Social etiquette is more than just a set of polite behaviors—it embodies the values, hierarchies, and unspoken rules that define a culture. In many ancient civilizations, these customs were sacred, with breaches leading to humiliation or even severe punishment. While many of these etiquette practices have faded with time, their echoes can still be felt today, subtly influencing modern social norms and cultural behaviors.

Exploring these ancient customs offers us a window into the complexities of human interaction and the profound importance once placed on seemingly small actions. Here are ten fascinating social etiquette rules from ancient civilizations that time has forgotten.

Related: 10 Social Conventions You Might Be Taking for Granted

10 Don’t Look Directly at the Emperor (Ancient Rome)

In ancient Rome, the emperor was not just a political leader but was often considered a living deity embodying the state’s power and divine favor. Citizens and even nobles were expected to show the utmost respect in his presence, which included avoiding direct eye contact. Looking directly at the emperor was more than impolite—it was a symbolic affront to his elevated status, akin to challenging his authority or questioning his supremacy.

This etiquette was strictly enforced during public appearances, ceremonies, and court proceedings. When citizens approached the emperor to plead cases or seek favors, they would do so with bowed heads and eyes cast downward, demonstrating submission and respect. Even high-ranking officials and soldiers adhered to this practice, acknowledging the vast gulf between the ruler and the ruled.

Failure to observe this rule could result in social ostracism or severe consequences, underscoring the rigid social structures of ancient Rome. The practice reinforced the social hierarchy and maintained the emperor’s near-divine status in the eyes of the people.^[1]

9 The Two-Finger Salute for Greetings (Medieval Europe)

In medieval Europe, religion permeated every aspect of life, including greetings. The two-finger salute, widely used across the continent, was a symbol of religious devotion. By raising two fingers—the index and middle fingers—individuals affirmed their belief in the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This simple gesture served as both a greeting and a silent affirmation of one’s orthodox beliefs.

During times of religious strife, such as the Crusades or the Inquisition, failing to use this gesture appropriately could lead to suspicion, ostracization, or even accusations of heresy. The two-finger salute was not just a polite custom but a crucial tool for social survival in an era when religious conformity was enforced by severe penalties.

Merchants and travelers also used the salute to indicate their faith and good intentions when entering new towns or engaging in trade. It facilitated trust among strangers in a fragmented landscape of feudal territories and varying local customs.^[2]

8 Never Eat with Your Left Hand (Ancient India)

In ancient India, the distinction between the left and right hand was deeply embedded in social norms and religious practices. The left hand was reserved for tasks considered unclean, such as personal hygiene. Meals were more than just eating—they were communal rituals that reinforced social bonds and religious observances. Using the right hand to eat honored the sanctity of the food and the occasion, reflecting broader concepts of purity central to Hinduism.

Using the left hand during meals was considered impure and disrespectful, not only to the food but also to fellow diners and the divine. This rule extended beyond the home into social and religious gatherings, where adherence to this etiquette was a sign of respect to hosts and guests alike.

Even today, in many parts of South Asia and the Middle East, this custom persists, highlighting the lasting impact of ancient practices on modern cultural norms.^[3]

7 Cover Your Head Indoors (Ottoman Empire)

In the Ottoman Empire, social etiquette required men to keep their heads covered indoors, especially in places of religious or social importance like mosques or private homes. This custom was rooted in notions of humility before God and respect within the social hierarchy. The head covering, often a fez or turban, was a symbol of one’s faith and societal status.

Removing one’s head covering in inappropriate contexts was more than a breach of etiquette; it was a potential act of defiance or disrespect. The strict enforcement of this custom reflected the empire’s emphasis on maintaining social cohesion and visual markers of identity.

The practice extended beyond religious settings to formal meetings and social gatherings, reinforcing the importance of modesty and respect in daily interactions. While the Ottoman Empire no longer exists, the legacy of head-covering customs continues to influence cultural practices in the region.^[4]

6 Bow Before Speaking (Feudal Japan)

In feudal Japan, social interactions were governed by strict codes reflecting one’s status and role. Central to these interactions was the act of bowing, or “ojigi,” which conveyed respect, gratitude, apology, and other sentiments without words. When addressing a superior, especially a daimyo (feudal lord), one was expected to bow deeply before speaking.

Failing to perform the proper bow was a grave breach of etiquette, implying arrogance or disrespect. For the samurai class, who lived by the strict code of Bushido, adherence to proper bowing was a matter of honor and discipline. Neglecting this could lead to serious consequences, including loss of status or even duels.

Bowing before speaking maintained the social hierarchy and reinforced mutual respect, essential components of Japanese society at the time. The practice highlighted the importance placed on non-verbal communication and the subtle nuances of social interaction.^[5]

5 Never Step on the Threshold (Ancient Egypt)

In ancient Egypt, the threshold of a home was more than just a physical boundary—it was a spiritual one. Stepping directly on the threshold when entering someone’s house was considered disrespectful to both the host and the protective deities believed to guard the home. Egyptians believed that the gods watched over families from the entrance, and stepping on the threshold could anger these protective spirits.

Guests were expected to step over the threshold, acknowledging the sacredness of the entrance and showing respect for the household’s divine guardians. This practice emphasized the importance Egyptians placed on hospitality, spirituality, and the sanctity of the home.

Such customs reinforced social bonds and religious beliefs, integrating everyday actions with spiritual significance. While the specific practice may have faded, it reflects the profound connection between daily life and the divine in ancient Egyptian culture. ^[6]

4 Silence Is Golden (Imperial China)

In Imperial China, Confucian principles shaped societal norms, including etiquette surrounding speech. One of the most important virtues was self-restraint, and in the presence of elders or superiors, it was expected to remain silent unless spoken to. Speaking out of turn or at length was considered a sign of arrogance and disrespect.

Silence maintained harmony by acknowledging the proper social order and showing deference to those of higher status. This etiquette was especially important in familial settings and official courts, where hierarchy was strictly observed.

Failure to adhere to this rule could lead to loss of face, a concept deeply ingrained in Chinese culture that pertains to one’s honor and reputation. The emphasis on measured speech and respect contributed to social cohesion and reflected the value placed on harmony and order.^[7]

3 Don’t Show the Sole of Your Foot (Ancient Mesopotamia)

In ancient Mesopotamia, the feet were considered the dirtiest part of the body due to constant contact with the ground. Showing someone the sole of your foot, even unintentionally, was seen as a grave insult. The sole was associated with filth both physically and symbolically, and displaying it to someone was akin to calling them unclean.

This etiquette influenced how people sat and interacted, ensuring that the soles of their feet were not exposed to others. It extended to formal settings, where individuals were mindful of their posture to avoid offending others.

The practice underscores the importance placed on cleanliness and respect in social interactions. Variations of this custom persist in some cultures today, highlighting the lasting impact of ancient social norms.^[8]

2 The Left Seat for Guests of Honor (Ancient Greece)

In ancient Greece, seating arrangements at social gatherings were significant, particularly during symposiums or banquets. The seat to the left of the host was reserved for the guest of honor, considered the most prestigious position. This placement symbolized the host’s trust and affection, as the left side was associated with the heart.

Hosts carefully arranged their guests to ensure everyone was seated according to their status, reflecting the importance of hospitality and social order. Misplacing someone in the hierarchy could lead to social tension or offense.

This etiquette emphasized the Greek values of xenia (hospitality) and respect for social hierarchies. Proper seating was a tangible expression of these virtues, reinforcing relationships and societal norms.^[9]

1 Cover Your Mouth When Laughing (Victorian England)

In Victorian England, etiquette rules were enforced rigidly, especially regarding women’s behavior. Women were expected to cover their mouths while laughing or smiling broadly. Modesty was a prized virtue, and excessive displays of emotion were considered unladylike and could damage a woman’s reputation.

This small gesture allowed women to demonstrate decorum and self-restraint, key virtues in Victorian society. It reflected the era’s strict ideas about femininity and proper conduct, where maintaining an air of modesty and reserve was paramount.

While men had more leeway in their expressions, women were held to stringent standards that dictated their behavior in public and private spheres. The practice highlights the gender norms and social expectations of the time.^[10]

There are several misconceptions that many believe about Neanderthals. One is that they were dumb and uncivilized, which is actually untrue. This misconception has lingered on for so long that we use “Neanderthal” as a word for an uncivilized and unintelligent person. Neanderthals were even almost named Homo stupidus (“the stupid man”).

Today, we know Neanderthals were as smart as humans. But that isn’t the only surprising fact we have about the Neanderthals. Read on to find out about the interesting things we’ve dug up.

10 They Walked Upright

Neanderthals have often been depicted as slouched creatures with hunched backs, almost as if they were some other species of great ape. This depiction is wrong. Neanderthals walked upright and could have been better-postured than us. The myth of the hunched Neanderthal was started by Marcellin Boule, who believed Neanderthals were the missing link between humans and other great apes.

Researchers concluded that Neanderthals walked upright after creating a computer model of a Neanderthal skeleton. They noted that the neck and lower spine were curved. Both indicate an upright posture. Neanderthals would have walked with a hunch if their necks and spines were straight, as originally thought.

Researchers also saw that the wear marks on the skeletion’s hips indicated an upright posture. The sacrum (the bone in between the hip bones) was positioned just as it is with Homo sapiens. This could have only been possible if they had an upright posture.^[1]

9 Non-Africans Have Neanderthal Genes

Early Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa 70,000 years ago. At the time, Homo sapiens shared the Earth with two other species of humans: the Neanderthals and Denisovans. The Homo sapiens went toward Eurasia, where they met and interbred with Neanderthals.

Today, the descendants of these Homo sapiens (Asians and Europeans) have some Neanderthal genes in them. Scientists have discovered that the DNA of the average Asian and European is about two-percent Neanderthal. Sub-Saharan Africans have little to no Neanderthal DNA because their ancestors never left Africa and did not interbreed with Neanderthals.

Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans because they were all closely related. All three groups descended from Homo heidelbergensis.

A group of Homo heidelbergensis left Africa between 500,000 and 600,000 years ago. They split on the way. One group traveled to Western Asia and Europe and became the Neanderthals. The other group went toward Eastern Asia and became the Denisovans. The Homo heidelbergensis that remained in Africa eventually became Homo sapiens.^[2]

8 Homo Sapiens Could Have Hunted And Eaten Neanderthals

Early Homo sapiens seem to have had a thing for Neanderthal meat, at least if the hypothesis by Spanish anthropologists Policarp Hortola and Bienvenido Martinez-Navarro is true. The anthropologists speculate that humans feasted on Neanderthals as they migrated from Africa into Europe.^[3]

Researcher Fernando Rozzi of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris makes the same claims. He reached the conclusion after analyzing a Neanderthal jawbone. He and his team discovered that cut marks on the bone were made by humans.

If that wasn’t enough, early humans also probably used Neanderthal teeth to make necklaces. Other researchers, however, dispute the claims that Homo sapiens hunted and ate Neanderthals. They say early humans could have taken the jawbone from an already dead Neanderthal.

If true, the claims would support the hypothesis that humans hunted the Neanderthals into extinction. Some researchers believe this because Neanderthals went extinct around the same time early humans reached Europe.

7 They Painted

Neanderthals were artists. In fact, they made the oldest cave painting in the world. Around 65,000 years ago, some Neanderthal used a red pigment to etch something that resembles a ladder onto the walls of a Spanish cave.

Researchers have found two more paintings made by Neanderthals in two other Spanish caves. All three artworks were clearly the handiwork of a Neanderthal because Homo sapiens had not reached Europe at the time. The artworks indicate that Neanderthals had a similar cognitive abilities to humans.^[4]

6 They Were Almost Called Homo Stupidus

The first Neanderthal fossil (that was recognized to be an early human) was discovered in the Neander Thal (“Neander Valley”) in Germany in 1856. Neander Thal was named after Joachim Neumann, a 17th-century German minister who often roamed the valley. Neumann also wrote hymns, which he published under the pseudonym “Neander,” the Greek translation of Neumann (as in “new man”).

