Everyone knows the saying: 'truth is stranger than fiction.' And the thing is,
it's actually true. From Roman nanotech to ice cream gangsters,
here are some of the stories from history that may sound fake — but are, in fact, absolutely real.
No matter how old you are, everyone feels that same childlike glee
and excitement that comes with the familiar song of the ice cream man.
The promise of a cold treat on a hot summer day is enough to send anyone running — but if you
were in Glasgow during the 1970s and 1980s, you might have wanted to run in the other direction.
During this period, the gangs of Glasgow dealt in stolen goods, drugs, and a whole lot more,
all under the colorful cover of the ice cream business. Being an ice cream man
could very quickly turn deadly, too: Territories were staked out,
and anyone caught selling in someone else's turf might catch an ax to the face.
"Three men, four men, had stopped in a car in front of it, jumped to it,
and smashed the windscreen with baseball bats, pick shafts, handles, I don't know which it was."
This was serious, gang-level stuff, and that particularly dark era of Glasgow's history
is popularly known as — I kid you not — the Ice Cream Wars. This had all started out as
a necessary service, as ice cream vendors also sold essentials like toilet paper and groceries
to people in low-income housing. But those involved quickly began selling illegal goods,
which were in turn protected by armed gangs who made sure no one was selling on their territory.
And yes, people absolutely died in the crossfire.
Eventually, the Ice Cream Wars came to an end — but only because they
were no longer the money-making enterprises they once were.
Everyone's heard the tales that suggest there may be something ancient and terrifying living in the
depths of Scotland's Loch Ness, and there've been plenty of stories touted as "proof," including the
incredibly famous and incredibly debunked photo that's been circulating for decades. But what you
may not know is that sightings of the Loch Ness Monster go back far, far beyond the 20th century.
Colum Cille, the grandson of the Irish king Niall ["NYE-ull"], was born in 521.
Later known as St. Columba, this is the guy who is widely credited with
bringing Christianity to Scotland when he settled on the Isle of Iona in 563, quickly
establishing a monastic community that spread its message to every corner of northern Britain.
Two years after reaching Scotland, Columba was spreading the word of God
in the region's northern reaches. He arrived at Loch Ness on August 22nd 565, and there,
he saw a man swimming in the lake… with a monstrous creature following right behind
him. Columba supposedly invoked the name of God and sent the beast diving back into the
depths of the lake, thus marking the very first sighting of the Loch Ness Monster.
Obviously, there's some debate to be had about this story, considering it was written about a
century after it supposedly happened. Still, it's quite remarkable that the notion of a
being living beneath the loch has endured so readily over the long course of history.
At the turn of the 20th century, food manufacturers could include pretty much
anything in their products, and nobody seemed to bat an eye-lid. But one Purdue scientist named Dr.
Harvey Washington Wiley decided that things were getting out of hand, and petitioned Congress for
permission to carry out testing on the effects common food additives had on the human body.
Well, that's the sanitized version of what he was doing. Wiley already knew additives were
dangerous; he just needed to prove it. So, he assembled a group of 12 volunteers — all male,
all young, and all healthy — who signed waivers promising not to sue him if they got sick
or died. And that was important… because they were all about to eat a number of deadly additives.
They started in 1902 with borax, which was used as a preservative at the time.
Predictably, it wasn't long before all the men given the poisons became
sick. With borax out of the way, they moved on to eating sulfuric acid, sodium benzoate,
formaldehyde, copper sulfate, saccharin, and saltpeter, among other equally pleasant things.
By 1906, Wiley's volunteers had demonstrated full well the need for food regulation,
and Congress passed both the Pure Food and Drug
Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Talk about taking one for the team.
Nanotechnology is one of those things that, even in the 21st century,
feels like it might as well be magic. But modern man isn't the first to unlock
the secrets of nanotech — no, that honor goes to the ancient Romans.
The Lycurgus Cup is called that because the figures featured on it are depicting
the story of the death of King Lycurgus, who was driven mad by the god Bacchus.
It's a cool story, but even cooler is the fact that the cup is usually green — until
the light shines through it, at which point these terrible scenes turn bright red.
In 1958, the Lycurgus Cup was donated to the British Museum, and it was nearly four
decades before researchers figured out how it had been made. The glass, it turned out,
had been constructed using silver and gold that had been ground down to individual particles,
each less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The color change
comes when light reflects off the tiny flakes, making them vibrate and turn different colors.
This wasn't an accident, either. The precise work that needed to go craft the cup suggests that,
even if they didn't know the exact science behind the principle, the Romans knew exactly how to
utilize wild, color-changing nanotechnology — all the way back in the fourth century A.D.
Aliens might seem like the domain of 1990s-era TV shows and modern day conspiracy theories,
but the belief that we're not alone in the universe goes back a long way.
"E.T. phone home."
In fact, in 1837, one scientist hatched a plan to let them know we're here. Scottish astronomer,
philosopher, and church minister Thomas Dick played a crucial role in getting 19th-century
theologians and scientists to at least accept the idea that science and religion could coexist.
He also promoted a slightly more out-there belief:
Our solar system, he said, was home to roughly 22 trillion other beings.
Dick came up with that number with some impressive science that took the average
population of England and expanded that to cover the entire solar system.
