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Woolly mammoths were still alive when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. A small population hung on at Wrangel Island in the Arctic until about 4,000 years ago, centuries after the pyramid went up around 2560 BC.
In 1861, Chicago lifted a six-story hotel 6 feet while guests were still staying in it.
The city was raising its streets out of the mud, so 500 men under the Tremont House slowly turned jackscrews on signal. The hotel stayed open, and some guests never noticed.
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There's no confirmed case of a child killed by a stranger's poisoned Halloween candy. A sociologist checked reports back to 1958 and found none. The infamous 1974 Texas case was a dad who laced Pixy Stix with cyanide to kill his own 8-year-old son for life insurance.
A jockey once won a race after he'd already died. In 1923 at Belmont Park, Frank Hayes had a fatal heart attack mid-race, but his body stayed in the saddle as his horse, Sweet Kiss, cleared the last jump and crossed the line first. It was the first win of his life.
Visitors haven't been allowed up into the Statue of Liberty's torch since 1916. That summer, German saboteurs blew up a huge munitions depot on Black Tom Island, across the water. Shrapnel hit the statue, the blast damaged the torch arm, and it's been closed ever since.
In 1943, more than 34,000 American and Canadian troops stormed Kiska, an Alaskan island held by Japan. Nobody was there. The Japanese had slipped away in the fog almost 3 weeks earlier. Friendly fire, mines, and booby traps still killed 92 Allied troops.
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Today 201 years ago, news traveled over 400 miles from Buffalo to New York City in about 90 minutes, with no telegraph. For the Erie Canal's opening, cannons were set 10 to 15 miles apart the whole way. Each fired when it heard the last. The first boats took 9 days.
A wave in Alaska once ran 1,720 feet up a mountainside, higher than the Empire State Building. In 1958, an earthquake set off a rockslide into Lituya Bay. A man and his 7-year-old son were anchored in the bay. Their boat rode a 100-foot wall of water, and both survived.
In 1962, the US set off a hydrogen bomb in space, 250 miles up. It knocked out about 300 streetlights in Hawaii, 900 miles away, filled the Pacific night sky with man-made auroras, and created a radiation belt that disabled at least six satellites in the months after.
Today 125 years ago, a 63-year-old retired schoolteacher went over Niagara Falls in a barrel on her birthday and survived. Annie Edson Taylor was the first person ever to do it. A few days earlier, she sent her cat over in the same barrel as a test. It survived too.
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During World War II, the US strapped tiny firebombs to bats. The plan was to drop them over Japan so they'd roost in wooden buildings and set cities on fire. In a 1943 test in New Mexico, some armed bats escaped and set fire to an Army airfield and a general's car.
In 1958, the US Air Force accidentally dropped an atomic bomb on a family's backyard in South Carolina. The nuclear core wasn't inside, but its regular explosives still went off and left a crater about 70 feet wide. Their house was wrecked, but everyone survived.
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In 1980, an oil rig drilled into a salt mine under a Louisiana lake, and the whole lake drained down the hole like a bathtub. It swallowed the rig, 11 barges and a tugboat. A canal that fed the Gulf ran backward, making a 150-foot waterfall. All 55 miners got out alive.
The 1904 Olympic marathon was so chaotic that the first guy to across the finish line had ridden 11 miles in a car. The real winner's coaches kept him going with rat poison mixed with egg whites and brandy, then held him up as he crossed the line.
Today 159 years ago, Alaska had two Fridays in a row and skipped 11 days. When the US took over from Russia, Friday, Oct. 6 was followed by Friday, Oct. 18, because Alaska switched calendars and moved to the other side of the date line.
In 1859, a solar storm hit Earth so hard that telegraph operators unplugged their batteries and kept sending messages anyway, running only on the electricity the storm put in the wires. The northern lights were seen as far south as Cuba.
The US government was still paying a Civil War pension in 2020. Irene Triplett got $73.13 a month until she died that May at 90. Her dad fought for both the Confederacy and the Union, and he was 83 when she was born in 1930.
Today 212 years ago, London was hit by a flood of beer. A giant vat burst at a brewery and a wave of porter about 15 feet high tore through the streets, destroying houses and killing eight people.
Scientists grew flowers from a fruit that was nearly 32,000 years old. An Ice Age squirrel had stashed it in a burrow now buried about 125 feet deep in Siberian permafrost. Researchers grew whole plants from its tissue, and they bloomed and made seeds.




