“Neander” and “thal” were soon slurred together to create the name “Neanderthal.” In 1904, the “h” was removed from “thal” because German does not have a “th” sound. However, some languages stuck with the “th,” creating a variant spelling of the name.

In 1864, William King suggested that the new human species be named Homo neanderthalensis, after the Neander Valley in which the fossil was found. Two years later, Ernst Haeckel suggested that we call the new human species Homo stupidus (“the stupid man”). Fortunately for the Neanderthals, King’s name was chosen because he proposed it first.

It is no surprise that Ernst suggested the name Homo stupidus for Neanderthals. We had poor knowledge of Neanderthals at the time—and probably still do now. Most people thought they were dumb creatures that couldn’t draw or use tools.^[5]

However, we now know Neanderthals could draw and use tools. They were also effective hunters, cared for their sick and elderly, and probably spoke some language. Neanderthals were just like Homo sapiens in many ways.

5 Neanderthals Inbred A Lot

Inbreeding was common among Neanderthals. In 2014, researchers discovered a 120,000-year-old Neanderthal toe bone in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Analysis of its genome revealed that the Neanderthal had closely related parents. They could have been siblings, first cousins, or even an uncle and his niece.

The inbreeding hypothesis was further supported by a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil unearthed in Vindija, Croatia, and 13 found in Sidron, Spain. All bones showed that the subjects descended from closely related parents.

As with modern humans, inbreeding among Neanderthals came with its own problems. Inbred Neanderthals had malformed body parts and bones. Many of their fossils had misshapen kneecaps and vertebrae. At least one Neanderthal retained a baby tooth into adulthood. Inbreeding made Neanderthals weaker and also less likely to reproduce than early Homo sapiens.

Unfortunately for us, Neanderthals transferred some of these unfavorable genes to early humans as they interbred. The genes are still present in some humans today, even though they have been largely suppressed. Some researchers speculate that inbreeding could have been one of the reasons the Neanderthals went extinct.^[6]

4 They Were Cannibals

While we are unsure whether early Homo sapiens ate Neanderthals, we know Neanderthals ate Neanderthals. Yes, Neanderthals were cannibals. The conclusion was reached after scientists analyzed the bones of five 40,000-year-old Neanderthals. The bones were broken the same way Neanderthals broke bones of the animals they hunted.

The reason Neanderthals feasted on other Neanderthals remains unclear. For a start, Neanderthals, early Homo sapiens, and even modern Homo sapiens are not nutritious. Neanderthals would clearly have preferred hunting bigger and more nutritious animals like horses, bison, reindeer, and mammoth that roamed nearby.

Researchers have speculated that Neanderthals cannibalized other Neanderthals for their marrow. This could be true, considering that the bones showed signs of being deliberately broken to reach the nutritious marrow inside. Researchers also suspect that Neanderthals could have turned to cannibalism for cultural reasons, or they just liked munching down on neighboring Neanderthals that strayed into their territory.^[7]

3 They Were Hunted By Other Animals

Neanderthals probably spent a huge chunk of their lives trying to avoid getting eaten. Besides their fellow Neanderthals and possibly humans, they were also hunted by wild animals of the day.

Researchers reached this conclusion after analyzing some Neanderthal fossils. They discovered the fossils had bite marks consistent with large carnivores. A fossil bone belonging to a young Neanderthal child clearly proved he was eaten by a large cat.

The analysis of the bone of another Neanderthal child from Ciemna Cave in Poland revealed that he was eaten by a large bird. The 115,000-year-old bone had holes indicating that it had passed the digestive system of a bird. However, researchers could not confirm whether the bird killed the child or fed on its corpse.

It should not be very surprising that Neanderthals sometimes ended up in the stomachs of other animals. Neanderthals and these animals were practically neighbors. Clashes would have been common, since they competed for the same sources of food and sought shelter in the same caves.^[8]

2 They Buried Their Dead

In 1908, two archaeologists unearthed the 50,000-year-old remains of a Neanderthal in a cave in La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. The anthropologists insisted that the Neanderthal had been deliberately buried there, even though nobody believed them at the time.

Archaeologists returned to the site in 1999. In 2012, a team led by William Rendu of New York University confirmed that the Neanderthal was truly buried there. Since then, we have found over 20 other sites scattered across Europe containing the remains of buried Neanderthals. The burials were often hasty, to prevent the body from being eaten by scavengers.

The discovery of burials among Neanderthals adds credibility to claims that Neanderthals took care of their sick and elderly. The Neanderthal found in the French cave had bone deformations and had lost lots of teeth. It is unlikely that Neanderthals would have bothered to bury somebody they refused to care for.^[9]

1 We Don’t Know Why They Went Extinct

We do not know why Neanderthals went extinct. We have already mentioned inbreeding and hunting by Homo sapiens as possible reasons, but those are only hypotheses. Other researchers speculate that Neanderthals went extinct after early humans infected them with deadly diseases after they migrated into Europe.

Other researchers think it was actually because Neanderthals couldn’t match the higher reproduction rate of humans. A more recent theory involves two ice ages.

Some 44,000 years ago, an ice age began and lasted for 1,000 years. This was followed by another ice age that began 40,800 years ago and ended 600 years later. Temperatures in Europe reached below zero during both ice ages.

Plants died off, starving the large game that the Neanderthals hunted. The large animals died off, and the Neanderthals soon followed since they depended on large game for food. Early Homo sapiens survived the ice ages because they were already adapted to eating plants and all kinds of meat and fish.

Some researchers believe a small number of Neanderthals survived the first ice age, and any remaining Neanderthals moved in with humans when the second ice age began. They interbred and soon became a part of the human gene pool.^[10]

Drool is the forgotten wonder—and sometimes horror—of the human body. This bubbly liquid is a multitasker: transferring hormones, keeping the teeth intact, and even retaining our long-lost ancestors.

The world of spit can get a little weird when doctors use it as a vaccine or modify it to become the world’s most powerful painkiller. In the darkest corner of sputum science, a new and dangerous life-form paddles around in human gob and people make a lucrative trade selling their own diseased samples on the black market.

10 Shape-Shifting Frog Spit

Many cards and cartoons depict frogs snapping up flies with their tongues. The science behind this ability is mind-bending. The amphibians catch insects with a combination of speed, accuracy, and sticky saliva. When a frog spots a tasty tidbit, it whips out a tongue that is 10 times softer than a human’s. This allows it to silkily slap into every nook and cranny of an insect.

As the tongue shoots forward and connects, the saliva is thin. The moment the tongue retracts, the spit turns thicker than honey. Suddenly, the watery liquid that seeped into the prey’s every crevice turns viscous, making frog gob inescapable.^[1]

The process is effortless for the amphibians as they are not required to do anything special. Shearing forces from the tongue shooting forward and then whipping back do all the work.

To get more insight into what went on inside the saliva, scientists pointed a rheometer at the mouth samples of 18 frogs. The device measures fluid properties and, in this case, determined that high concentrations of long-chain proteins also contributed to the snotty consistency.

9 Saliva’s Reproductive Role

Philematology is the study of kissing. Scientists who investigate puckered lips found something interesting. It would appear that spit is a crucial ingredient for romance. Well, physical attraction anyway.

From the onset, most people view saliva—especially that sloshing around in other people’s mouths—as the least romantic thing ever. But it plays a stronger role in reproduction than anyone realized.

Researchers turned their attention to college-aged couples, asked them to smooch, and then analyzed their hormones. The lovebirds who just held hands did not experience the same beneficial drop in stress hormones (cortisol) and increased bonding hormones (oxytocin) as those who kissed.^[2]

In evolutionary terms, thorough kissing might be a way to influence these hormones, both of which have been identified as key to reproductive success. Prior analysis also found evidence that there is testosterone in spit, the hormone that revs up sex drive.

Philematologists noticed that more men than women enjoy a good, open-mouthed, sloppy kiss. There is a chance that nature designed it this way to transfer testosterone from a man to his partner to get her in the mood.

8 It Cannot Stop Thirst

Many a desert crawler with some education in saliva has thought, “Spit is 98 percent water. Why am I still thirsty?”

Unfortunately for those stuck in the desert and the thirsty guy too lazy to get up and open the fridge, saliva cannot quench thirst. The issue is not water content but concentration. To stay hydrated, cells must absorb fluids that are less concentrated (with salts and solutes) than liquids already present in the body.

Fresh water fits the bill. On the other hand, saliva is so packed with enzymes and proteins that it is far more concentrated than water. When a person only has the option of spit, a vicious cycle soon develops.

It starts with a couple of swallows, but the spit fails to relieve the parched feeling. The body dehydrates, which makes saliva even more concentrated. It might be 98 percent water, but it is not watery enough to sustain life on its own.^[3]

7 Dry Mouth Disorder

Some people cannot produce enough saliva. This may not sound like the most dreadful condition out there, but the consequences are on nobody’s wish list. Saliva covers everything inside the mouth with a thin layer, barely a milliliter’s worth, but it plays an important part in oral health.

Without this bubbly liquid, a condition called “dry mouth” develops. Sufferers experience speedy tooth decay and yeast infections among other unsightly oral afflictions.^[4]

The protective powers of spit grow from its contents. Around 98 percent water, the rest teems with active ingredients such as mucus, electrolytes, enzymes, and antibacterial elements. Together, their functions serve to break down fats and starches, make swallowing easy, and protect the teeth and gums from acids, bacteria, and microbes.

Spit also has another somewhat remarkable ability. Chewing, jaw clenching, or teeth grinding exerts enormous pressure on teeth. Thanks to saliva’s proteins, teeth slide into each other instead of stabbing directly at the enamel.

It sounds plain, but any engineer knows that high pressure makes lubrication difficult. Spit weathers this challenge with excellence, and without it, teeth would be destroyed in a few years.

6 Alternative To Morphine

The strongest painkillers are opioids, morphine included. Despite the relief that opioids can bring, long-term use often causes resistance, addiction, and death by overdose. Needless to say, a new pill with the strength of morphine but without the side effects has been on scientists’ radar for a long time.

In 2006, a possible replacement—a peptide called opiorphin—was found in human saliva. It boosted the power of enkephalin—an opioid peptide and the body’s own natural painkiller.

In the same way as morphine, enkephalin binds to places on the spine and blocks pain signals to the brain. Since the two peptides are naturally occurring in the body, they do not come with the same dangers as conventional opioids.

However, they had their shortcomings. Opiorphin failed to reach all the places that morphine could. It remained localized, bound to wherever enkephalin was released.

In recent years, a modified version of the saliva peptide was created to overcome this problem. Called STR-324, it showed promise in rats when the compound was injected to control postoperative pain.^[5]

5 Cat Gob Vaccine

When officials investigated a Chicago doctor for possible malpractice, they were in for a world of weird. In 2016, they found that Ming Te Lin believed in thinning oral vaccinations with two unnecessary ingredients. One was vodka, probably procured from the local liquor store. How he harvested the second ingredient—feline saliva—remains unknown.

For Lin, this was not a one-time experiment. The doctor had been plying his patients with alcoholic cat spit for over 10 years. The youngest child he doped was seven days old. Lin, an allergist and immunologist, chose vodka and cat saliva because he believed they could treat allergies. None of his patients—or in some cases, their parents—complained.

Lin was only exposed when health care providers noticed that the children’s charts indicated modified versions of childhood vaccinations. Since the US Food and Drug Administration does not favor cat gob, Lin was suspended from the medical field. He also faced serious charges for signing state documents declaring that any shots he gave to underage patients were the conventional kind.^[6]

4 Mystery Nonhuman Ancestor

In 2017, scientists dug around spit samples harvested from sub-Saharan Africa. The aim was to study mucin-7, the protein responsible for saliva’s slimy consistency, and the health benefits it offered to humans.

