Radium is, quite famously, not good for you. Its effects on the body are deleterious — not that anyone realized this when Marie Curie discovered the alkaline earth metal in 1898, a scientific breakthrough that led to her winning the 1911 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Before long, the dangerously false belief that radium had health benefits began to spread: It was added to everything from toothpaste and hair gel to food and drinks, with glow-in-the-dark paints made from radium still sold into the 1970s. It was marketed as being good for any “common ailment,” with radioactive water sold in small jars that shops claimed would “aid nature” and act as a natural “vitalizer.”

Radium is the heaviest alkaline earth metal.

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The five other earth metals — beryllium (Be), magnesium (Mg), calcium (Ca), strontium (Sr), and barium (Ba) — all weigh less.

Of course, none of this was true — exposure to even a small amount of radium can eventually prove fatal. Curie had no way of knowing this at the time, just as she didn’t have the slightest inkling that her notebooks would remain radioactive for more than 1,500 years after her death. She was known to store such elements out in the open and even walk around her lab with them in her pockets, as she enjoyed how they “looked like faint, fairy lights.”

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Though they’re now commonly found on everything from jackets to couch cushions, zippers were actually originally made for shoes. The history of this versatile mechanism can be traced in part to inventor Whitcomb Judson, who in 1893 was granted a patent for a rudimentary zipper that he called the “clasp-locker,” an alternative to lengthy shoelaces. The patent described it as “a series of clasps securable to the flaps of the shoes,” which automatically engaged or disengaged with a movable hand device. Judson displayed his creation at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, but it was met with minimal interest. And despite several refinements to the product, this zipper ultimately never caught on due to its sharp hooks and the resulting frequency of torn fabric.

The first high-heeled shoes were worn by soldiers.

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High heels were originally worn by 10th-century Persian cavalry, who used them to stabilize their feet in stirrups while riding horseback. They later popped up in Europe, where aristocrats viewed them as a sign of virility. In 1670, France’s King Louis XIV decreed that only nobility could wear them.

Swedish inventor Gideon Sundback later improved upon Judson’s design, creating a more reliable version with two rows of metal teeth pulled together by a slider. These hookless fasteners were designed to be used on “shoes, corsets, and other articles of wear,” according to the 1917 patent. The invention then caught the eye of New York City tailor Robert Ewig, who sewed them onto money belts. The belts were popular among U.S. sailors, whose uniforms lacked pockets, and in 1918, the Navy bought 10,000 fasteners to incorporate into flight suits. In 1923, the BFGoodrich Company added Sundback’s fasteners to rubber boots and coined the word “zipper,” an onomatopoeia based on the sound they made.

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Octagon, octopus … most words that begin with the Latin prefix “Oct” have some connection to the number eight. But what about October? While the modern calendar considers the autumn month to be the 10th of the year, it wasn’t always that way. For the ancient Romans, who created the earliest form of the calendar we use now, October was originally the eighth month.

The Ethiopian calendar has 13 months.

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Cultures around the globe track time differently; take, for example, the Ethiopian Ge’ez calendar, which gives each month 30 days and runs about seven years behind the Gregorian calendar. After December, the year’s five or six remaining days create a mini month called “Pagume.”

Today’s calendar follows a 12-month cycle, though the earliest iterations had only 10 months. In ancient Rome, the year began in March and ran through December, with the first four months named for Roman deities. The next six months had more straightforward, numerical names that referenced their place in the year. The remaining weeks of winter (which would eventually become January and February) were largely ignored on paper; when the harvest season ended, so did the calendar, until the next spring planting season rolled around.

Over time, the calendar expanded by two months; January and February were added around 700 BCE, and by about the middle of the fifth century BCE, they had become the starting months of the year. When Julius Caesar introduced the Julian calendar, he didn’t adjust the number-named months to more appropriate places, though later Roman emperors tried, using names that didn’t stick. Domitian, who ruled from 81 to 96 CE, called October “Domitianus” after himself, and decades later, Commodus dubbed the month “Herculeus” after one of his own titles. Some historians believe the attempts to rename October (and the other months of the year) were widely disregarded because the leaders themselves were generally disliked, though another theory might explain it best: Like many people today, Romans of the past just weren’t fans of change.

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