Humanity has always had an intimate relationship with food. So it should come as no surprise that some of the most notable, influential figures throughout history have often had bizarre notions of how and what to eat.

10 Zuckerberg Only Eats What He Kills

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is famous for taking on yearlong challenges of self-improvement, such as wearing a tie every day in 2009 and studying Chinese every day in 2010. It came as a bit of a shock, though, when he announced in 2011 that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” After announcing the decision on his private page, he posted, “I just killed a pig and a goat,” which prompted various reactions from his followers.

According to an email that Zuckerberg sent to Fortune magazine, “I started thinking about this last year when I had a pig roast at my house. A bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn’t want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive. That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don’t have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from.”

His instructor was Silicon Valley chef Jesse Cool, who introduced Zuckerberg to local farmers and advised him on the slaughters of his first chicken, pig, and goat.”He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it,” said Cool to Fortune. Zuckerberg’s first kill, however, was a lobster that he boiled alive. Initially, this was emotionally difficult for Zuckerberg, but he said he felt better after eating it. As he told Fortune in an interview, “The most interesting thing was how special it felt to eat it after having not eaten any seafood or meat in a while.”

9 Beethoven’s Soup

Ludwig van Beethoven is known for many things, but few know just how seriously he took his soup. According to the famous composer, only a housekeeper or cook with a pure heart could prepare a pure soup. Beethoven brooked no opposition, particular not from his long-suffering secretary Anton Schindler. If Beethoven thought a soup was bad and Schindler disagreed, Beethoven would send him an insulting note: “I do not value your judgment on the soup in the least, it is bad.”

One of Beethoven’s favorite dishes was a mushy bread soup, which he consumed every Thursday with 10 large eggs to be stirred into the soup. He inspected the eggs by holding them to the light and then cracking them open with his hand. Woe to the housekeeper if they weren’t all entirely fresh. Beethoven would call her in for a scolding. She only half-listened because she had to be ready to flee, as it was Beethoven’s custom to pelt her with the eggs as a punishment.

According to Ignaz von Seyfried, an opera conductor during Beethoven’s time: “[Beethoven’s housekeeper] held herself in readiness to beat a quick retreat before, as was customary, the cannonade was about to begin, and the decapitate batteries would begin to play upon her back and pour out their yellow-white, sticky intestines over her in veritable lava streams.”

8 Gerald Ford’s Strange Lunch

It is a commonly cited piece of trivia that President Richard Nixon ate a daily lunch of cottage cheese covered in ketchup. After he was elected president, an article in the Washingtonian quipped that elegant White House dinners had been replaced by cottage cheese and ketchup. He even had cottage cheese with pineapple slices for lunch on the day that he announced his resignation from the presidency.

Less commonly known is that President Gerald Ford was also an aficionado of the bizarre but strangely appealing lunch menu item, which he consumed every day while reading or working. An Air Force One staffer revealed in the book Inside the White House:

President Ford had A-1 sauce and ketchup, mostly A-1 sauce, with the cottage cheese. We always had a vegetable garnish with spring onions, celery sticks, radishes. We always served ketchup and A-1 sauce with it. In most cases, he used A-1 sauced mixed in. [ . . . ] When we were going to land, he used mouthwash because of the onions.

Ford also liked a drink, although he could usually handle his alcohol. He once got drunk on martinis on Air Force One while returning from a meeting with the Soviet premier. That same staffer said, “We put him to bed. In the middle of the flight, he came out in his underwear and said ‘Where is the head?’ Normally, he knew where the head is. He could walk. He was slurring words. It was the one time he overindulged and was tipsy.”

7 Nicolas Cage’s Diet Of Dignified Animals

Nicolas Cage is known for a storied career of both great and terrible performances. There are certainly enough strange things to say about him, but his diet may top them all. He only consumes animals that he judges as mating in a “dignified way.”

Explaining the reason for his choice to The Sun, Cage said, “I have a fascination with fish, birds, whales—sentient life—insects, reptiles. I actually choose the way I eat according to the way animals have sex. I think fish are very dignified with sex. So are birds. But pigs, not so much. So I don’t eat pig meat or things like that. I eat fish and fowl.”

He may not eat those salacious swine, but he has consumed strange things in the name of art. The 1988 movie Vampire’s Kiss called for Cage to eat a live cockroach, which he did with some difficulty. “Every muscle in my body didn’t want to do it,” said Cage to The Telegraph. “But I did it anyway.”

6 Henry Ford’s Weeds

Henry Ford was a picky eater who usually had nuts or raisins in his pocket. In his youth, he was largely uninterested in food and mostly moved it around on his plate to give the appearance of eating it. This changed when he started to perceive his body as a machine and his stomach as a boiler that he needed to give the right fuel.

The act of eating was more practical than sensual, and Ford experimented with wild weeds as a source of nutrition. His dietary experiments caused misery to his business associates, although they were better received by his friend George Washington Carver, who was of a like mind on that sort of thing.

Even though Ford received a salary of almost $1 million a year, he preferred a diet of “roadside greens,” which were essentially edible weeds that Ford gathered from his garden or outside. According to biographer Sidney Olson: “There is nothing quite like a dish of stewed burdock, followed by a sandwich of soybean bread filled with milkweeds, to set up a man for an afternoon’s work.”

The weeds that Ford collected were often lightly boiled or stewed and then used in salads or sandwiches. However, the diet seemed to pay off because Henry Ford was rarely sick and lived to the ripe old age of 83.

5 Evo Morales’s Gay Chicken

Bolivian President Evo Morales caused controversy in 2001 when he claimed that eating hormone-injected chicken was a root cause of homosexuality. At the World People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, he shocked the socially progressive audience with his views. “When we talk about chicken, it’s pumped full of female hormones,” he said, “and so when men eat this chicken, they stray from being men.”

He also linked the consumption of fowl with male baldness. Within a few hours, the impact of his comments had spread to the international media.

Morales’s government quickly went into spin doctor mode, insisting that the president had been referring only to genital abnormalities. In a public statement, the Foreign Relations Ministry explained, “[Morales] made no mention of sexuality. Rather, he said that eating chicken that has hormones changes our own bodies. This point of view has been confirmed by scientists, and even the European Union has prohibited the use of some hormones in food.”

Many gay rights activists were unconvinced. The president of the Argentina Homosexual Community, Cesar Cigliutti, said, “It’s an absurdity to think that eating hormone-containing chicken can change the sexual orientation of a person. By following that reasoning, if we put male hormones in a chicken and we make a homosexual eat it he will transform into a heterosexual.”

In a different vein, Morales also took shots at Coca-Cola. “If the plumber comes to your house and can’t get the job done with all his tools,” said Morales, “have him pour Coca-Cola down the clogged toilet, and problem solved.” This was received more favorably as many in Bolivia believe that the US soda company exploits Bolivia’s coca supplies. Also, a local company had just launched a rival drink called “Coca-Colla,” with “Colla” being a reference to the native Andean highland people.

Morales has a long-standing antipathy toward unhealthy American food, complaining at the UN in 2013 that “the fast food of the West is a great harm to humanity.” He accused fast food companies of causing cancer and conspiring to suppress the rise of quinoa as a healthy alternative source of nutrition.

4 Howard Hughes’s Food Fetishes

Movie mogul, industrialist, and businessman Howard Hughes suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which was reflected in his eating habits. He gave a number of bizarre food preparation and serving orders to his servants, including wrapping spoon handles in tissue paper. They were then sealed with cellophane and wrapped in a second piece of tissue paper. He would only touch the covered handles because he was obsessively afraid of germs.

His servants had to open cans of food in a specific way, too. First, the servant would hold the can under warm running water. Then he or she used a brush and special bars of soap to remove the label 5 centimeters (2 in) from the top of the can. Next, the can was soaked to remove any dust and germs. Then the bottom was cleaned in the same manner as the top. All the indentations of the can also had to be scrubbed with soap and rinsed. Throughout the process, the servant was not permitted to let go of the can.

Hughes suffered constipation because he refused to eat leafy vegetables. His meals were very uniform, and he enjoyed a regimented menu that he changed every few months. He usually ate a medium-rare butterfly steak with 12 peas of uniform size. If any of the peas were too large, Hughes would send them back to the kitchen to be replaced. He ate almost every meal alone. According to his chef, Hughes didn’t even eat Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners with his wife.

But Hughes liked fudge. When he became reclusive in his later years, he virtually subsisted on chocolate bars and milk. He isolated himself in a studio near his home, surrounded by empty milk bottles and containers which he used to relieve himself when nature called. This reclusive lifestyle took a toll on his health. When he finally died, people compared the state of his body to that of a Japanese prisoner of war.