Instead, something weird distracted the researchers. MUC7, the gene behind mucin-7, was radically different from the same gene found in other regions. Around 5–7 percent of each population that lived in sub-Saharan Africa carried this strange variation. In fact, the same gene that existed in Denisovans and Neanderthals, both extinct human branches, were more closely related to modern humans than the sub-Saharan version.

This could only mean one thing. Around 200,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern people found romance in the arms of something not quite human. Tests showed that the latter was even more distantly related to humans than Neanderthals (who were the closest relative to humans alive today).

Although it was clearly another hominid branch, scientists have no clue what they looked like. Until their fossils are found, they have the dubious honor of being the only extinct hominids that continue to exist as, well, spit.^[7]

3 The Lyssinum Case

In 2018, the medical world got crabby over a remedy called lyssinum. If one cared to look past the name and study the ingredients, most would drop the bottle. Lyssinum is saliva taken from a rabid dog. Rabies is a disease that spreads through infected saliva and is almost always fatal to people.

The 2018 furor was sparked by a Canadian naturopath’s claims that she used the remedy on a child. The four-year-old boy, known only as Jonah, hid under his school table and growled at people. He had been bitten by a dog in the past, which the naturopath blamed for his behavioral problems.^[8]

The remedy allegedly worked, but the incident alarmed conventional doctors. Besides the obvious risk of infection, there is no proof that lyssinum is a safe product or that it even works.

But those fighting rabid dog spit as a cure for growling kids face an uphill battle. The College of Naturopathic Physicians of British Columbia said that the remedy was an acceptable one in this case. The Canadian government did not seem to have a problem with it, either.

2 A New Species

In 2016, researchers discovered a new life-form. It was not an animal in the woods or a fungus on Mars. All this time, a microscopic goober had been hiding in human saliva.

It is not a friendly face, either. If bacteria could scream and run away from a cannibal, this would be it. The unnamed bacterium is the first of its kind—a parasite that preys only on other bacteria.

It was found attached to another strain called Actinomyces odontolyticus. When studied in the laboratory, it hunted down Actinomyces and latched onto its victim’s surface membrane. The parasite harvested the life-giving amino acids it needed but eventually killed Actinomyces.^[9]

Scientists are not sure how it reproduces or moves on to its next meal. The most frightening discovery came when its DNA was found in high concentrations in patients with gum problems. It seems like Actinomyces, known to cause gum disease, received one last perk before it passed. The parasite boosted its ability to avoid white blood cells and resist antibiotics. The little horror’s DNA also showed up in people with cystic fibrosis.

1 Illegal Saliva Trade

In South Africa, saliva—specifically, spit that comes from tuberculosis (TB) patients—is a hot item on the black market. Healthy buyers take the vials to health clinics, claiming the sputum as their own.

Once tests confirm that the fluid is TB-positive, the scammer receives a clinic card stating the fact. The card is then used to obtain a disability grant from the department of social development. The temporary grant pays around R1,000 (roughly $75) per month.

Since scammers can milk the system for several months, they do not balk at the vial’s price, which ranges between R50 and R100 (roughly $4 and $8). Both the selling price and grant sound like peanuts, but the trade is thriving in Cape Town’s townships where unemployment and poverty strangle many families.

When someone is diagnosed with TB, they are even less likely to find or maintain work. So they sell their saliva. Such a TB patient-dealer visits a clinic for treatment but really goes there to steal the vials. The easy theft and the clinics that accept bottled spit not produced under supervision are among the reasons why the scam remains rampant.^[10]

Sometimes, the best ideas are those we didn’t even know we had. A stroke of luck can lead to the purest and most profound genius. An accidental uncovering of a new food, invention, idea, or product can become a world-changing moment. Even if it’s one we didn’t realize at the time!

So many great things have been invented after painstaking research, development, trial, and error. But so many more great things have been created entirely by mistake! In this list, we’ll take a look at ten tales of the latter. These ten things were produced in error if you can believe it. It was only after the mistake was realized and observed by their creators that they knew they’d stumbled upon something pretty good. May we all have this kind of good serendipitous fortune!

Related: Ten Offbeat “Hit-or-Miss” Inventions

10 Cheeseburgers

We all love cheeseburgers, don’t we? That juicy beef patty, those tasty buns, the deliciously fresh toppings, and, of course, the cheese that melts onto the meat as it sits there, making your mouth water. Well, you can thank the mistake of a lifetime for that cheese! As the story goes, a young man named Lionel Clark Sternberger invented the cheeseburger in Pasadena, California.

Sweet, young Lionel was working at his dad’s restaurant in the California city as a short-order cook one day in 1924. He was flipping burgers for a customer’s order one afternoon when he accidentally left one on the grill too long. The patty became burnt. But Lionel, not wanting to waste an otherwise perfectly good slab of beef, opted to throw a slice of cheese on top to conceal the burn. And it worked!

The customer loved the new concoction so much that he begged Lionel to keep making it. Eventually, the restaurant put it on the menu. They even had a funny name for it, terming the concoction the “Aristocratic Burger: the Original Hamburger with Cheese.” Lionel was just 16 years old at the time, but he was quickly recognized as the inventor of the cheeseburger. Of course, it would become an American staple food in the decades after that. And it all started after a grill error!^[1]

9 Jason’s Hockey Mask

Jason Voorhees’s hockey mask in Friday the 13th is so iconic that it has transcended the movie series. By now, it has become a much larger part of horror movie culture, Halloween culture, and just general Americana. But the whole thing almost never happened! In fact, putting the actor Richard Brooker in a hockey mask in the first place was entirely an off-the-cuff idea that was done simply to save money!

While the production team was filming Friday the 13th Part 3, director Steve Miner needed to do a lighting check on Brooker in a certain spot before filming a scene. The only problem was that nobody on set wanted to do all the work of putting together Brooker’s face prosthesis and grotesque makeup just for a quick two-second lighting check. So, instead, the crew opted to take the easy way out and make Brooker wear a hockey mask for the lighting check.

The film’s 3-D supervisor just so happened to have one and offered it to the production for use. They put it on Brooker, he stood for the lighting check, and Miner absolutely loved how it came across on camera. And thus, totally by accident, the hockey mask horror icon was created! The world would have never seen it had it not been for some lazy film crew members dragging their feet during the production. So it seems that sometimes, laziness really can pay off! You hear that, Mom?^[2]

8 Nachos

It may stun you to learn that nachos were entirely discovered by mistake. After an improvisation came up with this new Mexican food, the whole thing quickly blew up. And now, we have nachos everywhere! And for good reason—they are tasty as hell!

So in the early 20th century, there was a man named Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya. He was the maitre d’ at a restaurant called the Victory Club in the border town of Piedras Negras, Mexico. There, military members at nearby Fort Duncan Army Base often crossed the border with their wives and families to enjoy meals in Mexico. One day, a group of nearly a dozen military wives crossed the border without their husbands. They knew Nacho was a talented and capable manager at the Victory Club, and they wanted to push him a little bit. So they asked him to come up with a new dish that they hadn’t yet tried.

Nacho was stumped for a minute—until he decided to make up a plate of tostadas and cover them with grated cheese. Then, he passed it through a broiling unit to heat the whole thing to a crisp. When that was done, he topped it with jalapenos to give the women a little bit of a spicy kick. And just like that, nachos were born! And yes, they took their name after Anaya’s nickname. That part is only fitting. Gotta give the man some credit for creating one of the tastiest foods out there!^[3]

7 Luca Brasi

While The Godfather was being filmed, director Francis Ford Coppola ran into a bit of a problem. One scene called for a character named Luca Brasi to show up. Brasi was to be a mob enforcer working for the legendary Don Corleone. And Coppola needed a really, really intimidating guy to play Brasi. But what ended up happening wasn’t on anybody’s radar—because the real mob enforcer they got to play Brasi ended up bumbling his lines for a totally unforeseen reason!

To play Luca Brasi on screen, Coppola hired a man named Lenny Montana. Now, Lenny was a real-life mob enforcer. He was as tough as they come and had seen and done some, uh, less than above-board things during his life in the mafia. But when it came time to appear on screen alongside Marlon Brando, Lenny fumbled all his lines. Now, you might assume that he stumbled over his lines because the script called for his character to be intimidated by Brando’s Don Corleone. But that’s not the case!

In reality, Lenny was absolutely starstruck that he was in the same room as a legend like Brando. The real-life, tough-guy mob enforcer was so overcome with the power of Brando’s celebrity that he nearly couldn’t remember any of his lines. He stumbled and faltered as the scene was being filmed simply because he was such a fan of Brando. But when Coppola went back to look at the tape, the stumble worked! The line flubs and mistakes turned out to be the perfect thing at the perfect time for the movie. Now THAT is true serendipity!^[4]

6 Ms. Pac-Man

In 1982, two MIT students decided to create a fun and interactive game called Crazy Otto. But instead of building out the whole thing from scratch, they went the easy route: they hacked into a Pac-Man machine and modified it. Once inside the machine and tinkering around with its inner workings, they began to perfect their Crazy Otto creation. And it was a hit! Well, at least among their close friends, who all enjoyed playing the game on a small level. But the duo didn’t think to commercialize the thing, knowing they’d pilfered Pac-Man’s intellectual property to make Crazy Otto in the first place.

Then, a stroke of luck followed their stroke of genius. It wasn’t long before Midway Games learned that the two students had hacked into Pac-Man and changed the game. And instead of going forth with a lawsuit or asking the pair to knock it off, they bought them out! Midway liked the hacked creation so much that they bought it from the college kids. In turn, they replaced Otto with a female Pac-Man and gave her a bow to wear. And thus, thanks to the unforeseen decision by two young men to hack a Pac-Man machine, Ms. Pac-Man was created. How lucky!^[5]

5 Star Trek’s Transporters

The transporters that popped up in Star Trek are such a cool idea. And one that we hope would one day be possible (far, far) into the future! But they didn’t come around on the television show for any real reason other than, well, they were cheap to film! Initially, producers wanted their characters to take shuttles to various places where they were going. Or alternatively, they could land their ship at whatever location it called for in the script. But that would have meant lots of expensive filming of various scenes in various places. And a ton of hassle in assembling actors and props for very short shots.

So, instead, the transporters came into being! It was an accidental thought the production team was having one day when they decided that a simple transporter making a human disappear in one spot and reappear in another would solve all their problems! Obviously, there would be no budget issues from that move. And they could produce the whole thing on camera with very little need for special effects. Then, when they started doing it, the transporter move became a huge success with fans! That was sort of an unintended consequence, too, but producers were certainly happy about it.^[6]

4 I’m Walking Here!

In the legendary movie Midnight Cowboy, actor Jon Voight plays Joe Buck—a small-town Texas native who goes to New York City. While in the Big Apple, he then gets scammed by Ratso, who was a disabled con man played so memorably by Dustin Hoffman. Much of the movie is about the chaos and uncertainty of life in New York City. But since the filmmakers didn’t have permits to shoot out on the streets of the massive metropolis, they had to improvise. And that’s how they got one of the best lines in movie history—totally by accident!

The line, of course, is “I’m walking here!” Hoffman was the one who yelled it out after a taxi cab nearly ran them over. And since the filmmakers didn’t have permits, and the scene had to be shot on a hidden camera, that was a real taxi cab—not an actor driving a car on a set!

What really happened was that Hoffman was walking across the street just to get a general shot of him moving for a scene. But unexpectedly, a cab crossed his path as he had the walk signal. The car almost ran him over. So, completely off the cuff and without going to the script, Hoffman ad-libbed the line. The producers loved it so much that they kept it in the final cut of the movie. And now it’s legendary!^[7]

3 The Incredible Hulk

The Incredible Hulk was originally supposed to be gray. When he first popped up in a May 1962 comic, the character was intended to be a pretty basic shade of gray. That was on purpose so that his color wouldn’t offend any one particular ethnic group. But the Marvel printers were acting up when it came time to print out that first comic book because the Incredible Hulk turned into a strange and different shade of gray on every single page! Printers hated how he changed color on each page, and the Marvel folks weren’t that thrilled, either. But there was nothing to do!

