A Stream of Knowledge
A collection of random facts worth knowing
Updated weekly ❤️
History
From 1912 to 1948, the Olympic Games hosted fine arts competitions. Medals were given for literature, architecture, sculpture, painting, and music. The art submitted was required to be “Olympic-themed”.
In the 1830s, ketchup was sold as medicine. It was marketed in 1834 as a cure for an upset stomach by Ohio physician John Cook. Ketchup wasn’t popularized as a condiment until the late 19th century.
Of the 2,000 people accused during the Salem Witch Trials, none were actually burned alive. The majority of them were jailed while some were hung.
During the Great Depression, people often made clothes from food sacks (potato sacks, flour bags, anything made of burlap). Once distributors got wind of this trend, they started making their food sacks colorful to give people a more stylish material to work with.
Design
The earliest languages were logographic meaning that icons represented entire words instead of phonetic sounds like you’d use to read this blog aloud.
Early languages heavily relied on visual representation, giving us the foundation for graphic design and pictorial communication.
As early as 200CE, China used wood reliefs to stamp and print designs on silk clothes, and later paper. China holds the most records for printing discoveries, in fact, in 1040 Bi Sheng invented the world’s first movable type printing press. This invention came hundreds of years before the European Gutenburg printing press was released in 1440.
Literature
Don Quixote is the best-selling novel of all time, with over 500 million copies sold.
Bill Gates bought ‘Codex Leicester’, one of Leonardo DiVinci’s scientific journals, for $30.8 million.
In Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’, there is a famous sentence that’s 823 words long. I wonder how many high school English teachers have insisted it’s a run-on sentence.
Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, hand-copied ‘War and Peace’ approximately seven times. The novel is 1400 pages long.