3 Hitler’s Flatulent Vegetarianism

Many meat lovers enjoy telling their vegetarian friends that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and vegetarians often vehemently disagree. The truth is more nuanced. Until the early 1930s, Hitler showed a penchant for certain meat products, particularly liver dumplings and sausages. He is said to have subscribed to Wagner’s theory that “[the] thirst [for flesh and blood] . . . can never be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage.”

Yet he did not completely turn against the consumption of meat until his niece and possible lover Geli Raubal committed suicide in 1931. After that, he refused to eat breakfast ham. “It is like eating a corpse!” he said.

Hitler also turned away from meat because he believed it caused chronic constipation and flatulence. He ate his vegetables raw or pulped into a mush. Some of his favorite foods were oatmeal with linseed oil, cauliflower, cottage cheese, boiled apples, artichoke hearts, and asparagus tips in white sauce.

The high-fiber diet had precisely the opposite effect on his bowel drama. After Hitler consumed a particularly large plate of vegetables, his physician, Theo Morell, recorded in his diary that Hitler experienced “constipation and colossal flatulence . . . on a scale I have seldom encountered before.”

Of course, this is not only the fault of his vegetarian diet but also the ridiculous regimen of drugs and treatments administered by his doctor, which included chamomile enemas and a heavy dose of supplements. Some of those supplements were vitamins, testosterone, liver extracts, laxatives, sedatives, glucose, opiates, and poisonous strychnine tablets for gas.

The argument over Hitler’s vegetarianism is a bit of a red herring. He did occasionally indulge in animal products, but so do 70 percent of vegetarians. Even so, Hitler’s decision to become a vegetarian in no way refutes the moral arguments that vegetarians hold against meat eating.

2 Mussolini’s Milk Addiction

Benito Mussolini also had digestive problems and weird eating habits, such as refusing to eat anything at banquets. He believed that eating was an activity to which one should devote one’s complete attention and that eating in the presence of others would make one “apt to eat wrongly.”

In 1925, he vomited blood while at his house in Rome and was forced to take several weeks off from public appearances. Rumors circulated that Mussolini might have to be replaced as the National Fascist Party leader. Doctors diagnosed him with a stomach ulcer and recommended a drastic change in diet after he refused to have surgery. His new diet was mainly composed of fruit and up to 3 liters (1 gal) of milk every day. This apparently didn’t help him because he suffered another ulcer in 1929.

After the Allies invaded Italy and the Fascists retreated to a German satellite state called the Salo Republic, Mussolini sought the assistance of a physician named Dr. Zachariae. Shocked by his patient’s appearance, the doctor said, “I found myself before a ruin of a man who was evidently on the brink of the tomb.” Mussolini suffered from ulcers, anemia, constipation, insomnia, and low blood pressure. His skin was dry and inelastic, and his abdominal area around his liver was engorged.

Zachariae blamed Mussolini’s ridiculous milk diet and cut his milk intake to 0.25 liters (0.5 pt) each day for a week. Then he went cold turkey. The doctor began to treat Mussolini with small doses of vitamins and hormones, which had an immediate positive effect. After his liver returned to its normal size, Mussolini remarked, “I must tell you I feel liberated. I no longer feel pains in my stomach, and I don’t fear the night.”

The doctor insisted that Mussolini eat some light vegetables like carrots and potatoes, which he had once been unable to stomach, and to take his tea without milk. Although Mussolini preferred vegetarianism, the doctor insisted that his patient eat small amounts of boiled chicken and fish to increase his protein intake. Along with injections of vitamins B and C, the new diet caused his red blood cell count to rise and his health to improve. Despite Mussolini occasionally refusing to take food while the Italian people were starving, Zachariae later boasted that he had restored Mussolini to the health of a man of 40.

1 Kim Jong Il’s Gastronomy

Due to the testimony of Kim Jong Il’s former personal chef, Kenji Fujimoto, we know quite a bit about the eating habits of the former North Korean tyrant. While much of the country was starving, Kim indulged in expensive and elaborate food and drink. He had a wine cellar with over 10,000 bottles and a library with thousands of cookbooks.

Kim was committed to getting the best food and often sent Fujimoto on foreign excursions to pick up delicacies: Iran and Uzbekistan for caviar, France for cognac, Denmark for pork, western China for grapes, Thailand for papayas and mangoes, and Beijing for McDonald’s fast food. Former North Korean diplomats also sent back exotic delicacies, such as camel’s feet, from the countries in which they were stationed.

Kim established an institute of top doctors and scientists to design a diet to increase his longevity. This was a source of concern, as the 158-centimeter (5’2″) dictator’s former eating habits had brought him to a weight of almost 90 kilograms (200 lb). The doctors began to inspect every grain of his rice by hand to make sure it was perfectly shaped with no cracks or chips. Kim insisted that the rice be cooked over a wood fire using trees cut from Mount Paektu, a legendary mountain on the border with China.

Fujimoto also revealed the dictator’s love of sushi. When Fujimoto sought to leave North Korea (after being banned from travel abroad), he did so with a cunning ruse. He showed the “Dear Leader” a new episode of the cooking show Iron Chef, in which the secret ingredient was sea urchin roe, or uni.

He casually mentioned that the best place to acquire the ingredient was from Rishiri Island off the coast of Hokkaido. Kim couldn’t resist sending the chef, who eluded his handlers at a fish market in Tokyo and disappeared into the crowd. Fujimoto didn’t return to North Korea until after Kim Jong Il’s death.

David Tormsen only eats shoe leather and chives. Email him at [email protected].

Everything you come in contact with has its own story. Familiarity has drained some items of any interest. However, when looking at even the most mundane things, there is almost always something surreal.

Just because that item is banal doesn’t mean that its history is. The people behind even the most mundane things lived lives that were anything but. Here’s hoping these dark and disturbing backstories can bring some excitement to these commonplace things.

10 A Stagecoach Accident Created Movies And A Murder

In 1860, Eadweard Muybridge was traveling through Texas on a stagecoach. When it crashed, he and the other passengers were thrown out. After hitting his head, Muybridge suffered from double vision, sensory impairments, and confused thinking.

To recuperate, his doctor told him to take up a new hobby to recover. Muybridge decided to get into photography. With bold and deadly stunts, he earned a reputation as one of the most acclaimed photographers of the era.

His injuries grew worse. In 1874, he discovered that his wife, Flora Stone, was having an affair with a mutual friend. Muybridge shot the man at pointblank range, killing him instantly.

Unsure if his wife’s child was his own or that of her lover, Muybridge put his own kid up for adoption. People who knew Muybridge said that his eccentric behavior was caused by the crash. Though he plead insanity on the murder charge, he was acquitted on the grounds that murder was justified.^[1]

Muybridge’s exoneration was great news for Leland Stanford, the man who had raised money for Muybridge’s defense. The men’s relationship was about to change the world.

A prominent horse gambler, Stanford wanted to know if a horse in mid-trot takes all four feet off the ground. From rows of cameras placed along the track, the stills showed every motion of the horse. Replayed in sequence, the images came to life and revealed a momentary hold of all four legs off the ground. This little bet inspired the forerunner of the motion picture.

9 Slinky’s Inventor Abandoned His Wealth And Family To Join A Bolivian Cult

The Slinky’s origin is as whimsical as its iconic childhood status would suggest. In a happy accident, Richard James watched a spring walk down a pair of stairs. His children stood by laughing in delight.

Two years later, James showcased the newly debuted Slinky as the hot new Christmas gift of 1945. Despite its simplistic background, the Slinky has become one of the quintessential toys in American history for over 70 years.

Richard James did not have as amusing a story. The toy circuit was apparently a very scandalous place. Flushed with Slinky money, he became a serial adulterer. Remorseful for his affairs, James wanted to find religion again. He started sending his money to Episcopalian groups. His religious curiosity led him to join stricter and stricter faiths.^[2]

For a man who brought so much joy to children everywhere, James could not bring happiness to his own children. In 1960, James abandoned his six kids, who ranged from two to 18 years old. Richard James’s wife, Betty, had to raise their children on her own while James was busy sending all of Slinky’s profits to a religious cult in Bolivia.

None of James’s kids saw their father in the last 14 years of his life. The only communication was letters urging them to repent and join him in Bolivia. By shepherding the company in her husband’s absence, Betty personally saved the company from bankruptcy and let the toy entertain children to this day.