Until the next issue was released, that is. In the second issue detailing the Hulk’s activities, Marvel designers changed his color from the original gray to a deep, pleasing green. Thankfully, the printer was able to handle the green. And nobody really noticed that the Hulk had been gray in the first issue. They just took the story in stride with his green skin and let it be. Until now, that is as people have looked back to see how the Hulk didn’t originally begin as the green hero we know him as today. But to think the iconic green only ever came around due to a printing error! Could you imagine him now had he stayed gray this whole time?^[8]

2 Corn Flakes

The popular breakfast cereal Corn Flakes was created from a wheat-based dough that had been accidentally left out for an extended period of time. Will Kellogg, who was working on a health resort and lifestyle project (more on that in a minute) at the time, figured out that the fermenting done by the dough had caused it to become somewhat moldy. In a stroke of genius, while trying to salvage whatever food he could from that mishap, he rolled the moldy dough into thin sheets. Then, he baked the sheets. The fermentation and the high baking temperatures combined to create the first-ever batch of thin, crispy Corn Flakes that so many millions of people love to eat today. Crazy, right? What a fortunate mistake!

And yet, that’s only half the story, if you can believe it. As we mentioned, Kellogg was working on an entire lifestyle program as part of a retreat he was running at the time. One of his specific goals with the retreat was that he wanted people to masturbate less. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. Kellogg was a dietitian by trade, but he was very notably an anti-masturbation activist in his life. So he wanted to develop bland foods that would not “excite the passions,” as he was fond of saying. Thus, when the mistake that created Corn Flakes popped up, he made the most of it. And now, whenever you eat Corn Flakes from here on out, you can think of Will Kellogg’s dislike of self-pleasure.^[9]

1 Chocolate Chip Cookies

The chocolate chip cookie was invented by accident nearly 100 years ago. Ruth Wakefield was a New England woman who owned a place called the Tollhouse Inn. She loved baking cookies for weary travelers staying at her cozy little hotel. The only problem was that one day, she found out she was out of baker’s chocolate when it came time to throw a batch into the oven. Undaunted, she decided to substitute sweetened chocolate in its place to see what would happen. She broke the chocolate into small chunks, added it to the cookie dough, and put it all into the oven to bake.

Naturally, she expected the chocolate to melt and create the mainstay chocolate cookies for which she was already so regionally famous. But that’s not what happened! The sweetened chocolate kept its form within the cookies. The surprising result was a huge hit with travelers who came through the inn that day—and for many days after. Eventually, sweet old Mrs. Wakefield sold the accidental recipe (and the Tollhouse brand name, which became Toll House) to Nestle for just $1. Oh, and they also gave her a lifetime supply of chocolate. That’s nice!^[10]

One hundred years ago there were 10 million elephants living in the world. Today, there are less than half a million. Poaching, hunting and habitat loss have utterly destroyed the population, and it is unlikely they will ever achieve a population anywhere near that large ever again. 

While we have efforts in place today to protect elephants, around 20,000 are still poached for their ivory every year. There’s no practical reason for the poaching, it’s just used to feed an industry based on ignorance. Perhaps if people know more about elephants, they’d be disinclined to slaughter them, but we can only hope. In the meantime, there’s always something new the rest of us can learn.

10. Elephants Can Swim up to 30 Miles

A large male elephant can weigh as much as 15,000 pounds. That’s a hefty beast. Despite the ungainly size, elephants are actually adept swimmers. Though they are often pictured walking across shallow rivers, they can fully immerse themselves in water and swim for great distances.

An elephant’s body makes it remarkably buoyant so they take to water easily and can remain in the water for as long as 6 hours at a time. And though a human might consider an elephant fat and therefore not adept at physical exertion, elephants routinely walk for 80 miles every day in the search for food. 

Elephants can swim for miles. Though they can’t get a lot of speed and have a rate of about 1.3 mph. They have been recorded traveling as far as 30 miles at a stretch, which you have to assume was helped by the current.

9. Elephants Rarely Get Cancer Thanks to a Tumor-Suppressing Gene

For all the threats faced by elephants it’s comforting to know that they don’t need to worry about cancer. Though it’s not impossible for an elephant to develop cancer, it’s exceedingly rare. Scientists believe this is thanks to the TP53 gene. 

Research has shown that the TP53 gene activates when an organism develops abnormal cell growth that could cause a tumor. This gene sets to work on the abnormal cells and repairs the damage or kills the cell before it can start reproducing the damage. If the cell could keep reproducing in an abnormal state it would turn into what we know as a tumor. 

Humans have two copies of the TP53 gene to help them fight cancer and cancer is obviously a big issue for humans so these genes can only do so much. However, elephants also have TP53 genes and they have 40 of them compared to our two. Researchers have speculated that this accounts for why elephants are so resistant to the disease.

8. Elephants Will Sometimes Bury Dead or Sleeping Humans

Elephants are powerful creatures and project an air of strength and majesty. As much as most of us are in awe of elephants or even find them cute, there’s fear there as well. They’re huge and when they get angry, there is very little that can stop them. Most of us have seen videos of angry elephants charging at humans and even cars.

There is also a gentle side to elephants that is not well understood. We know they mourn their dead and will even bury them sometimes. But it’s not just other elephants that receive this treatment. Sometimes elephants will even bury human corpses that they run across in the wild. And, slightly stranger, the humans they bury may not always be dead.

There are reports that, occasionally, if elephants find a sleeping human they will try to bury them. You have to assume that, in this case, the person would probably remain frozen even if they woke up out of fear of what the elephants might do. The end result is a person getting covered in underbrush.

7. Young Elephants Need a Father Figure or Else

For all the obvious differences between elephants and humans there are a few things that are the same. We’ve seen that elephants mourn their dead and elephants are not just intelligent but self-aware, which is part of why the poaching of the species is even more tragic. But our similarities don’t end there.

Just like in the human world, elephants can sometimes have problems with their young. Juvenile male elephants go through a period in their lives when they have the potential to become overly hormonal. If juvenile elephants are together in a herd without an older, dominant male, they will enter a period called musth. During musth, testosterone production ramps up considerably and elephants become highly aggressive.

Some years ago, young males who had survived a cull were introduced to a new herd that had no older male. These teen elephants all entered this hormonal phase. Their aggression spiked as their hormones raged and several rhinos died because the male elephants would attack unprovoked. 

Normally it would be years before the males entered this phase, in their twenties. The presence of a bull elephant ensures this happens. As long as a mature male is present, the hormones of the younger males will not kick in and they have a chance to mature. In so many words, having a responsible father figure prevents young male elephants from acting like jerks.

6. Elephants Can Hear Clouds

Elephants have the largest ears in the world, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they have exceptional hearing. It’s just how good their hearing is that’s the surprising part. Sure, they can hear things far away, much further than a human, but so can lots of animals. Elephants, however, can even hear clouds thanks to their ability to hear low frequencies.

The acuity of an elephant’s ear extends beyond just hearing at a distance. They can hear well beyond the range a human can. When a storm is approaching the clouds produce infrasound, something far beyond the range of what a human can hear. Elephants hear these sounds and can tell a storm is approaching well before it’s obvious to most other animals. 

Research has suggested elephants can know a rainstorm as far as 150 miles away. 

5. Elephants Can Recognize Different Human Languages

Besides hearing distant storms, elephants have also developed an ear for human speech. On the one hand, this may not sound remarkable because many animals can somewhat understand humans, such as when your dog responds to commands and recognizes its name, but that’s not exactly how it works with elephants.

Elephants have showed an ability to differentiate between human languages and also whether a speaker is an adult or a child, male or female. Researchers played recordings of the same phrases for elephants, one in the Maasai language and one from the Kamba. Maasai sometimes kill elephants and Kamba generally don’t. By a two-to-one margin, the elephants reacted defensively to the Maasai version.

In addition, when played recordings of women and children speaking Maasai, the elephants didn’t react. They have learned that it’s the men who spoke that language who were most likely to show aggression, not women, children, or speakers of different languages. 

4. A Group of Kenyan Elephants Actively Mine for Salt in a Cave

Elephants are industrious and humans have used them as pack animals and for doing things like knocking over and moving trees thanks to their incredible strength. You can see them in videos tearing down fences now and then as well. But even on their own they have shown some clever ingenuity.

If you head to western Kenya, you can find a long extinct volcano called Mount Elgon. It’s in this area that an unusual herd of elephants make their home. These are the only known elephants who go out of their way to mine salt out of a mountain cave. They head as deep as 150 meters, or close to 500 feet, into Kitum Cave and at least 17 others to scrape salt from the walls with their tusks.

Like deer and other animals, elephants crave salt. It’s difficult to get in their diet normally, so the sodium-rich rocks are appealing. Evidence shows that, for years, elephants have been mining the caves by gouging out stones full of salt and eating them. They may only stop in the caves once every couple of months so they load up on salt before heading out again. 

Other animals also make use of the caves in search of salt, including buffalo, and predators will also hunt the salt-seekers. But it’s only the elephants who can actively mine it. 

3. Elephants Can Hear Each Other Across Miles with Their Feet

We already discussed how good elephant hearing is once but it’s so remarkable it gets to rank a second time because they can hear in more than one way. They don’t just hear infrasounds, they also use them to communicate. The noise our human ears hear from an elephant doesn’t begin to cover the full scope of the sounds they produce.

An elephant can use its larynx the same as a human and, because it’s so large, the sound it produces is extremely low. It’s the same as a person speaking or singing, just lower than the register of what a human can perceive. 

Things get shaken up a little more when it comes to how another elephant perceives those sounds. They don’t all travel through the air to an elephant’s ear. Instead, these deep notes travel through the ground for miles and other elephants feel them in their feet.

The sound has been likened to an explosion that starts at the vocalizing elephant. It spreads through the ground like a shockwave and the extremely sensitive feet of other elephants can feel it dozens of miles away. 

Combining vibrations in their feet with sounds their ears pick up, the elephants can pinpoint the source.

2. Elephants Know How to Induce Labor

Humans have traditionally taken herbs for all kinds of reasons. Elephants have been observed doing the same thing when pregnant females were seen consuming an herb that Kenyan women traditionally used to induce labor. The connection between an elephant eating a certain plant and giving birth a few days later meant nothing to researchers at first until they learned of the plant’s purpose some time later.

An ecologist had been observing the female elephant in question for an entire year. During that time the elephant’s diet didn’t change at all until the day it ate the red seringa tree. The elephant ate almost the whole small tree.

The bark of the tree is turned into tea by local tribes and it causes uterine contractions. Since the elephant gave birth so soon after, it seemed likely that it had the same effect on the elephant, and the timing of the act by the elephant relative to its late stage in pregnancy seemed to show it did so with intention.

1. An Elephant Trampled a Woman Then Came to Her Funeral and Did It Again

One thing we know elephants for is their memory, and they have showed excellent long-term memory in many studies. While a good memory is valuable for remembering food sources and watering holes, it has other uses and, in this case, they’re not always adorable.

It was reported in 2022 that an elephant killed a woman in India. The stories say she went to collect some water at a river and for whatever reason an elephant became enraged and trampled her to death. It’s not unheard of for an elephant to do something like this, even if the exact reason for it was not known.

Later that same day, the people of the town were preparing a funeral for the woman. This is when things got weird and somewhat horrifying. The elephant reportedly returned for the woman’s funeral, took her corpse off the funeral pyre, tossed it, trampled it, then ran off.

Most people have assumed it was the same elephant but that can’t be confirmed. That said, it seems just as unlikely that one elephant would trample a woman and then a different elephant would show up to do the same thing to her clearly unaggressive corpse. 

There’s no way to know what happened between the woman and that elephant but it certainly seems like the elephant remembered and was still very angry about it later in the day.

