Not many Americans know the name Charles G. Dawes today, but they should. As one of only three U.S. vice presidents to receive the Nobel Peace Prize during their lifetimes (for his work to preserve peace in Europe), he has reserved a place in the history books alongside Theodore Roosevelt and Al Gore. But perhaps even more notably, he’s also the only veep with a No. 1 hit pop song. Dawes was a self-trained pianist and flautist as well as a banker, and in 1911, 14 years before he would become Calvin Coolidge’s vice president, he wrote a short instrumental piece titled “Melody in A Major.” The song received some attention during Dawes’ lifetime, but it wasn't until 1951 — the year he died — that American songwriter Carl Sigman put lyrics to Dawes’ creation and called it “It’s All in the Game.” Seven years later, Tommy Edwards became the first Black artist to reach No. 1 in the U.S. with his doo-wop-influenced rendition of Sigman’s song.

Bob Dylan, the only U.S. songwriter to win the Nobel Prize, has no No. 1 hits.

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Not true, but just barely. Surprisingly, folk legend Bob Dylan has only one No. 1 hit under his own name, and it arrived in 2020 with the 17-minute-long song “Murder Most Foul,” which debuted atop Billboard’s Rock Digital Song Sales chart (his first time topping any Billboard chart).

But that wasn’t the end of Dawes’ posthumous music stardom. The song soon transformed into a pop standard, and was covered by a variety of artists across several genres. There’s Nat King Cole’s big band affair (1957), Elton John's upbeat cover (1970), Van Morrison’s sorrowful take (1979), Issac Hayes’ soulful remix (1980), and Merle Haggard’s country creation (1984), just to name a few. To this day (and for likely many days to come), Dawes remains the only chief executive — president or vice president — to score a hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

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Much human innovation is a collective effort — scientists, innovators, and artisans building off the work of predecessors to develop some groundbreaking technology over the course of decades, or even centuries. But in the case of writing systems, scholars believe humans may have independently invented them four separate times. That’s because none of these writing systems shows significant influence from previously existing systems, or similarities to another. Experts generally agree that the first writing system appeared in the Mesopotamian society of Sumer in what is now Iraq. Early pictorial signs appeared some 5,500 years ago, and slowly evolved into complex characters representing the sounds of the Sumerian language. Today, this ancient writing system is known as cuneiform. 

Half the world population is multilingual.

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Experts estimate that at least half of the human population can speak two languages or more. However, the U.S. is drastically behind compared to other countries. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 20% of Americans speak another language, whereas that number is 56% in Europe.

However, cuneiform wasn’t a one-off innovation. Writing systems then evolved in ancient Egypt, in the form of hieroglyphs, around 3200 BCE — only an estimated 250 years after the first examples of cuneiform. The next place that writing developed was China, where the Shang dynasty set up shop along the Yellow River and wrote early Chinese characters on animal bones during divination rituals around 1300 BCE. Finally, in Mesoamerica, writing began to take shape around 900 BCE, and influenced ancient civilizations like the Zapotecs, Olmecs, Aztecs, and Maya. Sadly, little is known about the history of many Mesoamerican languages, as Catholic priests and Spanish conquistadors destroyed a lot of the surviving documentation.

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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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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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