8 The Mathematician-Turned-Magician Behind The Decimal Point

John Napier was a paradox. Both a man of logic and superstition, he drove humanity forward by looking to the past. Perceived as consulting in the dark arts, Napier was an early mathematician who formulated the logarithm and invented the idea of a decimal point. All his advancements were grounded in his theological beliefs of the impending Apocalypse.

Reading the Book of Revelation, Napier calculated that the Apocalypse was set to occur in 1688 or 1700. Apparently, he allowed a little wiggle room for the end of the world.

Others in the community perceived Napier’s profound faith in Armageddon as evidence that he was a wizard. Convinced that the end times were imminent, Napier experimented with a proto death ray that harnessed and reflected the power of the Sun to burn ships.

His reputation was slandered, but his own eccentricities did not help. Napier would walk around in an all-black gown decorated with skulls. His ensemble was completed with a black pet rooster and black spider crawling on him. Never denying rumors about his ability to communicate with animals, he fostered beliefs that his rooster could read minds or that he (Napier) could control pigeons.

Speculative rumors led to his most daring exploit. Noted treasure hunter and pirate Robert Logan hired Napier to discover the buried treasure of Fast Castle.

Believing that Napier’s sorcery could easily locate the chest, Logan signed a contract to storm the castle. Little came of this exploit, which was good for Napier. Had he gone through with the heist, the notorious outlaw would have likely killed the genius, setting mathematics progress back for years.^[3]

7 The Toy Made By A Nazi Used To Fight Nazis

William Gruber was obsessed with mushrooms. He wanted the rest of the world to join him. In Gruber’s fantasy, people around the world would use his device to educate themselves on detailed depictions of flora and fauna. The world eventually grew to love his invention, but he never got to revel in the success. He was too busy being ostracized as a Nazi spy.

Raised in post–World War I Germany, Gruber was swept up in the Nazi fervor. Even after he moved to Oregon in 1924, he still proudly supported the burgeoning Nazi Party.

While photographing Oregon’s natural beauty, Gruber had a chance encounter with the honeymooning Harold Graves. Fascinated by Gruber’s bizarre technique of taking simultaneous photos with two different cameras to create a 3-D image, Graves thought that Gruber should make a machine to view these images up close. So they formed a partnership.

In 1939, Graves debuted their project at the New York World’s Fair. It was named the View-Master.

The outbreak of war later that year was not enough to shake Gruber’s Nazi allegiance. The FBI was worried about this vocal and prominent Nazi advocate with constant business connections with a German lens manufacturer, so they froze all of Gruber’s assets. Then the government banished him to Idaho.

Ironically, that same government was about to buy more than 10,000 View-Masters. Military servicemen used the reels as a necessary educational tool to quickly familiarize themselves with equipment or locations.

Returning to the product’s educational roots, Gruber’s last association with View-Master was a macabre project known as “A Stereoscopic Atlas of the Human Anatomy.” Instead of stills of beloved Disney characters, the reels were filled with dissected cadavers. However, Gruber had no control as the View-Master became an iconic symbol of baby boomer childhood instead of the educational tool he foresaw.^[4]

6 Milton Cooper Wrote Of Aliens And The Language Of Hip-Hop

Serving as an Army foot soldier in the Vietnam War, Milton William Cooper personally saw the government lie to the American public. And if you believe him, he also saw extraterrestrials. UFOlogists heralded Cooper as a government official turned whistle-blower. Others dismissed him as a plagiarist. No matter his credibility, Cooper was launched as a major figure in conspiracy circles.

In 1991, that culminated with Behold a Pale Horse. His book combines traditional conspiracy theories embedded with a new strain of paranoia. Subjects were as varied as the beliefs that the government created the AIDS virus and John F. Kennedy was assassinated because he was about to reveal the existence of aliens.

Readers have interpreted the meandering manifesto in multiple ways. Seeing the text as a call to violent insurrection, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. A different type of explosion went off in Harlem. Stoking the already-present distrust of the government, Cooper’s theories help launch the ’90s artistic boom in hip-hop.

As an omnipresent force in Harlem, Behold a Pale Horse was simply called “The Book” by many readers. Influenced by Black Islam’s call to serve as “lyrical assassins,” many of the most consequential rappers of the ’90s got their start by referencing Cooper’s book.

Notable Rappers who sneaked in nods to Cooper include the Wu-Tang Clan, Big Daddy Kane, Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, Nas, Rakim, Gang Starr, Public Enemy, Mobb Deep, and Jay-Z. Modern hip-hop traces its roots through Cooper’s text, even if he would not live long enough to see the results.

As of the 1990s, Cooper’s fears of government persecution were no longer just a theory. In 1998, he was charged with tax evasion. Two years later, a bloody altercation with his neighbor landed Cooper with an aggravated assault charge.

Labeled a “major fugitive,” United States Marshals arrived at Cooper’s house on November 5, 2001. Vowing to never be taken alive, Cooper shot an officer in the head. Prophetic until the end, Cooper was shot in the chest and died.^[5]

5 The Sex Doll By A Sex Addict Became A Childhood Staple

Despite being one of the most wholesome toys of all time, Barbie dolls have always been controversial. Many parents have worried that the doll’s unrealistic body figure is a bad role model for little girls’ body image.

Barbie’s exaggerated dimensions were meant to be sexualized from the beginning. While vacationing in Switzerland, inventor Ruth Handler found a Bild-Lilli doll. These dolls were pocket-size models of a namesake call girl from a German comic strip.

The Bild-Lilli dolls were risque trophies handed to women on dates for the men to make their intentions clear. Handler brought one of these dolls for her new business partner, Jack Ryan.

He was an odd fit for the toy world. Ryan initially set out to be a rocket designer. Using his engineering know-how, he modified the dolls with movable joints or individual fingers.

Unable to pay him an engineering fee, Handler arranged to give Ryan a small royalty for every toy sold. As Barbie took over, his contract made him extremely wealthy. He used that money to fund all types of bizarre purchases including his own fire engine and a castle surrounded by a moat.

Described by others as a “sex addict,” Ryan’s castle featured a sex dungeon covered in black fox fur. His insatiable sexual appetite was part of the reason that he married five times, including once to Zsa Zsa Gabor.^[6]

Sex was far from Ryan’s only vice. He also used copious amounts of alcohol and cocaine. In part due to his antics, Ryan was ousted from Mattel. This exile only exacerbated his already-debilitating cocaine addiction.

The cocaine took a mental and physical toll on his body. His drug use was a factor in a stroke that left him crippled. A few years later, he killed himself at age 64.

4 The Cult In The Kitchen

Considering the rest of his family, John Humphrey Noyes really stands apart. His father served in the US House of Representatives. His cousin was President Rutherford B. Hayes.

Apparently, the late 1800s would let it slide, but it might make the news today if the president’s cousin was running a religious sex cult. In his own small way, Noyes’s accomplishments affected daily life just as much as his cousin’s did.

In 1831, Noyes experienced a religious conversion. Citing a prophecy that the millennium would arrive within a generation of Jesus’s crucifixion, Noyes calculated that the Earth was redeemed in AD 70. All these generations later, Noyes was now free from sin.

His interpretation slowly gathered his own wave of followers. Together, the congregation of 250 formed a burgeoning community to recreate their own Heaven on Earth. Motivated by Jesus’s call to renounce Earthly possessions, the community shared everything.

Economic and physical possessions were divided among all the converts. This included romantic partners. All the men were married to all the women, and vice versa. Group sex was common and encouraged.

No longer comfortable with the unregulated sexual openness, Vermont authorities forced the organization out in 1847. In 1848, the group resettled in Oneida, New York.

Now dubbed the Oneida Perfectionists, the community had to find a way to fund themselves. They tried multiple activities including farming and sawmilling. The most successful was producing steel beaver traps for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Following the collapse of the fur trade, the Oneida Perfectionists continued blacksmithing with a line of silverware. In 1881, the cult collapsed, but the silverware company survived. Today, Oneida Silverware is a mainstay of china cabinets everywhere.^[7]

3 Frederick Hoelzel Crapped Out A Masterpiece

Diet yogurts, McDonald’s hamburgers, and dairy products are but a fraction of the common foods containing cellulose flour. Food manufacturers add cellulose to cheapen the processing price.

With almost no vitamin value of its own, cellulose flour sates appetites without adding any extra calories. Dietitians may rue the invention now for its lack of healthy properties, but fellow nutritionist Frederick Hoelzel had other priorities on his mind when he discovered the product.

Everybody eats cellulose flour, but nobody should eat like Hoelzel. In the 1920s, he became a minor celebrity in Chicago for his remarkable stomach.