The Ford Model T was the first affordable automobile. Henry Ford famously said that his vehicle was targeted at the common man. Only the rich could afford a car before the Model T came along, and it actually became less expensive throughout production. It cost $850 at the time it was unveiled in 1908 and continuously got cheaper, reaching under $300 in 1925.^[1]

This was possible thanks to the moving assembly line invented by Henry Ford. However, that is not the only notable fact about the vehicle. There are a few more, from how it got its famous nickname (the “Tin Lizzie”) to claims that it was the cause of Prohibition.

10 The Model T Did Not Cause Prohibition

There are claims that Henry Ford designed the Model T to run on ethanol instead of gasoline. Supporters of this claim say Ford only switched to gasoline when the sale of alcohol was banned during Prohibition.

Some conspiracy theorists say oil magnate John D. Rockefeller convinced the US government to introduce Prohibition just so the Model T would only run on gasoline. These claims are false, along with similar claims that the Model T could run on different fuels, including diesel, benzene, and kerosene. Some even add that the vehicle had a device that allowed the driver to switch between different sources of fuel.

In truth, Henry Ford did experiment with using fermented plants as fuel for the Model T. He even made statements indicating a possible switch from gasoline to ethanol. However, he made those statements in 1916 and 1925, when the Model T had been in production for some time.^[2] Ford never made the switch because gasoline was dirt cheap at the time.

9 It Was Quite Versatile

The Model T was a very versatile vehicle. This meant that people used it for more than just getting around. The Model T was used as a tractor, snowmobile, grain mill, sawmill, and more.

Repurposing of the Model T was so common that businesses sprang up to provide aftermarket kits to turn the Model T into something other than a car. Magazines of the day also dedicated columns to teach people how to modify their Model T to serve some other purpose.

Individual owners also modified their vehicles to taste. One minister turned his Model T into a mobile church. Rail companies replaced the wheels of the Model T with metal tracks, turning them into railcars. They used the railcars to inspect the tracks and switch engines between trains in rail yards.

Other owners turned their Model T into mills by replacing one of the rear tires with a leather belt drive connected to a pulley. The engines of damaged Model Ts were not spared from work, either. They were removed and used to power boats and pumps.^[3]

8 It Was Unbelievably Difficult To Drive

The Ford Model T was unbelievably difficult to drive. It’s probably easier to drive an excavator today than to drive a Model T. People of the day didn’t care, though, because there was no agreed-upon standard on how vehicles worked. They considered the Model T normal, even though people who have attempted driving it today think otherwise.

The Model T did not have any gauges, so drivers manually checked the water, oil, and gasoline levels. Starting it was no walk in the park, either. The driver manually cranked the engine to start the vehicle. The engine sometimes backfired, which could break the driver’s arm. Ford included an electric starter in models made from 1919 onward.

The Model T’s throttle was operated by hand. The firing of the spark plugs was also controlled by hand. The driver had to operate both while driving.

The vehicle had three pedals. One was the brake, while the other two involved shifting gears. The brake pedal was installed at the far right, where we have the gas pedal today. One of the two gear pedals allowed the driver to switch between first, second, and neutral, depending on how far in they pressed it. The other was for reverse.^[4]

7 Henry Ford Once Said The Model T Was Available In ‘Any Color So long As It Is Black’

The first Model T cars were available in red, blue, green, and gray. Later Model Ts were only available in black. Henry Ford switched to an all-black vehicle because the different paint jobs slowed down the assembly line.

However, car dealerships were unimpressed because they wanted to offer more choices to their customers. Some of the customers were complaining, too. The dealerships later requested that Ford make more color options available. They also appealed to Ford to make different versions of the Model T—the sort of thing carmakers do today.

Henry Ford is said to have stated: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” He also added that he would continue to build only the Model T without any modifications whatsoever.

In his 1922 autobiography, My Life and Work, Ford mentioned that he’d actually made the statement in 1909, a year after he built the first Model T. However, Ford didn’t start releasing only black Model Ts until 1914. He wrote that not one person thought he had made a good decision. Ford acknowledged the need to listen to customer complaints but noted that “when the suggestion is only as to style, one has to make sure whether it is not merely a personal whim that is being voiced.”^[5]

6 It Was Replaced With The Model A

Henry Ford called his first car the Model A. The next was the Model B and so on until he reached the Model T. In 1927, Henry Ford unveiled a new vehicle he called the Model A, rather than the Model U. This Model A often has something like “(1927–1931)” written after it to differentiate it from the earlier Model A.

Ford named his vehicles from Models A to T because every new model was a modification of the previous one until he hit gold with the Model T. The Model T was so successful that Ford wanted to continue building it forever. That changed when competition from other carmakers sent sales of the Model T into a decline in the mid-1920s.

Henry Ford ceased manufacturing the Model T in May 1927 and replaced it with the new Model A that November. The Model A was partly designed by his son, Edsel, who had tried to convince Henry to cease production of the Model T few years earlier. Henry refused, but Edsel continued working on his new car anyway. That car was the basis for the Model A.

Ford switched from the old naming system to indicate that the new Model A was designed from scratch and not a modification of the Model T. The Model A had unique features, including a speedometer, water pump, and gas gauge. The Model A was successful like its predecessor. Ford churned out 9,200 cars a day at its height.^[6]

5 It Was Nicknamed The Tin Lizzie After It Won A Race

The Ford Model T went by a few nicknames, including the “flivver” and the “Leaping Lena.” However, its most common nickname was the “Tin Lizzie.” The Model T got that name from a race.

At the time, car dealerships regularly hosted automobile races to publicize the cars in their collection. One such race was held at Pikes Peak in Colorado in 1922. One of the contenders was Noel Bullock and his Model T, which he called “Old Liz.”

Old Liz was truly old. Its body paint had faded, and its hood was missing. Spectators started calling it the Tin Lizzie over concerns that it looked more like a tin can than a vehicle. Nevertheless, the battered Old Liz went on to defeat the cleaner and more expensive cars in the race. Newspapers reported the surprising win but called the car the Tin Lizzie instead of Old Liz. The name stuck.^[7]

4 It Was Not The First Car Built On An Assembly Line

The Model T was not the first car built on an assembly line. Henry Ford didn’t invent the assembly line, either. What he actually invented was the moving assembly line. The assembly line was the invention of Ransom E. Olds of the Olds Motor Vehicle Company. Olds created the assembly line to build the Oldsmobile Curved Dash.

The Oldsmobile Curved Dash was the Model T of the very early 1900s. However, Olds couldn’t manufacture enough vehicles to meet demand, so he invented the assembly line to speed up production. The assembly line allowed Olds to scale from building 425 cars in 1901 to 2,500 a year later. By 1904, he was building and selling 5,000 cars a year.^[8]

Henry Ford built on Olds’s idea but added conveyor belts that moved the cars around the factory. This was the first moving assembly line. This allowed Ford to build a Model T in less than three hours, down from the 12 hours and 30 minutes it previously took. Ford had gotten the idea of the moving assembly line from the conveyor belts used in flour mills, meat plants, and other factories.

3 The Model TT

Most people do not know that Henry Ford made a truck version of the Model T. The Model TT was a Model T with a bed in place of rear seats and a heavier frame.

As we mentioned earlier, Ford never wanted to make any other version of the Model T. However, he made an exception after observing many Model T owners replace their rear seats with a wooden bed. The first Model TT truck went on sale on July 27, 1917. Ford sold 209 vehicles before the year was over.

Chevrolet jumped on board the pickup bandwagon a year later in 1918. Dodge followed suit in 1924. The Model TT went out of production in 1927 and was succeeded by the Model AA truck the same year. The Model AA was rebadged as the successful F-series in 1948. The F-series has been a top seller in the US vehicle market since 1977.^[9]

2 Ford Did Not Advertise The Model T

Ford’s Model T was the Tesla of its day. The Model T was so successful that Ford did not run advertisements and depended on word of mouth to drive sales. That is the sort of thing Tesla does today.

Ford initially did some advertising from the time he invented his car until 1917, when he stopped all advertisements. He did not run a single ad between 1917 and 1923. This made sense, considering that the Model T was the dominant vehicle at the time, and every prospective car owner looked his way.

Interestingly, most Ford car dealerships still ran adverts to entice would-be car buyers to acquire their Model Ts from them. Meanwhile, General Motors and Chevrolet—Ford’s primary rivals at the time—ran massive ad campaigns to promote their vehicles. This culminated in Chevrolet overtaking Ford in sales in 1931. Ford only became the top seller again in 1957.^[10]

1 Poland Modified It Into A War Vehicle

Poland created an armored version of the Model T in June 1920. It was called the Ford FT-B, alternatively known as the Model 1920 or the Ford Tf-c. The vehicle was the brainchild of one Tadeusz Tanski (pictured above with his invention), who worked with the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs at the time.

The Ford FT-B was developed as a part of Poland’s desperate attempt to win an ongoing war against the Soviet Union. Poland and Ukraine had formed a coalition against the Soviet Union at the time. But the Soviet Union had invaded and almost overrun Ukraine. Poland feared it was next.

Poland decided its 120 Renault FT tanks were too slow to outmaneuver the Soviet cavalry. It needed something faster. Tanski came up with a proposal to weld steel armor captured from the German Army during World War I to the chassis of a Ford Model T. The result was the Ford FT-B.

The Ford FT-B was small and fast, just as the Polish army hoped. It only required a driver and a machine gunner to operate. However, it was notoriously uncomfortable. The machine gunner could not even stand upright when firing. A later proposal to build 90 improved versions was rejected after the war ended in 1921.^[11]

Every day when you wake up and start walking around you’re carrying a skeleton with you. That’s just as bad as being stalked by a vampire. That creepy, bony guy is right under your skin 24/7. You might not be giving a second thought to your skeleton in your day-to-day life unless maybe you have some bone injuries now and then, but there’s a lot to know about your skeleton, or skeletons in general, that could make you want to jump right out of your skin.

10. Your Skeleton is Replaced Every 10 Years or So

Your body seems like a very permanent thing because it’s you. It’s not like your body goes anywhere without you. But, in a technical sense, you’re actually recycling your body all the time. Your cells die and are replaced constantly to the point that who you are today is not who you were a year ago, at least in terms of the cells and atoms that make you up. Your skeleton is no different.

Even though a skeleton seems like a pretty solid, stationary, and permanent aspect of yourself, it’s not. The cells in your bones get replaced just like everything else. Over a decade you will have replaced pretty much every bit of your skeleton with new cells.

The bones of your skeleton reach their peak mass when you are in your twenties. From then on, a process called remodeling takes place which sees your cells swapped again and again, turning you into a skeletal Ship of Theseus.

9. Tons of Movies Have Used Real Skeletons as Props

In your real life, there is a good chance you will never see an actual skeleton in person. Most of us rarely ever even see a dead body, and if we do it’s probably a loved one and we’re viewing them at a funeral shortly after they died. 

There’s very little reason or opportunity for the average person to see the skeletal remains of a human.  But that’s just in person. You have probably seen a real skeleton before, even if you didn’t realize it.

There’s very little reason or opportunity for the average person to see the skeletal remains of a human.  But that’s just in person. there’s a good chance you have seen a real skeleton before, even if you didn’t realize it.

Skeletons in movies are about a dime a dozen. All kinds of films have made use of skeletons, not just horror movies. And while you might think a special effects person could simply whip up a fake skeleton to get the job done on a movie set, it’s often easier just to buy a skeleton that already exists. For quite a long time, those skeletons were actually real skeletons.

Films like the original Poltergeist, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show all feature real human skeletons as props. Maybe not everyone knew it at the time, but they were. Even the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland was made using real human skeletons. 

The skeletons in the movie Poltergeist were used in a pool scene. Everyone on set assumed that they were props at first until they found out it’s cheaper just to buy a human skeleton from a medical supply company than to make one out of plastic.

In the movie The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the villain finds a skeleton in a coffin at one point which was also genuine human remains. It was the skeleton of an actress whose wish was to continue acting even in death. 

8. There’s a Lake in the Himalayan Mountains That’s Full of Skeletons

A lake with a dead body in it is foreboding. A lake that’s full of skeletons is the basis for a horror movie. Nonetheless, there’s an infamous lake in the Himalayan mountains where hundreds of skeletal remains were discovered. 

