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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Difficult times can lead to great art. Case in point: the volcanic explosion that caused a “year without a summer” in 1816 — and inspired the novel Frankenstein. The eruption took place at Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, many thousands of miles away from author Mary Shelley’s home in England. In addition to a harrowing death toll, the April 1815 explosion caused mass amounts of sulphur dioxide, ash, and dust to fill the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and plunging the global temperature several degrees lower, resulting in the coldest year in well over two centuries. In part because of the volcano, Europe and North America were subjected to unusually cold, wet conditions the following summer, including a “killing frost” in New England and heavy rainfall that may have contributed to Napoleon’s infamous defeat at Waterloo.

“Frankenstein” was originally published anonymously.

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The literary world didn’t exactly welcome female authors with open arms in the early 19th century, and Shelley wasn’t alone in initially publishing her book anonymously. Many believed that Percy Shelley was the author of “Frankenstein,” a falsehood Mary later had to correct many times.

So what does that have to do with Shelley’s masterpiece? Then 18 and still going by her maiden name of Godwin, she and her lover/future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, traveled to Lake Geneva in April 1816, a time of extremely gloomy weather. One fateful night that July, the two were with their friend Lord Byron, the infamous poet, when he suggested, “We will each write a ghost story.” Shelley completed hers in just a few days, writing in the introduction to Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus that “a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” Who knows: If it had been bright and sunny that week, we might never have gotten the endlessly influential 1818 book, which later spawned an assortment of movies, TV shows, plays — and of course, iconic Halloween costumes.

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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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