Ingesting inedible things like gravel, glass, feathers, ball bearings, and gold pellets, he recorded the amount of time they took to poop out. To put it mildly, it was a painful process. Self-sacrifice is admirable, but Hoelzel’s research had limited applicability.

Despite no one ever needing to know how long it takes to poop cotton, Hoelzel went ahead and tried. Probably a welcome relief from the gravel, he grew to love the taste of cotton-based surgical gauze. As a new favorite, the cellulose in the cotton got him interested in looking into further uses of the compound, eventually leading to the flour.^[8]

2 Eric Gill’s Fonts Are Good; Everything Else About Him Is Not

If one turns on BBC World News, brushes off an old VHS tape of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Toy Story, rides down the London Underground, shops at a Tommy Hilfiger, grabs a copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, or reads any Penguin Publishing classic, he would see Gill Sans font.

More celebrated for his sculpting abilities, Eric Gill turned that artistic sensibility into one of the most ubiquitous typefaces in the world. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, he was repeatedly acclaimed as one the best artists of his generation. Upon his death, Gill’s diaries revealed jarring accounts of his private life that complicate the question of delineating the art and the artist.

Gill’s sexual improprieties were rooted in his Catholicism and deep shame of his sin. If he felt sinful, he never atoned. Instead, he lived a life of increasingly amoral actions.

Gill’s sins started early with lifelong incestuous affairs with his two sisters. The affairs only ended when one of his sisters died. Modeling one of his statues after what his sister looked like while they were having sex, the affair is inseparable from his sculptures. (There is some question about whether he had an incestuous relationship with one or both sisters.)

However, Gill’s incest did not end with his sisters. When two of his three daughters were still children, he raped them. In diary entries, he relished the disgusting deeds by graphically describing his own children’s anatomy.

No diary entry highlights the extent of Gill’s depravity more than the ones mentioning his love of fellating his dogs. With all the incest, rape, pedophilia, and bestiality, maybe Toy Story should choose a different logo.^[9]

1 W.C. Minor’s Life Cannot Be Defined

It is hard to know where W.C. Minor’s name should appear in the dictionary. His heavily bearded face could appear next to words as varied as “genius,” “dedicated,” “murderer,” or “insane.” Whichever word you choose, Minor’s work certainly played his role in history.

A Yale graduate turned Union surgeon in the Civil War, Minor was poised to do great things. Watching the contorted bodies burn in the Battle of the Wilderness changed all of that.

With the forest in flames, Minor burned a deserter himself with a scalding hot “D.” The Irish ancestry of the branded deserter damaged Minor in turn. Haunted with new psychological apparitions of the Irish nationalist group the Fenian Brotherhood, Minor’s mind degraded.

His mental unrest first manifested itself with a more acceptable vice—sex. Living in the red-light district of his town, Minor visited brothels almost daily. Decades later, he could no longer control his urges. Now wanting to have sex with young boys, Minor chopped off his penis. He used the exact knife that was about to cut out definitions in ancient manuscripts.

Instead of seeking treatment, Minor tried to murder his hallucinations. George Merrett was sadly caught in the crosshairs. A bullet that Minor intended for his Irish specters accidentally hit local businessman Merrett. Seven weeks later, Minor was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Institutionalized in the Broadmoor asylum, he reached out to the widowed Eliza Merrett. Their relationship grew. Each week, the two would exchange their favorite books. Buried inside one of the books was a pamphlet mentioning that the Oxford English Dictionary was looking for volunteers.

Thanks to Merrett’s contributions, Minor had a collection of thousands of books. Scouring the texts, he found the etymological roots for hundreds of words. His contributions to the dictionary were incalculable.

In the preface of the fifth volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, the publisher thanked Minor for enhancing “our illustration of the literary history of individual words, phrases, and constructions . . . so enormous have been Dr. Minor’s contributions during the past 17 or 18 years that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone.”^[10]

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England is a land long known for its eccentricities. From their love of pigs blood-laden black pudding for breakfast to the judicial system which insists on using syphilis-masking wigs, cheese rolling, and pope effigy burning; the English have a long and proud tradition of kookiness. Here are some of the finest oddballs England has ever produced.

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10 John Ruskin—The Coy Wonder

All good stories of English peculiarities should begin in the same way the story of John Ruskin begins here—Notable art critic and writer John Ruskin married his cousin in 1848. (That explains A LOT in this list’s wider context, does it not?)

Ruskin’s genius is undoubted but this did not translate into charisma with the ladies. In fact, he was downright disgusted by the fairer sex. His unhappy marriage to Effie Gray was never consummated, Ruskin flat out refused to do so as well as treating her in an unfair and cruel fashion. So profound was his distaste with the female form that, when he founded the Ruskin School of Art in 1871, students were not allowed to sketch, paint or sculpt depictions of nude females…in an art school.^[1]

9 William Beckford—Lord of ‘(fall)Downton Abbey’

This bloke was a real-life ‘Ritchie Rich’, the comic book boy billionaire. Beckford inherited a stupendous £1 million in 1770 at the age of 10, (adjusted for inflation, that’s around a gazillion and a half US Dollars and 43 cents) along with a few sugar plantations in Jamaica and 1,600 African slaves. Given his newfound wealth, the young Beckford grew to enjoy and expect the finer things in life. He was an art collector, great literary mind and collector of harems of young boys to cavort with. But he had a particular penchant for gothic architecture and, like any decent, god-fearing insane millionaire novelist, decided to build himself an abbey to live in and carry on his love affair with William Courtenay, his 11 year old cousin.

After employing 500 local men for a period of six years, the brand spanking new home was completed on his sprawling Wiltshire estate. ‘Fonthill Abbey’ was put in place by builders who were liberally plied with beer in order to keep them working on the strange project; nobody could have been very surprised when the 300ft spire snapped in half. Seven years later and the tower was back up, allowing Beckford to live in peace . . . with his sole servant, a Spanish dwarf.^[2]

8 Mary Amelia ‘Emily Mary’ Cecil, Marchioness of Salisbury—Mistress of the Hunt who was Gone in a Flash

When people get to the age of, say, around 70, a most curious metamorphosis occurs; the once fashionable begin to choose comfier and comfier apparel until they are little more than shrunken heaps of woolly sweaters, deck shoes and bulky cataract glasses. Imagine seeing a 90-year-old punk rocker? The first Marchioness of Salisbury, on the other hand, refused to go gentle into that loungewear-draped night.

She was quite the sportswoman, loving a good fox hunt like many of her fellow countryside-dwelling, upper class lords and ladies. Lady Cecil continued with this hobby well into her seventies and, due to her failing eyesight and poor balance, had to be tied to her horse whilst leading the hunt. She was most notable for her fashion sense, however, continuing to don the fashionable highly decorated wigs once popular when she was young. This nostalgic predilection caused her horrible death when, whilst sitting at her writing desk in the west wing of her country manor, her huge wig caught fire from one of the candelabras, causing severe damage to the house as well as taking her life. Some charred bones and a set of dentures was all that could be found of the eccentric octogenarian.^[3]

7 Henry Cavendish—Make it Rain-man

“The richest of all the savants and the most knowledgeable of all the rich” was how famed French scientist Jean Baptiste Biot described the ‘The Honourable Henry Cavendish’, a man perhaps best known as one of the most important and influential experimental chemists of the eighteenth century.

Among his most important discoveries and inventions are numerous astrological instruments, discovered the chemical composition of both air and water, worked out the properties of electrical resistance 50 years before Georg Ohm and calculated the effects of gravity on light rays over a century before Einstein and, most incredibly of all, calculated the mass of the Earth as so accurately that his conclusion has only been fine tuned, barely changing at all. He was also very reclusive and had no idea what the worth of money was. When one of the staff at his home fell ill, colleagues organised a whip around for the man and asked Cavendish to chip in. A couple of pounds would have been most generous but Cavendish, without knowing what he was doing, pledged £10,000—an amount that would be incredible today!^[4]

6 Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord Berners—Typifier of the Bizarre

How’s this for logic? If you throw a cute little spaniel into water it is commonly held that it will instinctively swim, therefore, if one were to throw a cute little spaniel out of a window…that is exactly what a young Lord Berners did at his family estate. Results of the test are unavailable.

Tyrwhitt-Wilson, a strange and eccentric child, grew up to be a strange and eccentric adult. His meals were planned and served according to which colour he was in the mood for on any given day (green, one assumes, would be asparagus soup, mixed leaves, peas and a kiwi fruit fool). He built a folly tower on his estate, Faringdon in Oxfordshire, England, in 1935, despite the protestations of local planners. A sign near the completed tower read: ‘Members of the public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk’.