In 1942 it was discovered that somewhere between 300 and 800 corpses were in and around this frozen lake, high in the mountains. The lake is about 5,000 m above sea level and is days from the nearest town. 

For years it was believed that the skeletal remains were of pilgrims who probably got caught in the storm. There were no weapons and no sign they had been attacked, anyway. However, genetic testing in 2019 showed that the skeletal remains belong to three different groups of people who died in three different time periods and had diverse origins far from the Himalayas. Rather than solving a mystery, the information made it even more confusing.

7. There Are No Skeletons of the Titanic Victims 

The story of the Titanic is something that has fascinated people since the day the ship sank. Obviously, James Cameron helped build the mystique with his movie, and subsequent efforts to find the wreckage of the ship also helped capture people’s imaginations. And then, of course, there was the ill-fated submarine trip in 2023 that never made it to its destination.

One thing we do know about the wreck of the Titanic is that there are no bodies to recover. Nothing remains of the victims of the Titanic including their skeletons which have long since dissolved away. 

Below a depth of 3,000 feet in the ocean, you’ll pass something called the calcium carbonate compensation depth. At this level and below, bones can’t hold together long and they will dissolve. Even if some bodies were trapped in rooms with oxygenated water, after more than a century it’s unlikely any identifiable remains could ever be found. 

6. Museums House the Skeletal Remains of Over Half a Million Native Americans

If you go to almost any natural history museum in America, you’re probably going to find the skeletal remains of a few people. Sometimes these are mummies, sometimes they are the remains of ancient humans that were discovered in caves or bogs or who knows where. 

On a case-by-case basis, these can seem very curious, interesting, or even educational. But if you step back and look at the big picture, it becomes something much darker.

If we’re dealing with ancient skeletons from North America, chances are you’re talking about Native Americans. And if every museum has a few of these skeletons on display or in storage, then those numbers quickly add up. If you’re wondering what they add up to, someone has done a bit of math to give you a rough idea. It’s believed that the remains of over half a million Native Americans are currently in museums. 

Try to imagine anyone in the modern world taking the bodies of your ancestors, maybe your grandparents or great-grandparents, and putting them on display.  Now imagine they did that for the entire city of Sacramento which has a population of about 528,000.

5. Europeans Used to Cover Skeletons in Gold and Jewels and Display Them

The Catholic Church differs from many other Christian churches in particular because of its focus on saints. Whereas many Christians would only pray to god, Catholics had prayers for specific Saints to supposedly help watch over them or guide them as it related to specific issues. Saint Amand is the saint of bartenders, for instance. Saint Christopher is one of the saints of travelers. But some Catholics in some places also devised catacomb saints.

A catacomb saint is basically a skeleton that has been covered in gold and jewels. They would be stationed in small churches and revered as local protectors. For years and years, these golden crested skeletons might watch over a congregation, grinning jewel-encrusted smiles from the wall.

Many of the skeletons, which still exist in parts of Northern Europe, were Roman martyrs, and can still be viewed to this day. 

4. The Sedlec Ossuary is Decorated With Over 40,000 Skeletons

If golden skeletons are not your cup of tea, you can always take in the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic. The church dates back to the 13th century and today it’s most well known for being decorated with the skeletons of anywhere between 40,000 and 70,000 humans. 

The bones aren’t just stuck to walls; they have been arranged to create art. Ribs will be lined up alongside fingers and lead the eye to decorative crests made of pelvic bones and skulls. You can find chandeliers, candelabras, chalices, and several other grim, dusty decorations made from the rattling remains of thousands. 

According to legends, the abbot Of the monastery that used to be there went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and came back with a handful of soil from where Jesus had died. Everyone and their uncle literally wanted to be buried in that holy soil but after 30,000 graves were filled around the monastery, there was no room left. The rest of the bodies were turned into decorations over the years.

3. India Used to Dominate a Skeleton Black Market

You heard earlier that real skeletons were used in movies over the years, which means there’s a market for people selling them. For the most part, skeletons have been sold for medical study and research. 

You’ve probably seen those anatomy skeletons that are used in medical schools so that students can see the entire skeletal structure. Many of those today are fake, but once upon a time, they used real ones. This begs the question, where do you get skeletons from?

For many years there was a black market in skeleton sales based in India. Most of the teaching skeletons around the world originated here. The skeletons aren’t donated by people who are aware of what’s happening, instead, they were robbed from graves, generally around the Calcutta region. 

The skeleton trade was an old one in India, dating back to colonial times. British doctors used to pay grave robbers to bring them fresh bodies, and for 200 years the trade continued with people raiding graves and selling what they found. In some parts of Calcutta whole graveyards are empty.

2. A 9,000-Year-Old Skeleton was DNA-matched to a Guy Who Lived Nearby

Genealogy has become a science that fascinates many people, now that you can run DNA tests and pay a few dollars to see your genetic history. For most people, it just links you to others across the country, and maybe even around the world so you get a better idea of your family tree. Sometimes it goes a little deeper. 

Cheddar Man was the name given to the 9,000-year-old skeletal remains found in an English cave in 1903, near the town of Cheddar. They are the most complete remains of a homo sapiens ever discovered. DNA tests on the ancient skeleton in 1997 found that it was related to a man who lived and worked a half mile away.

Adrian Targett, a British teacher, was informed that he was the closest living relative of Cheddar Man, who died a violent death 300 generations earlier. There’s not a lot one can do with information like that, but it was interesting to note that his people clearly liked that part of the world and hadn’t strayed far. 

1. Scans Showed a Skeleton Inside a Buddha Statue 

Most of us consider Buddhists peaceful and calm people. They believe in meditation and spiritualism and being good people overall. But there’s also a belief that mortal life is suffering and sometimes their beliefs come out in what others might consider creepy ways. Which is to say that at least one Buddha statue has an entire mummified monk inside of it.

In 2015, a Dutch buyer took possession of a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue. During the restoration process, a CT scan was done and the skeletal remains were discovered within. Papers within the statue, which had replaced the organs, also revealed the identity of the mummy as a monk. 

It’s believed the monk, named Liuquan, practiced something called self-mummification which included drinking a poisonous tea that would make the body too toxic for maggots to eat. He essentially both starved and preserved his living body until he died, ready to have his organs removed and his body put on display.  After years as a simple mummy, the body would have been entombed in the statue.

You get paid royalties if you own the rights to something, whether that’s a physical asset, a song, even a name, and someone else wants to use it commercially. If someone else is making money off of something that’s yours, you are probably owed money for it. But it’s not as cut and dry as it sounds and sometimes there are some very bizarre rules over what does and doesn’t qualify for royalties. There are many people out there paying or get paid for very unexpected reasons.

10. Finnish Cabbies Have to Pay Royalties for Songs on Their Radios

Cab drivers exist in just about every city in the world. If a place is big enough people will always need to get around so someone can always make a living by driving them. But there are plenty of rules and regulations about how this has to work and those rules can vary from one place to another.

Finland has one of the most obscure and unusual rules that cabbies have to abide by. They are required to pay royalties for the songs that play in their cabs because, strictly speaking, they make money while music is playing in the car. 

A court ruling in 2002 applied to all cabbies in the country. If they turn on the radio in the presence of a customer, then they need to pay for the music that plays. Music in a cab is a public performance at that point, and subject to such fees.

It wasn’t a ton of money and it wasn’t like the cabbies had to write down what song played when. Instead, they were tasked with paying a yearly fee of just £14 to the Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society. Cabbies are, of course, free to keep the radio off and not pay anything.

9. Alice Cooper Pays His Band Royalties to Use The Name

Alice Cooper spent decades as an icon of rock. One of the earliest performers to blend horror esthetic and showmanship with his music he’s something of a founder of the whole “shock rock” genre which led to acts like Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Gwar among many others. He’s a trailblazer is what he is. He also pays for his name.

Cooper was born Vincent Damon Furnier though he legally changed his name to Alice Cooper in 1975. The story of the name was shared by Cooper in a book in which he claimed the story of a medium using a Ouija board to spell it out, which is the popular myth, was untrue. Instead, it was just a random name that popped into his head that he felt would conjure confusing imagery for fans because the band was all men. The name was not his; it was the band’s.

As the frontman, he became known as Alice Cooper even though that wasn’t precisely the intent. But he went with it and, as a result, pays yearly royalties to the rest of the band to use the name because it belonged to all of them. 

8. Everyone Who Uses HDMI Pays Royalties for the Technology

When it comes to plugging in video peripherals these days, you need to use an HDMI cable. It’s what DVD, Blu-ray, video game consoles and everything else use and it gives you some high-quality video and audio. It’s also proprietary, and that means people pay royalties to one company to use it. 

The name HDMI stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface, which is trademarked. Anyone who wants to use HDMI has to pay a yearly fee to HDMI for adopting it. That was a $10,000 base fee plus $0.15 per unit sold unless they clearly use the HDMI logo, then the price drops to a nickel. 

If a company makes less than 10,000 units of whatever they’re selling, they can opt for a different plan to save some money. But whatever the case, if it’s your Xbox or just a cable you pick up loose, if it says HDMI on it, that company paid a royalty fee.  

7. Climbers Have to Pay Royalties to Nepal to Climb Everest

If you’re the adventurous type, you may have an incline to one day live the ultimate adventure and climb Mount Everest. And why not, it’s a big accomplishment. It’s also not very cheap.

If you’re not a Nepalese citizen, the government of Nepal is going to need you to pay royalties to climb their mountain. This varies by season but if you decide to go up in the Spring, as most climbers do, then you’re looking at an $11,000 royalty payment. You’ll also be asked to provide a $4,000 garbage management fee which you can have refunded if you bring enough trash back down with you.

In 2023, that fee faced a proposed increase to $15,000 in an effort to control the numbers because people keep going up there and dying. The new fee will go into effect in 2025.

6. DC Pays Much Bigger Royalties to Comics Creators Than Marvel

If you follow comic book news, this one may not be a surprise to you but it might be to the casual movie fan. It’s no secret comic book movies are huge business and they make literal billions of dollars. Many of those movies are based on whole storylines that were first printed in the comics. All the characters are, of course, from the comics as well. So do the writers or artists behind Deadpool and Thanos and Joker get their piece of the pie? Not as much as you’d think. 

Jim Starlin, for instance, is credited with creating Thanos, the huge villain from the MCU’s long and elaborate film series. He also created Gamora and Drax. Starlin never said what Disney paid him for putting his creations in so many films but it has been confirmed by several sources that Marvel/Disney give the comics creators $5000 and a ticket to the movie premier. 

Contrast that with Starlin’s admission that DC also paid him for the use of the character KGBeast in the Batman v Superman movie and they paid him substantially more. If you don’t remember KGBeast it’s because in the movie he was just a regular guy and they never called him by that name. But DC still paid for him, meaning DC pays significantly higher royalties for even minor characters that Marvel does for major ones.  How much more? According to Starlin, more than all the Marvel movies combined. 

5. Marvel Got Paid Royalties Every Time Hulk Hogan Wrestled

Speaking of comic book royalties, let’s look at the Hulk. The Incredible Hulk debuted in 1962, one of Marvel comics’ oldest characters appearing before the X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and many others. The name Hulk became synonymous with the big green monster forever afterwards. But there was another pop culture hulk most of us remember, too. Hulk Hogan.

Although hulk is a perfectly normal noun that refers to anything large and unwieldy you can’t just call yourself Hulk and be a big, muscular dude at the same time. Marvel comics owns the big, muscley Hulk. So, for 20 years, Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, paid royalties to Marvel comics to use his stage name. 

Hogan had appeared in a promotional photo with Lou Ferrigno back in the 70s when Ferrigno played the Incredible Hulk on TV. Someone made the joke that Hogan, taller and more muscular, was the real Hulk. The nickname stuck, and he carried it through a few wrestling promotions until the WWE (then WWF) signed him. 

