkepticalNumber or you can email him at mailskepticalnumber@gmail.com.

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According to author Malcolm Gladwell, “Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them”. Although a show expressly for the little ones (there are none of the ‘adult’ jokes floated in shows like “Spongebob Squarepants”), “Sesame Street” has continually been at the forefront of major societal issues that programs for mature audiences have ignored, including death, racial tolerance, and the differences between us. The show seeks not only to educate and entertain, but to help children understand the world around them. Below are ten fascinating facts which contribute to Sesame Street’s legend.

In recent years, as many around the world have begun pushing in earnest for gay marriage to become legal, a grassroots Internet campaign has surfaced urging longtime Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie to finally acknowledge their homosexuality and tie the knot. Although the show has been renowned for preaching a message of tolerance, they carefully backpedaled away from these claims, stating: “Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”

Although blasting loud music to psychologically torture people is not an entirely new concept, its use has really come to the forefront since the opening of the US’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The purpose of the camp was to detain and interrogate subjects captured in the “War on Terror” begun since the events of 9/11. A great deal of controversy has arisen as pictures and stories have leaked to the public, and President Obama has made promises to close the camp that have yet to materialize. Amongst far more sinister and humiliating tactics, the soldiers at Guantanamo have been known to inundate Al-Qaeda operatives with blaring, repetitive songs including hard rock music and the Sesame Street theme that are known to break down mental resistance. Amnesty International has condemned this ploy, while the Pentagon has called it a mere “disincentive”.

One of the original human characters on the show, Mr. Hooper ran a general store that served as a focal point and served such fare as birdseed milkshakes. When actor Will Lee died of a heart attack in 1982, there was some debate by the show’s producers how to handle the situation. Some leaned toward having the character retire, but eventually it was decided to deal with the issue. A child psychologist was consulted and the situation was handled gently, but head-on, with Big Bird unable to understand that his friend wasn’t coming back. When Big Bird expresses concern that it “won’t be the same” without Mr. Hooper, another of the adults tells him “You’re right, Big Bird. It’ll never be the same without him. But you know something? We can all be very happy that we had a chance to be with him and to know him and to love him a lot, when he was here.”

The episode aired on Thanksgiving Day, 1983, to ensure that the children who saw it would be around family that could help them with their feelings when they saw it. In retrospect, Mr. Hooper’s passing has been honored by many as one of the most important moments in television history.

The main focus of Sesame Street is a 3 apartment brownstone building (Bert and Ernie live in the basement). The show itself is filmed in Astoria, Queens, but the actual location of Sesame Street has been under debate for years. It is intended to be a neighborhood in Manhattan, though which exactly is up for debate, even amongst staffers of the show. Some suggest the Upper West Side, and others claim that it is modeled after the Alphabet City area of the Lower East Side. Some detail oriented investigators have tried to pin down the location based on clues from the show itself, including zip codes printed on envelopes and background shots of characters walking around.

Despite the terror they invoke, vampires are really terribly vulnerable creatures, with a laundry list of weaknesses: sunlight, garlic, and religious symbols amongst others, depending on which franchise you are considering. But folklore speaks of one of the more rarely considered chinks in the vampire’s armor; arithmomania— an aspect of obsessive-compulsive disorder that in an uncontrollable urge to quantify and count things. Should one find himself confronting by a ravenous, undead ghoul, he could merely throw a handful of rice on the ground. The vampire would be helpless but to fall on his knees and count every single grain. This vulnerability has been rolled into the popular Sesame Street character “Count von Count”, the world’s least intimidating vampire, who teaches children basic concepts of arithmetic.

Elmo is one of the most popular (and obnoxious) denizens of Sesame Street, a bright red puppet known for his falsetto voice and habit of talking about himself in the third person. Elmo has been around for years, but he was relegated to the background for some time, until he was picked up in 1984 by young puppeteer Kevin Clash. Clash breathed life into Elmo, and over the next decade, his star rose exponentially. Elmo hit is stride in the mid to late 90s, with the release of the “Tickle Me Elmo” toy and the film “Elmo in Grouchland”. And then in 2012, 22 year old Sheldon Stephens emerged, claiming that he had Clash had an inappropriate sexual relations when Stephens was underage. Clash acknowledged the two had shared a relationship, but that it had been between two consenting adults. Stephens later recanted his statement, but other men came forward, claiming that Clash had also slept with them when they were teenagers. Clash quickly resigned. When he left the show, he made the statement: “Personal matters have diverted attention away from the important work ‘Sesame Street’ is doing and I cannot allow it to go on any longer. I am deeply sorry to be leaving and am looking forward to resolving these personal matters privately.” Since leaving, additional allegations have been levied against Clash. He has recently come back into the spotlight when he was nominated for four Emmy Awards, despite the scandal.

Aloysius Snuffleupagus is a woolly mammoth Muppet who spent fourteen years as Big Bird’s “imaginary” friend. Whenever adults would appear, Snuffy would vanish by way of coincidence, and the grownups would disbelieve Big Bird that he ever existed. Snuffy was revealed to the entire cast in 1985. According to Martin P. Robison, who plays the character, the producers decided that due to stories of abuse of children, they did not want to portray a situation between adults and a child character who wasn’t believed despite being honest. They were afraid they were giving kids the message that their parents might not listen to them in case they had a “unbelievable” story to tell, such as being sexually abused by a relative.

AIDS devastates sub-Saharan Africa like no place in the world; hundreds of thousands of children are born with the disease each year. Most of them die before the age of five. A staggering percentage of the children in the area have been orphaned by the virus. First appearing on 2002’s “Takalani Sesame” in South Africa, Five year old Kami is an upbeat yellow “monster” Muppet like Grover. She is portrayed with a perpetual case of the sniffles as a nod to her condition, which has also claimed the lives of her parents. Kami contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. Along with educating the children of South Africa and Nigeria about the disease, Kami helps them to deal with the societal stigma attached to HIV/AIDS and the inherent sense of loss and fear. Kami has since been appointed a representative of UNICEF projects throughout the world.

Africa is not the only place to host its own version of “Sesame Street.” There are varieties throughout the world, in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. The earliest international adaptation was Brazil’s Vila Sésamo. Many other versions exist, each tailored to the specific language, environment, and social circumstances of the area in which it aired. While many of the characters carried over, others were added or replaced. In the Canadian version, the main character was a giant polar bear named Basil, who learned French from his bilingual friend. In the version from the Philippines, the Big Bird character is a giant pink turtle named Pong Pagong; in Israel it is a hedgehog named Kippi Kippod, and in Kuwait it is a camel named No’Man. According to Joan Ganz Cooney, one of the creators of the Sesame Workshop, she was stunned at the international interest in the show: “To be frank, I was really surprised, because we thought we were creating the quintessential American show. We thought the Muppets were quintessentially American, and it turns out they’re the most international characters ever created.”

In 1990, Jim Henson, the creator of Sesame Street’s Muppets, died suddenly of a bacterial pneumonia. In the wake of his passing, two memorial services (one in New York and one in London) were staged wherein both characters from Henson’s “The Muppet Show” and “Sesame Street performed”, including a heartrending version of “Being Green” by Big Bird. Henson’s only request was that no one wear black. Although the services were open to the public, they were not televised, and only certain recorded segments exist. Along with Muppet performances and eulogies from friends and collaborators, excerpts from Henson’s correspondence to his children were read, including this passage: “Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It’s a good life, enjoy it.”

Mike Devlin is an aspiring novelist. As Muppets go, he prefers Kermit.

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