Lord Berners was a sprite, ready to play tricks and practical jokes on his friends and acquaintances. Like most of us who use trains, he loved having his own space, so he’d dress in the strangest garb possible, leaning out the window at stations to invite strangers to sit with him. Few did. Those brave enough to join the strange Lord Berners would soon leave, given his need to check his own temperature every few minutes…with a rectal thermometer.^[5]

“Here lies Lord Berners
One of the learners
His great love of learning
May earn him a burning
But, Praise the Lord!
He seldom was bored.”
– Epitaph on gravestone of Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners

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5 David James, MP for Brighton Kemptown—In Search of Nessie…and his Seat in Parliament

I reeeeeeallly want the Loch Ness Monster to be real, (along with UFOs, Bigfoot and guardian angels…the magical kind, not the vigilante guys on the streets of New York—they’re real, I think). Another person who wanted to find Nessie was the David James. The difference between he and I? I don’t actually believe that Nessie exists and I’m not the Member of Parliment for Brighton Kemptown on the south coast of England.

During the general election of 1964, James lost his seat to a challenger from the rival Labour Party, the first time they had won the seat. Despite the conventional wisdom dictating one should knock on a few doors, attend debates and kiss a few babies in your district if you want to win an election, David James had far more important plans—he was on a three-week hunt for the Scottish cryptid. Needless to say he had no luck finding his elusive aquatic dino-pal but you must admit, this was a man with a plan. A really stupid plan.^[6]

4 Admiral Algernon Charles Fieschi Henage—Cleanliness is next to Godliness, Sloppiness gets you Punished

Admiral Henage was revered, honoured with a knighthood in the Order of Bath after his retirement along with many other venerated admirals from the world’s most powerful Navy. Given that England had, perhaps, the world’s most powerful fleet ever, perhaps we should consider the practices and behaviours that allowed this dominance.

Was it daily gun drills to ensure optimal firepower at the highest possible rate? Was it an insurance that supply lines are seamless so that the men of the fleet are well fed, well watered, healthy and ready to engage? No. A clean ship was the real weapon in Admiral Henage’s view. How did he ensure this? Henage would tour his ship with a pair of white kid gloves on, a coxswain in tow with a mound of fresh gloves carried upon a silver platter, and run his finger along every possible surface in search of schmutz. Any dirt of grime found could well spell an ignominious end to an officers’ time in the Navy. And that is how Britannia ruled the waves.^[7]

3 Lady Diana Cooper—Beyond Leisure

One could write an article, (or ten articles, or a book), on the life and times of Lady Diana Cooper, the leisure-loving socialite, muse for Evelyn Waugh, and the “most beautiful girl in the world”. Let’s just focus on a couple of elements and hope that will suffice to highlight this High Priestess of English eccentricity. During the Second World War, Lady Cooper had an amazing brain wave, a way to save London from the dreadful nightly bombings the city suffered through. It was a simple idea, quite elegant in its simplicity; place giant magnets in London’s parks…the War Office didn’t adopt the plan.

The other stand-out story amongst the myriad of droll tales about Lady Cooper occurred at a reception for the 100th birthday of musician Sir Robert Mayer. Lady Cooper was schmoozing with all the well-to-do party guests and found herself chatting to a very well-dressed lady. She gabbed away in her usual, effervescent, bizarre way until she realised that the fancy lady she was blathering at was the Queen. She quickly curtseyed and offered a quintessentially Cooperian apology for her informality: “I’m terribly sorry ma’am. I didn’t recognise you without your crown on”.^[8]

2 Justice Sir Melford Stevenson—A Terrifying Wit

We’ve read about at a lot of kooky, odd folks in this article thus far and it’s fun and whimsical but imagine one of their oddballs had your life in their hands. Terrified yet? This was the case for many defendants facing a trial presided over by Justice Sir Melford Stevenson. Know for making inflammatory comments during the many trials he presided over; he called bookmakers a “bunch of crooks”, called the city of Birmingham in the Midlands of England a “municipal Gomorrah” and, during a divorce hearing, described the fact that the husband lived in Manchester as a “wholly incomprehensible choice for any free man to make”. He decided to run for parliament in 1945 and, on claiming to want a clean, smear-free campaign against his opponent Tom Driberg, promised not to mention Driberg’s “alleged homosexuality”. This non-PC judge holds the dubious record of having the most decisions overturned by the Court of Appeal in a single day, 3, to which he commented “a lot of my colleagues are just constipated Methodists”.^[9]

1 Kenneth Cecil Gandar-Dower—Not quite the Sport of Kings

England has a long tradition of multi-sports practitioners, men and women who have excelled in many sports. Nobody exemplifies this more than Kenneth Cecil Gandar-Dower who was an excellent cricketer, master of both Eton and Rugby versions of the game ‘fives’, tennis, squash, billiards—the list goes on. Kenneth Gandar-Dower was also a prolific traveller and adventurer, a pioneering aviator, discoverer of parts unknown on behalf of the Empire. He was also the inventor of the stupidest spectator sport in history.

Greyhounds are quick but they aren’t as fast as cheetahs. We make greyhounds race…catch my drift? Gandar-Dower certainly had that ‘drift’. It didn’t work. Because, as I’m sure we all know, Cheetahs are not Greyhounds. Locals became quite afraid at the notion of marauding bands of hungry cheetahs looking for a meal in West London, (the big cats didn’t really want to race, they simply wandered around searching for food). Despite the waning interest in Gandar-Dower’s weird idea, we can all salute the craziness of the man, as well as all these supreme oddballs in this list.^[10]

Top 10 Incredibly Eccentric People

About The Author: CJ Phillips is a writer and actor living in rural West Wales. He is a little obsessed with lists.

As we’ve covered elsewhere, the Medal of Honor is the United States’ most prestigious award for bravery in combat. Naturally, most medal recipients’ stories are pretty straightforward: They involve a tough soldier, overwhelming odds in combat, and often the loss of life or limb. Yet there are more than a few outliers.

Some are secretive, some are shameful, and some are downright silly. If you’re looking for an oddball method of getting a Medal of Honor—a method that’s worked at least once—you could always try . . .

10 Writing In To Ask For One

Normally, an American soldier has to be recommended for the medal by either a member of Congress or a superior officer in his or her unit. You can’t self-nominate. This ensures that the Medal of Honor is given for brave conduct that others can confirm and protects its integrity from self-serving individuals. But back in the 1800s, the rules were a lot more flexible—so flexible that the government might as well have placed an ad saying medals were available upon request, “while supplies last.”

Asa Bird Gardiner was a Civil War veteran from New York who served as a company officer in a state militia unit. His unit was called into action a few times, and he received minor wounds while a company officer. This service was good, though by no means spectacular. But, evidently, he had heard something about the Medal of Honor, because a few years afterward, he sent a politely worded letter to the War Department to see if they’d give him one: “I understand there are a number of bronze medals for distribution to soldiers of the late War, and request I be allowed one as a souvenir of memorable times past.” Apparently his politeness was extremely persuasive, because they sent him one!^[1]

The rules have become more stringent since that time, and Gardiner’s medal was one of those rescinded by an audit in 1916 (more on that below). Nowadays, the process is much more formal, and the medal is generally not regarded as a mere memorabilia item. Still, it seems there’s no harm in asking.

9 Fighting A Secret Battle Against An American Ally

Since the Medal of Honor is intended as a decoration for courage in combat, it’s natural to assume it will be received for combat with America’s enemies. Most are. But Commander William McGonagle received it for an accidental conflict with the forces of America’s ally, Israel.

It was hardly his fault. In command of the USS Liberty in 1967, he was tasked with gathering naval intelligence. The problem was that, during his cruise, the Six-Day War erupted between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Though the US remained officially neutral in the conflict, the Israelis were responding to threats with extreme prejudice. After an error misidentified the Liberty as an Egyptian warship, Israel’s jets and torpedo boats were inbound.

It was a friendly fire incident on a grand scale. For almost an hour, the attackers pounded the ship, while the astonished Americans scrambled to protect the vessel. McGonagle was badly wounded in the initial onslaught, which shredded the ship’s bridge. Nevertheless, he refused to leave his post. He tried mightily to open communications with the Israelis while directing damage control efforts. When he finally did yield command 17 hours later, the ship was grievously scarred, and 34 crew members were dead. The Liberty still floated, however, due to the tireless efforts of its crew and commander. McGonagle refused medical treatment until the other seriously wounded personnel had been seen to.^[2]

The horrified Israelis apologized afterward, and the US government acknowledged it had been a tragic mistake. But how could the government honor McGonagle’s bravery, and by extension that of the whole crew? They’d acted courageously. Yet no one wanted to further publicize the embarrassing incident.

