In the early 1970s, a young Steve Wozniak — the future co-founder of Apple — was doing some casual “phreaking” in his college dorm room at Berkeley University. A portmanteau of the word “phone” and “freaking,” phreaking was a method through which technologically savvy ne’er-do-wells could hack into early telecommunication systems using a gadget called a “blue box.” The result? Free phone calls anywhere in the world. To test his newly acquired phreaking abilities, Wozniak placed a call to the Vatican, asking to speak with the pope. Putting on his best impersonation of Henry Kissinger (then-President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state), Wozniak nearly got the pope on the line until a high-ranking bishop caught him in the lie. The jig was up. 

Segway polo’s championship cup is named after Steve Wozniak.

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In 2006, the sport of Segway polo (it’s exactly what it sounds like) named its championship cup, the Woz Challenge Cup, after its most famous player — Steve “Woz” Wozniak.

This wasn’t a one-off incident — pranks played a vital role in the history of Apple, which was founded in 1976. Steve Jobs, like Wozniak, also had a love for practical jokes. During his early school years, Jobs placed firecrackers under his teacher’s chair (no major injuries were reported), and switched all the combination locks on his classmates’ bikes. After Jobs and Wozniak understood the power of the blue box, the duo sold a homemade version of the gadget for $150 to fellow Berkeley students. Nearly 40 years later, Jobs’ love for pranks hadn’t faded. When he introduced the world to the iPhone in 2007, Jobs called a local Starbucks and ordered 4,000 lattes while on stage. Thankfully, he quickly let the unlucky barista off the hook with a lighthearted “just kidding.”

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Ernest wasn’t the only eccentric Hemingway. Leicester, the younger brother of the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises, was also a writer and used the proceeds from his biography, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, to establish his own micronation. He did so on July 4, 1964, citing the obscure U.S. Guano Islands Act of 1856 to claim an 8-by-30-foot bamboo raft floating 8 miles off the coast of Jamaica, in international waters, as his own sovereign land. The Guano Islands Act grants U.S. citizens the right to claim, on behalf of the U.S., any unoccupied “island, rock, or key” where valuable guano (read: bird droppings used as fertilizer) can be found. Patriot that he was, Leicester ceded half of his humble territory to the U.S. and declared the other half the Republic of New Atlantis.

Ernest Hemingway had only one sibling.

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Though they were the only boys in the family, Leicester and Ernest Hemingway had four sisters: Mercelline, Ursula, Madelaine, and Carol. Ernest, who was born in 1899, was the second-oldest after Marcelline, while Leicester (born in 1915) was the youngest.

As is often the case with micronations, the founder of New Atlantis took it more seriously than anyone else. He drafted a constitution that was actually just the United States Constitution with “New Atlantis” replacing every instance of “United States,” created stamps, enlisted his wife to design a nice flag, and declared shark teeth and carob beans to be the country’s official currency, called “scruples.” Not long after Leicester Hemingway was voted the first president of New Atlantis in what we can only assume was a landslide, however, the country’s coffers ran empty (perhaps due to a lack of taxpayer revenue).  The country’s primary activity seems to have been issuing stamps — meant to finance marine protections in the area — but the Universal Postal Union never recognized the stamps, or the country. Within a few years of its founding, the raft became untethered during a storm, drifted out to sea, and was destroyed, consigning New Atlantis to the dustbin of history.

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Each June, stores roll out their Father’s Day best — sales on ties, watches, and barbecue grills. But when Father’s Day was first created, a much smaller token was given out to dads: roses. Flowers aren’t as heavily advertised for Father’s Day now as they are for mothers in May, yet the link between dads and the delicate blooms comes from the earliest American celebrations of the holiday.

Roses are the national flower of the U.S.

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Many flowers were in the running, but only one became the official bloom of the United States: the rose. President Ronald Reagan signed a proclamation certifying the rose as the national flower in 1986, over other suggestions such as marigolds, dogwoods, and columbines.

The first known Father’s Day is tied to the West Virginia mining community of Fairmont. On July 5, 1908, the town held a church service honoring the lives of fathers in their community, many of whom had perished the December before in what is widely considered the worst mining disaster in U.S. history. However, the church event was held just one time, and another city propelled the holiday into national view. 

In 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd launched her campaign to honor fathers from her home in Spokane, Washington. As the daughter of a Civil War veteran and widower who had raised six children, Dodd believed fathers deserved recognition for their roles. Within a year, she had drummed up community support, and on June 19, 1910, Washington became the first state to celebrate Father’s Day. Dodd’s first festivities included an exchange of roses; children gave red roses to their fathers and pinned color-coded buds to their shirts — red for living fathers and white roses in honor of the deceased. The activist even rode through the city, handing out flowers and gifts to fathers who couldn’t leave home. Over time, the tradition of giving roses to dads faded away, but the holiday stuck around. After years of rallying, Father’s Day became a federally recognized holiday in 1972. 

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