Across all the mostly-solid celestial bodies, such as planets and asteroids, if everywhere
supported the same density of life as England, that's how many aliens would be in our backyard.
Dick took it one step further, too. In the 1830s,
he decided to get in touch with the 4.2 billion aliens he thought were living on
the Moon. In order to do so, he proposed building a massive triangle or ellipsis,
possibly in Siberia. The idea was that, even if the aliens didn't have telescopes,
they'd have been able to see this monument and know that we were here. Sadly, it didn't come to
pass — probably because most people at the time were still figuring out what lawnmowers were.
While it hasn't quite picked up the same kind of momentum as the flat Earth theory,
the idea that Earth is hollow is, to many, a perfectly legit alternative. It's not exactly new,
either, and strangely enough, there was even a U.S. president who believed it — so much
so that he even gave the go-ahead for an expedition to prove the theory was true.
It was the 1820s, and the army captain John Cleves Symmes wanted everyone to know that there were
entrances to the planet's crust situated at both poles. He described going into these doorways as
just like walking into the center of a giant donut: You could, in theory, stroll right in
and find yourself in an interior world similar to our surface world. Only, y'know, darker.
Symmes even went to Congress to get approval to launch a government-funded trip to prove
just how hollow the Earth was, and while Congress declined,
President John Quincy Adams was all in favor of it.
Unfortunately, the expedition never got off the ground. Symmes died in 1829,
and most of the people who had heard his claims thought… well, they thought the
same thing you're probably thinking now. Adams ended up being a one-term president,
and although the government did fund an 1838 expedition to the North Pole,
nobody on that expedition is known to have tried to dig their way into the Earth's core.
In 1932, five friends came up with a less-than-brilliant idea. They would take out
an insurance policy on someone, name themselves as beneficiaries, and then kill him. And yes,
there's a reason this sounds more like something you'd see on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
"What's Ponderosa doing here?" "Oh, he's going to drink himself to death,
so we took out a life insurance policy on him." "Oh, cool, yeah. Pretty dark, though, right?"
The man they picked was an Irishman named Michael Malloy. He was a loner, had no friends,
and already drank a lot, so how hard would it be to kill him? Well, as it turned out: very.
Once they'd taken out separate policies on Malloy, the trio got to work. They started
by giving Malloy an open tab at Marino's bar, which he quickly took advantage of. Like,
a lot. For days. When regular alcohol didn't do the trick, they started giving him wood alcohol.
That should have been deadly, but it didn't kill ol' Michael Malloy.
Before long, it became clear that what they were spending on alcohol was quickly approaching the
amount the insurance policies were going to pay out. So our intrepid villains decided to
escalate matters. They gave Malloy bad oysters, fed him sandwiches made with shards of metal,
dumped him into a snowbank, and even hit him with a car and backed over him.
But he just kept showing up back at the bar.
This went on for seven months until Malloy finally died.
It turned out that a tube had been forced down his throat and connected to a gas line, which,
as you'd hope, made the authorities more than a little suspicious.
After receiving just a couple hundred bucks from the insurance companies, the five were arrested,
tried for first-degree murder, and all but one were executed at Sing Sing prison.
Everyone knows floods are terrible, but a flood of molasses? Well, that's even
worse. And it really happened, too, back in Boston in 1919, in an event that killed 21
people. On January 15th of that year, a molasses storage tank standing along the waterfront burst,
spilling 2.5 million gallons of molasses in a 15-foot-tall wave that moved at 35 mph.
Eyewitness accounts sound genuinely terrifying: Buildings fell, telephone poles snapped,
electrical wires flew, steel girders broke, and people drowned. An entire section of the
city was destroyed, and none of Boston was untouched: Even the parts that avoided being
covered with molasses were left sticky, as people carried the goop on their clothes and shoes.
Cleanup took a whopping 87,000 man-hours, and the flood did an amount of damage that,
in today's money, would cost around $100 million. The 119 lawsuits that followed included 25,000
pages of transcripts and almost 2,000 exhibits, and at the end of it all, the company that owned
the tank was found responsible, as the tank was structurally flawed — so much so, in fact,
that locals apparently filled their cups with its leakage in the months leading up to the disaster.
How does a mayor take on New York City's organized crime? Why, ban artichokes, of course!
The mayor in question was Fiorello LaGuardia, and on December 21st, 1935, he banned artichokes
because, he claimed, they posed a "serious and threatening emergency to the city."
Let's back up a little. Artichokes were incredibly popular among Italian immigrants,
who could only get this fair-weather crop from West Coast farmers — which is where the mob came
in. One of the mafia's major money-makers was the agricultural industry, and by the time LaGuardia
decided it was time to outlaw artichokes, the mafia had been collecting millions from them.
The money had come first when they started charging growers to import their product,
and it wasn't long before this "transportation racket" escalated.
Wholesalers and vendors were buying at massive markups that went right into mob pockets,
so much so that the Morello family underboss was known, at the time, as the "Artichoke King."
Artichokes weren't the first or the last time the mob used agriculture as a money-making machine,
but LaGuardia's ban hurt — a lot. In the end, LaGuardia only needed to keep
the ban in place for three days. In that time, mob pressure on the crop was lifted
and artichokes became popular far beyond the Italian-American community. Who'd have thunk it?
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