In a compromise, the Medal of Honor was presented to McGonagle in secret at the Washington Navy Yard. Even his citation conspicuously fails to identify the forces attacking the ship during the events. His medal remains the only one to date presented in deliberate secrecy (as far as we know). It serves as at least a modest requiem for the sailors of the Liberty.

8 Participating In A Native American Massacre

US Army troops fought plenty of battles against Native Americans, and some of these could even be called fair fights. The so-called Battle of Wounded Knee was not one of them. It involved the US 7th Cavalry—George Custer’s old regiment—letting loose on a group of natives they were escorting.

The Lakota Sioux were being returned to their reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Ominously for the members of the band, the troops had been ordered to disarm them by force if necessary—all the while backed up by a battery of four cannons. All it took was a scuffle over a rifle, and some itchy trigger fingers, to light the spark.

Midway through the disarming process, both sides started shooting. Some of the Sioux rearmed themselves, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The casualty figures speak for themselves: On the US side, 64 men were killed or wounded, some by friendly fire. By contrast, between 150 and 300 Lakota lay dead, many of them noncombatant women and children.

Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded among the 490 US Army participants, or four percent of all the soldiers present. As of this writing, this is the same number of medals given to US servicemen for actions in the 17 years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ever since the Wounded Knee awards, some have called for them to be retroactively canceled.^[3]

On one hand, these soldiers may have acted with authentic physical bravery in a fight—saving the wounded, risking their lives on behalf of others, etc. But on the other, honoring them in this fashion (especially with such an astronomically high award rate) seems to grant the whole affair an honor it does not deserve. Currently, Congress has split the difference by leaving the medals alone and approving the placement of a national memorial at Wounded Knee. The monument, as yet, remains unbuilt.

7 Getting Killed Anonymously In An Ally’s Uniform

In one sense, any Medal of Honor is intended as a way of honoring the specific actions of the recipient. In another, the award serves as a symbolic representation of the bravery America asks all its soldiers to aspire to. Sometimes, the symbolism grows larger than individual deeds—no more so than in the case of the Unknowns.

Soldiers’ dog tags, serial numbers, and other identifiers—let alone DNA testing—are quite recent developments. In prior eras, it was quite common for dead soldiers to be buried in a nameless grave, especially if they fell in a large or chaotic engagement. World War I’s battles were the largest and most chaotic in history up to that time and produced a frightful number of anonymous corpses. To figuratively honor the sacrifice of all, several countries designated a representative unknown soldier, to be laid to rest with special ceremony.

Several US allies from that war dedicated tombs to their Unknown Soldiers, as did the US itself. To honor not only anonymous sacrifice but anonymous bravery, American authorities decided to symbolically award the Medal of Honor to five allied Unknowns: those from the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Romania, and Italy. All those involved agreed to ignore the usual requirement that recipients be US military personnel, as a special exception.^[4] Each allied nation awarded a medal to the American Unknown in turn.

Since these medals stand for the bravery of all unidentified allied war dead, counting them all up together would swell the total number of Medal of Honor recipients by several orders of magnitude. Nonetheless, the awards serve as acknowledgment that even the authorities do not always have a perfect sense of what happens on the battlefield and that heroism occurs even when no one is around to record it.

6 Guarding Abraham Lincoln’s Casket

The Medal of Honor was first created during the American Civil War; as often happens, its initial standards were rather ill-defined. The US military did not have much else to offer in the way of official recognition, so any sort of meritorious service might be considered to make one eligible for the award. That meant a number of awards which would not pass muster today.

In 1865, the United States was in mourning for its first assassinated president. Struck down at the close of an exhausting but victorious war, Abraham Lincoln was showered with as much ceremony as the country could possibly provide. He lay in state in the nation’s capital; his funeral train stopped in 12 cities along the way to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois; and a grand burial ceremony was held there.

Throughout the three weeks of pageantry, soldiers stood by the coffin, a final honor guard for the president. Most were veterans of many hard-fought battles, glad to serve in this last salute to their commander in chief. None were seeking accolades. Yet, after the president was buried, some of the nation’s grateful outpouring of recognition rubbed off on them. Twenty-nine members of the funeral guard were given the medal—even more than the number awarded for the affair at Wounded Knee described above.

Guarding a beloved president’s remains was certainly admirable service. Yet this hardly reaches the high bar for combat valor that the medal represents; for this reason, the 1916 review board rescinded all 29 of the funeral guard medals.^[5] More than anything else, the whole business points to the need for a hierarchy of honors—since the existence of lesser recognitions preserves the highest honors for the most meritorious service.

5 Being An Extremely Plucky 11-Year-Old

The funeral guards described above were not the only Medal of Honor recipients with a connection to Abraham Lincoln.

In the days before electronic or radio communications, often, the best way to communicate on a battlefield was through the loud, sharp intonations of a drum or bugle. Since one hardly has to be a grown man to play an instrument, these combat music duties often went to the under-18 set. Thousands of young boys served in the American armed forces during the 19th century.

During the Civil War engagement known as the Seven Days Battles, the US army was reeling under the hammer blows of a resurgent enemy force. The army commander, spooked by the unexpected ferocity, fell back in a week-long fighting retreat. Union forces became steadily more demoralized, and often disorganized, over the course of the withdrawal. Some soldiers even abandoned their equipment—neutralizing their effectiveness—in order to speed their escape.

Not so for Willie Johnston of Vermont. He was a drummer, and knew he was a vital link in battlefield communication. It would have been easy for an 11-year-old to fall out of line and be forgotten or to flee rather than remaining with his fighting unit. But Willie remained resolute. He stayed with his regiment through it all—through days of confused marching and countermarching, nights of fearful redeployments, and a brutal, disorganized fight at the Battle of Savage’s Station, in which his unit suffered terrible casualties. By the end of it all, he was the only drummer in the entire division who had kept hold of his drum.

After the army had reached safety, a morale-boosting divisional review was set for July 4, and the commanding general picked young Willie to play for the whole division, in recognition of the boy’s service. The same general included the boy’s name in his report. When the story reached President Lincoln, he suggested the boy receive a medal for his valor, perhaps moved by memories of his own 11-year-old son, another Willie, who had died a few months before.^[6]

The president’s suggestion was acted upon, and the following year, Willie got his medal. The boy was one of the first to ever receive it—and, to date, remains the youngest.

4 Getting Twice The Credit For A Single Act Of Bravery

Most consumers are familiar with “Buy one, get one free” deals; it’s often a simple matter to get two items for the price of one. Usually, this goes for modest items. But five men in World War I, by paying the price of a single day’s heroism, got two Medals of Honor in the deal.

First, at the Battle of Chateau-Thierry, Ernest Janson drove off a German counterattack using only his bayonet. The subsequent Battle of Soissons was a banner day for immigrants in US service. Louis Cukela, a Croatian, single-handedly wiped out two German machine gun crews with bayonets and hand grenades; Matej Kocak, a Slovakian, drove off another machine gun crew and also mustered disorganized French soldiers for an assault. At Blanc Mont Ridge, three months later, John J. Kelly ran out in front of the American advance, through an artillery barrage, destroyed an enemy machine gun nest, and herded eight prisoners back through the artillery fire. In the same fight, John Pruitt upped the total by capturing two machine guns and 40 enemy soldiers, all by himself.^[7]

All of these were brave deeds. But why did they receive double credit?

The answer: They were Marines. The Marines are a hybrid service branch, serving at the intersection between land and sea. In the US military, the Marine Corps is a part of the Navy but routinely fights on land, which is normally the realm of the Army. During World War I, battalions of Marines were assigned to the Army, since the Army was better-equipped to coordinate the massed troop movements required on the Western Front. And the Army and the Navy each have their own versions of the Medal of Honor.

Naturally, each branch of the service wanted to claim credit for the bravery of these men. The Army emphasized that the combat happened under its direction; the Navy stressed that the men were naval personnel. In the end, each branch issued a separate medal, with a separate citation, for the same gallantry.

Since 1919, regulations have stated that no more medals can be awarded twice for the same action. But these men’s medals remain on the books: a plethora of honor, ten medals among five men.