Hogan was an instant star, and the WWF was just becoming the biggest, and only, name in wrestling for most people. They kept introducing him as the Incredible Hulk Hogan and by the time they were drawing crowds to Madison Square Garden, Marvel stepped in.

Hogan had to drop “incredible” and, from then on, Marvel got $100 for every match he wrestled. For 20 years. They also got a small portion of all Hulk merchandise. The deal likely made Marvel millions.

4. Warner Paid Royalties to John Hinckley for a Devo Song

Sometimes paying royalties makes perfect sense, like if a musician uses a sample of someone else’s work in a song. That happened to the band Devo and Warner, their label, had to pay when the band used a sample of poetry in a song. But it’s the “who” that makes it a little more off-putting in this case. They used the words of John Hinckley, the man most famous for trying to assassinate Ronald Reagan. And Warner had to pay.

The song I Desire came out in 1982, a year after Hinckley tried to kill the President. He had also infamously written love poems to Jodie Foster, and it was one of those poems Devo sampled for their song. The band asked him if they could use it and he said yes. Thus, he was a co-writer of the song. But Warner didn’t know until it was too late. 

In 2021, Hickley said on Twitter that he hadn’t been paid in decades. 

3. The Seattle Space Needle is Trademarked And You Need To Pay to Use It

A lot of cities have something that stands out on the skyline to make them easily identifiable. For Seattle, it’s the Space Needle. But you can’t go off and use the image of the Space Needle all willy-nilly if you’re trying to promote something in the city. The building is a trademark and you need to pay royalties for its likeness. 

In 2022, a coffee chain was sued by the company that owns the Space Needle for trademark infringement but the two companies came to a settlement. 

If you want to use an image of the Seattle skyline for anything commercial, Getty Images points out that you cannot do so if the key feature is the Space Needle. Even the name “Space Needle” is protected and the company will ask anyone using it commercially to change it when it comes to their attention. You can go to the Space Needle website and fill out a form if you wish to use the image, however.

2. Alaskan Residents Get a Yearly Oil Royalty Check 

If you like free money, but not a lot of free money, consider moving to Alaska. Residents of the state are given a yearly royalty check just for living in a state that’s full of oil. In 2023, Alaskans were issued a $1,312 check as their portion of the state’s oil fund.  The year before it was over $3,000.

The money changes from year to year and apparently it’s an absolute nightmare of political red tape as the government has to decide how to allocate the funds through the year to cover all kinds of unrelated things like education or transportation when there are shortfalls in those budgets. But all of that aside, there’s always something for the people of Alaska, whatever the politicians end up deciding, and it’s unique to the state. 

1. The US Had to Pay Royalties to Germany for the Springfield Rifle 

There’s a lot of business that goes into war and many people make money off of it. That’s more of a modern realization and not something everyone was concerned with back in the day. But maybe they should have been. After all, it looks like the US was paying royalties to Germany for rifles based on the German Mauser. And they were paying them during WWI.

The Mauser 98 is arguably the most famous rifle ever made. Between 91 and 125 million have been made and countries around the world copied the design for their own. This included the United States. Because of this, governments were paying royalties to Germany for the design.

The US had worked out an agreement in 1905 to pay $0.75 per rifle plus $0.50 per thousand clips to a maximum of $200,000. Later, the Springfield M1903 would try to duplicate the Mauser design but tweak a few elements to avoid royalties, which failed in the long run. The US ended up paying a number of penalties and fees to Germany even after the First World War began, while the US was still neutral.

Forty percent of us will experience some form of memory loss by the time we turn 65. For many people, it’s just something that comes with old age, but there’s more to it than that. Lifestyle choices, medications, chemicals, and more can play havoc with our minds and our ability to create or access memories. There are probably far more things linked to memory loss than you ever realized.

10. Mountain Dew Has Been Linked to Memory Loss

Food additives are a touchy subject all over the world. There is no end of misinformation about what might be dangerous in what might not be. Much of it is fueled by a lack of understanding, strange conspiracies, laziness, and outright lies. Consider the case of MSG, which was demonized for years based on faulty research. The same thing, to some degree, has happened to Mountain Dew.

The famous soft drink has been banned in Europe and Japan because it contains brominated vegetable oil. Some reports claim that brominated vegetable oil is a flame retardant, a carcinogen, and a dozen other horrible things. 

In soda, brominated vegetable oil is an emulsifier that has been used since the 30s. It just holds Mountain Dew together so that the citrus won’t separate. But it has been recognized as potentially harmful in large amounts, and both PepsiCo and Coca-Cola claimed to be removing it back in 2014, which they didn’t do at the time but have done in the years since.

Though it’s not really a flame retardant any more than table salt is bleach because of the chloride in its name, it has been linked to memory loss in people drinking more than two liters of soda daily. 

9. Extensive Use of Benadryl is Linked to Dementia

If you suffer from chronic allergies and take Benadryl to manage it regularly, you might want to rethink your strategy. Extensive use of Benadryl has been linked to early dementia and other memory loss issues. Drugs like Benadryl block the action of a chemical called acetylcholine, which transmits messages through your nervous system. In your brain, it’s also linked to learning and memory. 

Though the link is not a proven one, just an observed one, these drugs have been shown to cause confusion and increase fall risks among older adults.

Specifically, diphenhydramine seems to put patients at risk for dementia. This is the antihistamine in Benedryl in most, but not all, countries where it is available. Taking these drugs for three years or more increases dementia risk by 54%.

8. Taking Photos Impaires Your Ability To Remember What You Photographed

It’s been estimated that 1.81 trillion photos are taken yearly. Anyone who’s been on social media in the last decade has seen just how popular selfies are. And with 15 billion cell phones and mobile devices worldwide, that’s nearly two for every living human. Almost all of us have access to a high-quality camera all the time. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Photos make our memories worse. Taking multiple pictures of the same thing doesn’t change this, either. Our memory of what we photograph is impaired the moment we take a picture. The irony of people taking photos to remember people, places, and events is worth noting. 

One theory for why this happens is that our brain essentially hands off the job of remembering the moment to the photograph. You understand what the photo will be, so your mind doesn’t need the memory; it has the picture. 

7. Sometimes Sex Can Cause Short-Term Amnesia

This one’s going to get a little personal, so buckle up. Sex has been linked to short-term amnesia but only in certain cases. For the effect to happen, you have to have good sex. As in the mind-blowing sort. Almost literally, as it happens. 

Known as transient global amnesia, it most often affects people in their 50s and 60s. Once it sets it, it can remove an entire 24 hours from your memory. Any strenuous physical activity could cause it, but sex seems to be a common one. 

The effect is short-term, lasting just a few hours. Though it only happens once for some patients, others have reported multiple instances. The man in one couple had had it happen five times in a span of nearly 20 years. 

6. Shift Work Leads to Major Health Issues Including Memory Loss

Someone once said if work were fun, they wouldn’t call it work. Most people would agree that work isn’t fun, so it’s not usually an issue. Worse than that, a lot of work can be detrimental to your health. There’s even evidence that shift work can lead to memory loss. That means you can hate your job and not even remember why. 

Shift work leads to lower levels of focus, alertness, impulse control, sleep disorders, cardiovascular disease, mood disorders, substance abuse, and much more. Sample sizes for determining this were not small, either. Eighteen studies of over 18,000 participants concluded shift workers were much worse with cognitive function and working memory. 

Half of the participants in the study were from the healthcare field, while the other half were made up of a mix of professions ranging from IT to law enforcement. Across the board, shift workers performed more poorly than those who stuck to traditional schedules. This is especially unsettling news when you factor in how many of them are healthcare workers, including doctors and nurses, who may try to treat you one day while their brain is messed up from doing shift work. 

5. First-Person Shooters Lead to Hippocampus Damage and Memory Loss

What are the most frustrating things about medical news is when it’s contradictory. For instance, have you ever heard that playing video games can help cognitive function and memory in children? There have been a lot of stories about it over the years. But this is about the opposite effect, isn’t it? It sure is, so let’s focus on the researchers who say first-person shooters can damage your hippocampus and cause memory loss. 

Gamers who play FPS games more than 6 hours per week were tracked over four years. The results showed a decrease in the part of the brain where short-term memories are stored.

FPS gamers come in two types. Those who navigate the game with spatial memory strategies and those called response learners who manage to navigate using a part of the brain called the caudate nucleus. Most chronic gamers are this type, and after 90 hours of play, scans of their brains showed significant loss to the hippocampus. 

Before you hang up your Call of Duty dog tags, it’s worth noting that even the author of the study says more research is needed before anyone can confirm there’s a long-term danger to worry about.

4. Some Algae Blooms Cause Brain Damage and Memory Loss

In most towns that have beach access, if algae blooms show up in the water then a sign will be put out warning you not to go swimming. Most people know that an algae bloom can be dangerous, but probably not the extent to which these things cause harm. There are also multiple toxins that you need to watch out for.

One toxin called domoic acid forms in algae blooms and infects anything that may eat it. These toxins can then work their way up the food chain. A number of sea lions were affected in 2015, leading to brain damage and memory loss. 

Another toxin, Pfiesteria piscicida, gained infamy in the 1980s when fishermen exposed to it began exhibiting signs of cognitive dysfunction, and then the scientists studying it suffered the same fate. 

The microbe has not been studied well, nor has its effect on humans. Some people report confusion or nausea. One of the scientists studying it lost the feeling in his legs and had to crawl out of his lab to get help. When fish are infected with it, the result is death. Large lesions form on their bodies, and it looks like they’ve been burned by acid. 

3. A Study Linked SpongeBob to Poor Brain Function in Children

Over the years, people have found a way to demonize almost anything under the guise of protecting children. You can go all the way back to antiquity and read about how Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth. Elvis Presley did the same thing with his gyrating hips, and heavy metal music, violent video games, and sugar in soda are all in the same boat. They have all been accused of being bad for children in one way or another. But how many of those can be accused of damaging children’s brains on a fundamental level?

In 2011 a study concluded that SpongeBob SquarePants was hurting children’s brains and harming higher cognition. According to the study, 4-year-olds who sat down to watch 9 minutes of SpongeBob showed “less self-control, a reduced ability to delay gratification, and poorer working memory skills” than kids who did something else.

One of the conclusions drawn here was that kids who watch SpongeBob are overwhelmed by having to keep up with the fast pace, frantic cartoon. Obviously, the fact that these were four-year-olds did factor in, and no long-term conclusions were drawn suggesting they would have chronic memory issues. That said, if you ask a four-year-old to remember a phone number right after watching Spongebob, you’ll probably not be happy with the results. 

2. A Bad Sex Life Can Lead to Memory Loss in Later Life

Sex has been shown to provide multiple health benefits. From lower blood pressure to an improved immune system, pain relief, and depression relief, a healthy sex life boosts your well-being. You can add protecting your memory later in life to the list, also.

Sexually active patients between 50 and 89 score higher on memory tests than those who are not engaging in sexual activity. In another study that spanned 12 years, over 800 men were tracked, and those who experienced a lack of sexual satisfaction or erectile dysfunction also had higher instances of memory decline. The study was not concerned with how often a person had sex or how many partners they had, just their overall level of satisfaction. And if you are satisfied, you’ll probably suffer less memory decline in later years. 

1. Social Isolation Has Been Linked to Memory Decline

Being alone is not considered good for your health. One reason it’s good to keep in touch with others and maintain a social relationship is for the sake of your memory. Social isolation has been linked to memory loss, and it’s been determined that memory loss precedes social isolation, not the other way around. If you consider yourself a lone wolf, you might want to look into getting some friends to add to your wolfpack.

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, doctors saw the effects of social isolation firsthand. People who normally engaged with family and friends had to cope with being more alone, and the effects were profound. Studies during the pandemic were small, but associations were drawn between isolation and issues with memory. 60% of patients in one study who already had Alzheimer’s or mild memory impairment experienced worse issues.

It’s believed lack of socialization can cause cognitive decline and poorer resilience in your brain simply because your brain is getting so little stimulation. 

