We all remember the Marlboro Man: an able-bodied outdoorsman, usually a cowboy, who enjoyed a hard-earned puff from his cigarette amid a day of honest labor, his steely gaze beckoning us to "come to where the flavor is" in the land of Marlboro Country.

Except the real Marlboro Man never smoked — at least not the "original," an individual by the name of Bob Norris who featured in the brand's early TV commercials. A Colorado rancher who was offered the job after being seen in a photo with his friend John Wayne, Norris reluctantly became the face of an overwhelmingly successful advertising campaign by the Leo Burnett agency that made Marlboro the world’s top-selling cigarette brand by the 1970s. But while Norris epitomized the Marlboro Man’s image of rugged individuality, he ultimately proved too principled to last in the role; when his children asked why he was promoting a product they were forbidden to try, he reportedly hung up his Stetson after 12 years of cigarette pitch work.

Marlboros were once marketed as a women’s cigarette.

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The Philip Morris product was promoted for women beginning in the 1920s through taglines like “mild as May,” until the addition of a filter prompted a macho rebranding and the launch of the Marlboro Man in 1954.

Of course, Norris was an anomaly among his Marlboro brethren. While he lived to the ripe old age of 90, others who followed in his bootsteps learned the hard way what decades of smoking could yield, with several later publicly speaking out against the habit before dying from smoking-related illnesses. With the health risks all but impossible to ignore by the time a civil settlement was reached between the major tobacco companies and most U.S. states in 1998 (in which the companies paid out billions of dollars to compensate for taxpayer money spent on tobacco-related diseases), the Marlboro Man was sent riding into the sunset of Marlboro Country by the close of the 20th century.

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Although it may seem like something that emerged alongside ancient Euclidean geometry or Babylonian astronomy, calculus is a surprisingly recent invention — even newer, in fact, than some of the historical institutions that teach it, including Harvard University. 

Harvard was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1636, making it the oldest operating university in the U.S. Back then, it was set up to train Puritan clergy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and its early curriculum focused on classical languages, theology, and logic.

Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.

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Education at Oxford began around 1096, and the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325.

Later on in the 1600s, across the Atlantic, mathematical heavyweights Isaac Newton in England and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany began working on a new kind of mathematics called calculus, a system that could precisely explain motion and change. The two scholars independently developed their respective systems around the same time in the 1660s, and each published early calculus works in the 1680s. By that time, Harvard had already been educating students for more than 40 years.

The university gradually secularized throughout the 18th century, and its religious instruction began to take a back seat to pave the way for more diverse course offerings. Still, it wasn't until the 1720s — nearly a century after Harvard’s founding — that calculus was first introduced into the curriculum.

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Samurai seem pretty old-school, a remnant of a feudal past, whereas sound recording feels like a hallmark invention of the modern era. So it’s strange to think that these things actually overlapped — and that sound recording started before the samurai disappeared. When U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s “black ships” arrived in Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) in 1853, the end of the samurai — Japan’s hereditary warrior caste — was close at hand. Perry’s maneuvers opened Japan to the West after centuries of isolation. It would take several more years, but the Meiji Restoration (1868–1889) saw the end of the samurai when feudalism was officially abolished in 1871. 

“Mary Had a Little Lamb” is based on a true story.

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Heard at piano recitals everywhere, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is thought to be based on Mary Elizabeth Sawyer, who in 1815 nursed an injured lamb to health. The lamb then followed Mary everywhere, prompting a fellow student to write the familiar poem.

Thomas Edison’s recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1877 is sometimes regarded as the world’s first true sound recording — but that isn’t technically true. In the late 1850s, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville started capturing a series of sounds, including the French folk song “Au clair de la lune” in 1860, using a phonautograph (a machine that captured the image of a sound wave using soot). Scott never designed the phonautograph to play sound back, unlike Edison’s phonograph. But in 2008, scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California successfully recreated some of Scott’s recordings, including the folk song, making the Frenchman’s experiments the first recorded sound in history — and preserved from a time when samurai still roamed the streets of Edo. 

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