3 Making It A Lifetime Achievement Award

As the above case of the Lincoln funeral guard shows, it’s possible for a soldier to provide commendable service without rising to the level of Medal of Honor-worthy valor. For this reason, American military branches now offer various medals at assorted levels, using every synonym in the book (achievement, commendation, meritorious service, and so on). It’s possible to see these as gestures of admirable recognition—or, more cynically, as the military version of a participation award. Whatever one’s opinion, the divide becomes even greater when the award in question is supposed to be the nation’s highest.

It has happened twice. The first was for Frederick Gerber, an Army combat engineer. He served steadfastly in two wars (the Mexican-American War and the Civil War) and helped train numerous engineers in combat practices. The Army created the position of Sergeant Major of Engineers especially for him, and Gerber took pride in being the senior enlisted man of the Engineer Corps for seven years. He received his medal for “distinguished gallantry in many actions and in recognition of long, faithful, and meritorious services covering a period of 32 years” upon retirement.

The second was a general named Adolphus Greely. After solid Civil War service, he remained a lieutenant for 20 years. During this period, he commanded the disastrous Lady Franklin Bay Expedition (also called the Greely Expedition), a polar venture that saw 19 of its 25 men succumb to either the elements or cannibalism. Eventually promoted to Chief Signal Officer (a post carrying a general’s rank with it), he later supervised the laying of several major telegraph lines and coordinated relief after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. After reaching mandatory retirement age (64), he traveled home with a Medal of Honor in his baggage, the gift from Congress for “his life of splendid public service.” His medal was the last one bestowed for noncombat duty.^[8]

2 Waiting 151 Years For Recognition

Some Medals of Honor are awarded quickly; this often depends upon commanding officers who have the ear of their superiors and can swiftly pass the recommendation up the chain. Others are awarded years or even decades later, after someone takes an interest in honoring a soldier for some remembered action. Modern regulations specify that a “chain of command” medal recommendation must be made within two years of the incident, while recommendations after that time limit expires must be approved by a special act of Congress. This system has sometimes resulted in gray-haired men receiving an award for service when they were young.

That said, few have had to wait for more than a century. Alonzo Cushing graduated from the US Military Academy in June 1861, just in time to race off to battle in the Civil War. He served with distinction for two years before heading to his last battlefield—Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. During the famous climax of that battle, Pickett’s Charge, Cushing was stationed in command of several cannons in the center of the Union line.^[9] The charge came straight for him. After a punishing bombardment that killed his superior officers and severely wounded him, Cushing refused evacuation and continued to direct his men’s return fire. His guns helped turn back the assault; he died firing one final shot.

Cushing’s story was well-remembered; he even appears in a famous panoramic painting of the battle completed in 1883. Yet Medal of Honor recognition took three decades of determined effort on the part of a Wisconsin woman, who became interested in the story after purchasing the former Cushing farm. Finally, in 2014—151 years after the fact—President Barack Obama presented the award to Cushing’s closest living relative (a distant cousin who had taken weeks to track down).

“No matter how long it takes, it’s never too late to do the right thing,” Obama commented.

1 Sitting Around For Five Days

The Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 was a cauldron of terror and heroism for all its participants. One well-known story from the fight involves the men of the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment, which held a tenuous position with a ferocious bayonet charge after exhausting its ammunition. The unit lost one third of its men in the maelstrom, and two of the survivors (the colonel and the colorbearer) would receive the Medal of Honor for courage where the fighting was thickest.

By contrast, no less than 864 other men from Maine would receive the same medal for service rendered in the same period—during which they did precisely nothing.

The Gettysburg campaign was a major scare for the United States; rebel troops were penetrating deep into national territory, and every soldier possible was being mustered to stop them. Some of those were the men of the short-term 27th Maine regiment. Their enlistments were expiring, and they were due to go home at the height of the crisis. A member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet personally pleaded with the men to stay in Washington, DC, until the rebel invasion was defeated, promising Medals of Honor to each one who did. Most refused, but 311 men of the 27th Maine decided to stay. The rest packed their bags.

As it turned out, the 311 weren’t needed. They stayed in the defenses of Washington, performing light garrison duty, while the titanic battle raged in Pennsylvania. After the rebels were turned back, the 311 were released and sent home. They arrived in time to be mustered out alongside their brethren who had departed first.

But where does the 864 figure come from? The government official was true to his word and made sure the medals were awarded after the war. However, during the 1863 crisis, no one had kept notes on which 311 men stayed behind in Washington. Unable to determine who had been promised this outsized honor, the War Department threw up its hands and decided to award medals to every single man in the regiment, regardless of whether he performed the designated service or not.

In one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of the US Army, the government shipped 864 Medals of Honor to Maine en masse, directing that they be forwarded to the former commander of the regiment, Mark Wentworth. Wentworth did his best in the absurd situation, working to track down the men he remembered staying in Washington and give them their medal. Even so, he was left with more than 500 surplus medals (or about 14 percent of all Medals of Honor awarded by the United States between 1863 and 2018). Not knowing what else to do, he stuck them in his barn. After Wentworth died, the whole collection disappeared. Their whereabouts remain unknown.

As a postscript, the US military decided in 1916 to put together a review board that would audit all Medal of Honor awards given out up to that time.^[10] The idea was to bring past actions up to higher standards for the medal, to avoid diluting its potency. It was an arduous task which required combing through mountains of records, but the board eventually finished the job. On their recommendation, 911 medals were struck from the rolls, and their holders were removed from the list of official recipients.

Some questionable ones remained, like the Wounded Knee massacre medals, or Adolphus Greely’s career recognition award, but the lion’s share of the rescinded medals were those belonging to the 27th Maine. All 864. The board agreed overwhelmingly that these were undeserved. In this way, the military demonstrated its willingness to enforce high standards for honoring valor, even if the gesture was long overdue.

David Ellrod lives in Maryland with his wife, three daughters, and one very excitable dog. He can be reached at https://twitter.com/DavidEllrod.

We all like to indulge our appetites every now and then. Maybe eat a bit more than we should. Maybe try out something new or exotic, or maybe simply ravage an entire pint of delicious ice cream in one go. Well, compared to the next ten entries, we’re not even playing in the same ballpark.

10. William Buckland

We start off with William Buckland, famed English theologian, geologist, paleontologist, and Dean of Westminster. In 1824, he wrote the first complete account of a dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus. However, it was his relationship with non-extinct or extant animals that we are concerned with. 

Buckland wanted to eat everything. It was literally his life’s ambition to eat one of every animal on the planet, like some kind of bizarre mash-up between Noah and Hannibal Lecter. Because, as he taught his students at Oxford, the stomach “rules the world. The great ones eat the less, the less the lesser still!

Buckland’s position with the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals allowed him to import all sorts of exotic animals to the country. Hedgehogs, panthers, crocodiles, ostrich, porpoises – they all made their way to his dining table. The worst thing he tasted was apparently blue bottles, while mice on toast were his go-to snack.

By far the strangest story involving Buckland’s bizarre appetite concerns the mummified heart of a French king, but this one is in the “maybe” pile as to whether it actually happened or not. In 1848, while visiting Lord Harcourt, the Archbishop of York, Buckland was presented with a preserved heart in a silver casket, said to be that of King Louis XIV. Unable to restrain himself, the theologian immediately gobbled it up in front of his shocked audience.

9. John Montagu

Compared to everyone else on this list, John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, had quite tame eating habits. However, they were still unusual for that time and he is much better remembered nowadays for them than for anything else he did, despite the fact that he held the positions of Postmaster General, Secretary of State, and First Lord of the Admiralty during his lifetime.

John Montagu gave his name to one of the most common, versatile, and popular foods of all time – the humble sandwich. There is no doubt that he popularized it, but did Montagu actually invent the sandwich? Well, no. It is such a basic snack that it has existed, one way or another, for a long time before the earl, but we have no idea who actually was its creator. The practice is, at least, 2,000 years old, as an account of Rabbi Hillel the Elder making sandwiches exists dating back to the 1st century BC.

As to how exactly Montagu became associated with the sandwich, the story goes that he was such an inveterate gambler that he asked for some simple sustenance in the form of meat between two slices of bread so that he wouldn’t have to get up from the card table. A more flattering version claims that Montagu was such a dedicated man that he ordered sandwiches at his desk so he wouldn’t have to stop working.

8. Nicholas Wood

While Buckland consumed strange food for his own gratification, other people managed to turn it into a career. At first glance, Nicholas Wood looked like a typical 17th-century English farmer. However, when it was lunchtime, the man could easily put away 60 eggs, multiple pies, and a hefty chunk of lamb, and still hunger for more. No wonder, though, that he became known as the Great Eater of Kent.

