Original photo by sorincolac/ iStock
Most people use eBay to buy and sell everything from baseball cards to old jewelry. In 2007, a man by the name of Gerrit Six tried selling something a bit larger: the country of Belgium. In a listing titled “For Sale: Belgium, a kingdom in three parts,” the Belgian citizen made light of a major political crisis involving disputes between the country’s French- and Dutch-speaking political parties by jokingly attempting to sell the Western European nation to the highest bidder. Suffice to say that the listing was taken down before anyone could claim Belgium for themselves. Asked why he did it, Six responded simply, “I wanted to attract attention.” Mission accomplished.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factThe website launched in 1995 as AuctionWeb, described at the time as “dedicated to bringing together buyers and sellers in an honest and open marketplace.” It was renamed eBay (a shortened version of founder Pierre Omidyar’s consulting firm, Echo Bay) in September 1997.
Belgium is hardly the only strange thing to be listed on eBay, let alone sold. A corn flake shaped like Illinois went for $1,350 in 2008, a suit of guinea pig armor fetched $24,300 in 2013, and one buyer bid $55,000 for a ghost in a jar before later backing out of the deal. “Buyer beware,” indeed.
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The first item sold on eBay was a ______.
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The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer.
We have a Belgian to thank for the big bang theory.
Though sometimes attributed to Edwin Hubble, the big bang theory can more accurately be traced to priest, astronomer, and cosmologist Georges Lemaître. When Lemaître began working on his ideas in the late 1920s, most models of the universe showed it as static (nonexpanding). Yet Lemaître was intrigued by data showing that other galaxies were speeding away from us — and the farther away from us they were, the faster they moved. In 1927, Lemaître posited that the universe’s expansion could be the result of a single point exploding at a specific moment, an event he referred to as both “the primeval atom” and “the cosmic egg.” His paper, which carried the rather lengthy title “Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques” (translated in 1931 as “A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius Accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extra-galactic Nebulæ”) initially drew little notice but eventually helped shape our ever-evolving understanding of the universe.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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