If someone mentions the period 1492-1800 in Europe, you might think: Columbus’ discovery of the Americas; Protestant Reformation; Shakespeare; Charles II; Scientific Revolution via Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and co; Dr Johnson and Mad King George III. What you probably don’t know is that, at just the time when European Christians were denouncing supposed cannibals of the Americas as the scum of the earth, these same Europeans were swallowing just about every part of the human body as medicine.

10 Bizarre Things People Did With Corpses

10 Yummy Mummies for Medicine

In the Middle Ages, physicians began to use the bodies of ancient Egyptian mummies for medicine. In 1424, for example, the authorities in Cairo discovered persons who confessed under torture that they ‘were removing bodies from the tombs, boiling them in hot water, and collecting the oil which rose to the surface. This was sold to the Europeans for 25 gold pieces per hundredweight. The men were imprisoned’.

By the time of Shakespeare, in the 1580s, one Elizabethan traveller told of seeing ‘the bodies of ancient men, not rotten but all whole’, being daily unearthed from a Cairo pyramid. And a British merchant apprentice, John Sanderson, illicitly obtained a mummy shipment of over six hundred pounds in weight.

Come the late 17th century, it was getting much harder to smuggle mummies into Europe for medicine. Accordingly, merchants in Egypt baked up the flesh of dead lepers, beggars or camels into ‘counterfeit mummy’ to satisfy European demand. Finally, the trade plundered ‘Guanche mummies’ from the Canary Islands.

As the Guanche people were thought to have emigrated from North Africa, the civilised Europeans were in fact eating Africans; and also eating ancient Egyptians, founders of perhaps the greatest civilization the world has ever known. Perhaps the Europeans were the Real Savages after all.

9 Drink the Red Tincture

Well: you may first want to know how it was made. One should take ‘the cadaver of a reddish man … whole, fresh without blemish, of around twenty-four years of age, dead of a violent death (not of illness), exposed to the moon’s rays for one day and night, but with a clear sky’. One must next ‘cut the muscular flesh of this man and sprinkle it with powder of myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe, then soak it, making it tender, finally hanging the pieces in a very dry and shady place until they dry out’. Finally, ‘a most red tincture’ could be extracted from this artfully cured flesh.

This kind of recipe was popular among followers of the controversial medical reformer Paracelsus (d.1541). And many of these followers were extremely influential. The Paracelsian Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne (1573-1655) has rightly been dubbed ‘Europe’s physician’. In his long career he treated Henri IV, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, James I, John Donne, Charles I, Charles II, and Oliver Cromwell.

8 The Vampire Pope and the Vampire Aristocracy

In July 1492 Pope Innocent VIII lay dying. One of the alleged cures attempted at Innocent’s deathbed is particularly memorable. Three healthy youths were bribed by the pope’s physician, with the promise of a ducat apiece. The youths were then cut and bled. All three presently bled to death. The pope drank their blood, still fresh and hot, in an attempt to revive his failing powers. The attempt was not successful. Innocent himself also died soon after, on 25 July.

So runs the account of the pope’s contemporary, Stefano Infessura. Infessura was a lawyer and a fierce critic of Innocent VIII. Can his claims be trusted? Contemporary evidence shows that Innocent’s Vampire Cure seems to have been merely a more extreme version of a therapy recommended by others. Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), for example, was one of the most highly-respected figures of Renaissance Europe. And he too believed that the aged could rejuvenate themselves if they would ‘suck the blood of an adolescent’ who was ‘clean, happy, temperate, and whose blood is excellent but perhaps a little excessive’.

In 1777 one Thomas Mortimer claimed that, ‘towards the close of the fifteenth century, an idle opinion prevailed, that the declining strength and vigour of old people might be repaired by transfusing the blood of young persons’. He adds that some ‘drank the warm blood of young persons’ and that the practice was suppressed in France after ‘some of the principal nobility … turned raving mad’ as a result.

7 Cannibal monarchs

Here’s something you were never taught in your school history classes. James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. James was in fact unusual in his refusal, and it was somewhat surprising, as he was one of the most disgusting monarchs in British history. He never washed or changed his clothes, and was so fond of hunting that he would urinate in the saddle to save the trouble of dismounting.

As for Charles I? His blood was mopped up with handkerchieves by spectators after his beheading in 1649. There is in fact a painting of this, by an eyewitness, John Weesop. Intriguingly, some of the handkerchieves belonged to Parliamentarians, who still nonetheless believed that the king’s blood could cure ‘the king’s evil’.

But the biggest player of all in the dark world of corpse medicine was Charles II. Charles reportedly paid £6,000 for the recipe for ‘spirit of skull’, originally formulated by the eminent chemist Robert Goddard in the 1650s. This distillation now became so closely associated with Charles that it was known as ‘the King’s Drops’, and was in great demand amongst élite patients. One Lady Anne Dormer drank them with chocolate against depression, and they were given to Queen Mary on her deathbed in 1694. Before that, they were the very first remedy Charles reached for on 2 February 1685, a few days before he died.

In France decades before, the Emperor Francis I (d.1547) ‘always carried [mummy] in his purse, fearing no accident, if he had but a little of that by him’. In Britain William III was given powdered skull for his epilepsy.

6 Cannibal Aristocrats and Gentry

Robert Boyle, the aristocrat who became known as the Father of Chemistry, distilled human blood into various treatments around this time, and would sometimes give these to a noble or genteel patient under a false name, lest they had qualms about swallowing blood. He claimed a near miraculous recovery in one case.

Whilst some of the nobility were therefore unwitting vampires, others were quite openly cannibalistic. A 1653 cure for epilepsy included ‘a pennyweight of the powder of gold, six pennyweight of pearl, six pennyweight of amber, six pennyweight of coral, and eight grains of bezoar’, adding: ‘also you must put some powder of a dead man’s skull’. This came from the recipe book of Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent. Historian Elaine Leong has shown that many other noblewomen and gentlewomen of the age made their own cannibal medicines, using mummy, skull, or blood and fat. If you were a humble tenant of such a woman, you would probably not have the nerve to refuse the cannibal treats she offered you.

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5 The Secret History of Human Skulls

If you happened to chance upon a human skull in the time of Charles II, you would probably feel great joy, rather than great fear. A prized medical commodity, one single skull could be worth as much eleven shillings (whilst an unskilled labourer might earn perhaps ten pence a day). Shavings or powder of skull could be used against epilepsy and haemorrhoids, and the King’s Drops against everything from depression down to miracle cures on the deathbed.

The most highly valued skull was one with moss on it, as pictured on the cover of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. This moss would be powdered and then used to stop bleeding: either on wounds or thrust up the nostrils against nosebleeds. Robert Boyle himself used it against a severe nosebleed one summer, and swore that it worked, even when merely held in his hand.

Boyle’s family were from Ireland, and so was the moss which he used. With no one left to bury the dead after the war crimes of English invaders, skeletons and skulls lay in green Irish fields for perhaps decades, and in some cases botanical moss grew on the skull. You could see these in London chemists’ shops around 1750, in the time of Dr Johnson. As late as the 1770s, by the time Mad King George III was on the throne, there were still import and export duties on skulls brought from Ireland, and later shipped onto Germany.

4 The Secret History of Human Fat

In October 1601, the then Dutch city of Ostend was a few weeks into the longest siege in history. At one point, the Dutch lured a party of Spanish besiegers into a trap and slew them all. After rifling the corpses for valuables and arms, a few of the Dutch could also be seen dragging wobbling sacks back into the city. They contained human fat, swiftly plundered from the fresh corpses by surgeons.

The reason for this was that human fat was a prime treatment against wounds and sores. Usually, the chief source of fat at this time was the executioner. In France, Italy and northern Europe he would either sell it to chemists or treat you himself. Executioners performed a surprising number of cures in this era, and in Germany one of them (records Kathy Stuart) was supposed to have saved a limb given up for amputation. The bandages he used were almost certainly soaked in human fat. In Britain in the time of Dr Johnson, fat continued in use as other corpse medicine was attacked. It was used to treat rabies, gout, cancer and arthritis.

Some idea of its value comes from an incident in Norfolk in 1736. After a man and his wife had ‘had some words’, the husband suddenly ‘went out and hanged himself’. An inquest ruled that, as this was suicide, the man must be buried at the crossroads. But, eschewing funeral or burial, ‘his wife sent for a surgeon, and sold the body for half a guinea’. While the surgeon was carefully ‘feeling about the body’ the woman assured him: ‘”he is fit for your purpose, he is as fat as butter”‘.

3 Medical Vampires at Public Executions

Touring Vienna in the winter of 1668-9, the English traveller Edward Browne saw a public execution, the man beheaded whilst sitting in a chair. ‘As soon as his head fell to the ground, a man ran ‘speedily with a pot in his hand, and filling it with the blood, yet spouting out of his neck, he presently drank it off, and ran away’. This he did, Browne adds, ‘as a remedy against the falling-sickness’.

By this time, hundreds if not thousands of those suffering ‘the falling-sickness’ (as epilepsy was then known) had drunk hot fresh blood at public executions in Austria, Germany and Scandinavia. And hundreds or thousands more would continue to do so until at least 1866.

In Denmark in 1823 the Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen saw ‘”a pitiful poor person made to drink by his superstitious parents a cup of the blood of an executed person, in an attempt to cure him from epilepsy”’. In Sweden the authorities did not permit blood drinking at beheadings. At a beheading in 1866 soldiers were stationed to prevent the rush for blood, so that it soaked into the earth. But as soon as the guards had left, people surged forward and, falling to their knees, crammed the bloodsoaked dirt into their mouths.

2 The Secret History of the Soul

A great many forms of corpse medicine were underpinned by one extraordinary belief: simply, that you could swallow the powers of the human soul by drinking blood, or various distillations of skull or flesh. In this sense, then, the Whitewashed Cannibalism of Europe was emphatically Christian.
Those who drank hot blood at executions might seem to have the highest chance of absorbing such power. In most cases the felon was not obviously dead as they drank. As epilepsy was then held to be a disease of the soul, there was also a special logic linking disease and cure.

In other cases, the bodies of criminals used by chemists may have hung on gibbets for some time. But our medical reformer Paracelsus, champion of such recipes, had stated quite precisely that such a corpse was useful for up to three days. This claim was rooted in a startling but widespread belief of northern Europe. For some time after what we might call legal death, the power of the soul was held to smoulder on in the body. It was associated with the blood in particular, but also with very fine hot spirits of blood which saturated all flesh and bone. Because the soul and spirits were a physical force at this time, the young red-headed man killed by violence offered the greatest source of youthful vitality, as well as the best type of flesh and blood.

1 When and why did it end?

The educated began to turn against corpse medicine around 1750. Dr Johnson and his new Dictionary were key players in this shift, with Johnson deriding the ‘horrid medicines’ of a backward past. Johnson and others sought to create a new culture of Reason opposed to unenlightened Superstition. They also increasingly gave up the idea of the soul in the body, which meant that people no longer seemed worth eating for medicine. And as the emerging Medical Profession struggled to clean up its Public Image, corpse medicine seemed an increasingly hard sell to genteel patients, who were now more easily disgusted than those of the Restoration.

But corpse medicine continued amongst ordinary people for well over a hundred years. Along with the vampires of continental beheadings, we hear of Britons obtaining skulls to treat their children in Victorian times; whilst in Scotland until around 1900 epileptics might be advised to drink from the skull of a suicide.

No less strange for being true.

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About The Author: Richard Sugg is the author of eleven books, including Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Middle Ages to the Falun Gong; Fairies: A Dangerous History; Our Week with the Juffle Hunters; and The Smoke of the Soul. He has previously lectured in English and History at the universities of Cardiff and Durham (2001-2017), and his work has featured in The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Lancet, The Times, Daily Telegraph, the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, among others. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires has been translated into Turkish. He has appeared on television with Pat Spain, and with Tony Robinson, when they made cannibal medicines for Channel 4. It was educational. @DrSugg