At first, Wood did this to impress the fellas down at his local inn, but he soon realized that he could turn his prodigious appetite into a sideshow act for fairs and festivals. He even got booked every now and then as entertainment for a nobleman’s banquet or two. Wood particularly attracted the attention of poet John Taylor, who gave us the most detailed account of Wood’s eating prowess in a pamphlet he wrote with the catchy name “The Great Eater, of Kent, or Part of the Admirable Teeth and Stomach Exploits of Nicholas Wood, of Harrisom in the County of Kent His Excessive Manner of Eating Without Manners, In Strange and True Manner Described.”

Taylor was so impressed that he wanted to become Wood’s manager and bring him to London. At first, the “Kentish Tenterbelly,” as the poet called him, agreed, but he got cold feet and backed out. From that point on, Taylor no longer mentioned his feasting feats and the Great Eater of Kent disappeared from the annals of history.

7. Apicius

Although we don’t know much about Apicius, we do know that he lived in Rome sometime during the 1st century, that he had extravagant tastes when it came to food, and that he had the wealth to indulge in them. There is even a Roman cookbook named after him, better known as De re Culinaria, although it is a collection of collected recipes and it is impossible to tell how many were contributed by Apicius himself.

Some of the gourmet dishes recommended by Apicius included stuffed mice, jellyfish omelets, and dolphin meatballs. The tastiest food, however, was something a bit more commonplace – pork or goose liver. The best way to prepare it involved feeding the animal dry figs until it was stuffed and then making it drink “mead or honyed wine” until it keeled over dead. According to Apicius, there was no other “flesh of any other living creature, that yeeldeth more store of dishes to the maintenance of gluttonie, than this.”

Apicius is also credited with creating the most decadent dish of that era, which, for Roman times, is really saying something – the lark tongue pie. The reason this course was so outrageous was because the lark was a tiny bird. Its tongue was absolutely minuscule and you needed around a thousand birds for a single pie. 

6. Andre the Giant

Not all men have large appetites for food. Some of them enjoy their drinks more than their vittles and, if the stories are to be believed, then Andre the Giant was the biggest drinker of them all.

As his name might suggest, French pro wrestler and “The Princess Bride” actor Andre the Giant was a mountain of a man. He wasn’t nicknamed “The Eighth Wonder of the World” for nothing. So you would expect a guy like him to imbibe more than your average person, but even for his size, Andre’s love of all things alcohol was legendary among all those who knew him.

Pretty much every wrestler from that era has, at least, one Andre drinking story. Bobby Heenan wrote in his memoir that the Giant once stayed until 4 in the morning at the Marriott Hotel bar drinking 40 vodka tonics before finally calling it a night. He would often down six bottles of wine just to get him in the mood for more drinking. When he had to stop drinking to lose weight, he restrained himself to only four or five bottles with dinner.

Andre’s biggest drinking session came when he knocked back 119 beers in just six hours. According to the wrestlers he was with, that was the only time they actually saw the Giant pass out from booze, which he did in a hotel hallway. The problem was that he was too heavy to move so, instead, they draped a piano cover over him and let him sleep it off. Andre remained undisturbed until the next day, as everyone thought he was a piece of furniture.

5. Michel Lotito

From one Frenchman, we move on to another, Michel Lotito, better known as Monsieur Mangetout or “Mr. Eat-All.” As his name implies, his appetite wasn’t particularly picky. Lotito ate everything. And when we say “everything,” we don’t mean any kind of food that he could get his hands on. We mean everything – glass, razor blades, beds, television sets, computers, bicycles, chandeliers, and, his crowning achievement, an entire Cessna 150 airplane.

Lotito discovered his unusual skill when he was a teenager. It was a combination of two bizarre physical traits – an abnormally high threshold for pain and an extra thick stomach lining and intestines, which meant that he could swallow just about anything with little ill effects.

He first achieved fame in 1979 when he entered the Guinness Book of Records for eating a bicycle over the course of 15 days. From then on, TV shows, fairs, and festival appearances followed, but already he had started on his most ambitious project. It took Lotito two years, between 1978 and 1980, but he managed to eat, piece by piece, an entire Cessna 150 aircraft.

Guinness estimated that Lotito consumed around nine tons of metal during his lifetime. Oddly enough, it was soft foods such as bananas and boiled eggs that gave him an upset stomach.

4. Elagabalus

Having a ravenous and extravagant appetite is one thing, but also being able to indulge it is quite another. In order to afford such outlandish and hedonistic dishes on a regular basis, you’d have to be a Roman emperor or something. Lucky for Elagabalus, that’s exactly what he was.

Tales of the excesses of Elagabalus have been often told, mainly by people who didn’t like him very much. But there is no doubt that the young emperor enjoyed the finest things in life. When Elagabalus and his guests dined, they all sat on silver beds, as the perfume of amaranth was gently fanned by boys whose curly locks were used as napkins. As for the menu:

“Sows’ breasts with Lybian truffles; dormice baked in poppies and honey; peacocks’ tongues flavored with cinnamon; oysters stewed in garum…flamingoes’ and ostriches’ brains, followed by the brains of thrushes, parakeets, pheasants, and peacocks, also a yellow pig cooked after the Trojan fashion, from which, when carved, hot sausages fell and live thrushes flew; sea-wolves from the Baltic, sturgeons from Rhodes, fig-peckers from Samos, African snails and the rest.”

3. Francis Battalia

Everyone on this list had large and unusual appetites, but at least most of them consumed food. That cannot be said for 17th-century Italian soldier Francis Battalia. We’ll let you guess what his preferred nourishment was, but we’ll give you a hint – he was known as the Stone-Eater.

Like others, Battalia turned his peculiar eating habits into a sideshow performance. In front of a curious crowd, he would swallow large plates full of stones and gravel, and then shake his body violently so the people could hear them rustle inside his stomach. 

Unsurprisingly, some people were skeptical and thought that Battalia was faking the whole thing, but he allowed himself to be tested to show that his Stone-Eater act was legit. A doctor named Bulwer wrote an account of Battalia in his paper Artificial Changeling. He claimed that the Italian was monitored for 24 hours, a time during which he not only ate exclusively rocks, but also excreted a sandy and crumbly substance.

2. Tarrare

The third and final Frenchman on our list, Tarrare was someone who, like others previously mentioned, would eat just about everything he could get his hands on. However, he didn’t do it to set records or to put on a show, he did it because his hunger would simply not stop.

Ostensibly born in Lyon circa 1772, Tarrare’s gargantuan appetite started exhibiting from an early age. Eventually, unable to feed him, his parents kicked him out, so teenage Tarrare roamed the streets of France, begging, stealing, and putting on sideshows to try and satiate his unending appetite. 

When the War of the First Coalition broke out, Tarrare joined the French Revolutionary Army, but even quadruple rations weren’t enough to satisfy him. He was admitted to the hospital, where doctors were mainly interested in testing the limits of his gluttony. They once fed Tarrare a meal fit for fifteen men, which he devoured without any problem. They started feeding him live animals – cats, dogs, snakes, lizards – Tarrare ate them all without hesitation.

The army tried using him as a courier who would swallow secret documents, cross the border and pass them through his system a couple of days later. The experiment was an abysmal failure, as Tarrare was caught immediately, kept prisoner for a few days, given a beating, and sent over the border.

Back in France, doctors started experimenting on him again, but would no longer feed him all he could eat. Whenever Tarrare didn’t get his fill, he prowled the streets at night, scrounging the gutters for garbage and offal. He then moved on to munching on the corpses in the morgue and was even suspected of stealing and eating a toddler. At that point, the doctors said enough is enough and chased the famished fiend out of the hospital. 

1. Charles Darwin

We end with the most famous name on our list – Charles Darwin. Obviously, he was a man fascinated with the animal world around him, and it seems that this fascination also included wanting to know how they all tasted…for science, of course.

Darwin first started indulging in this habit during his student years at Cambridge, where he became a member of the Glutton Club, whose goal was to feast on “birds and beasts which were before unknown to the human palate.” They ate hawks and bitterns, but were left supremely disappointed by a dish of brown owl, which Darwin could later only describe as “indescribable.”

Once aboard the Beagle and headed to faraway lands, Darwin could once again indulge his cravings for rare and exotic meat. Pumas, iguanas, giant tortoises, and armadillos were all on the menu, but it was a giant rodent assumed to be an agouti that the naturalist described as “the very best meat [he] ever tasted.”