Ancient Egyptians are often said to have worshipped cats. They didn’t — though it is accurate to say their felines were beloved and pampered, sometimes bedazzled in gold accessories, and occasionally allowed to eat directly from dinner plates at meals. Cats first made their appearance in Fertile Crescent farming communities around 8,000 years ago, and they initially earned their keep as household protectors from rodents, snakes, and scorpions. Eventually, the Egyptians grew to see cats’ protectiveness and companionship as the same traits held by their deities, particularly Bastet, a goddess often depicted as a cat or lion who was honored with temples and pilgrimages. All in all, the Egyptians bonded so well with their cat companions that they mourned their pets after death, and both cat owners and family members would publicly express their grief by shaving off their eyebrows. Some historians believe that the mourning period lasted until a new set of eyebrows grew in (which could be as long as three or four months).

No one knows the original name of the Sphinx in Giza.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

The Great Sphinx of Giza is known for its cat-shaped body, but the sculpture has a secret: its own name. There's no record of what the ancient Egyptians called it. The name used today comes from Greek mythology, and likely emerged 2,000 years after the statue was carved.

The ancient Egyptians are often credited with domesticating felines, though in 2004, archaeologists found a 9,500-year-old cat buried in Cyprus — suggesting cats may have been living alongside humans earlier than previously thought. Still, Egyptians likely helped transform cats from the tiny, wild creatures they once were to the lazy furballs we now snuggle with; some historians believe the Egyptians selectively bred housecats, helping their numbers flourish and giving them the temperaments we now enjoy (or at least tolerate) today.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

For the first several thousand years of their existence, doors were largely knob-free; they were typically opened and closed using latches, handles, bars, or leather straps.  The process of entering and exiting a room was revolutionized on December 10, 1878, when a self-taught 16-year-old inventor named Osbourn Dorsey received a patent for a doorknob with an internal door-latching mechanism. This was a massive improvement to existing doorknobs, which lacked internal latches and were generally more difficult to use — some used external bolts or strings and didn’t stay in place as well. However, as modern innovations can take a while to catch on, it took several more years for most people to embrace Dorsey’s upgraded doorknobs and begin having them installed in their homes.

Doors were invented in ancient Rome.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fib

They were actually invented in ancient Egypt. The earliest known evidence of doors are depictions found in Egyptian tomb paintings dating back 4,000 years.

Although most of us now use Dorsey’s version of a doorknob every day, little else is known about the African American inventor’s life beyond the fact that his mother Christina and siblings Mary and Levi were enslaved prior to his birth in 1862. Before his inventing days, Dorsey either trained or worked as a blacksmith.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Whether at home on the couch or among the crowds in Times Square, watching the New Year’s Eve ball drop symbolizes a fresh start. But as the ball descends to mark another year gone by, it also harkens back to an era when knowing the exact time was much more difficult. Before the 20th century, timekeeping was significantly less precise; most people noted the time thanks to church bells that rang on the hour, though the system was often inaccurate. For sailors and ship captains, knowing the exact time was key for charting navigational courses, and they used a device called a chronometer to keep track of time onboard ships. That’s why Robert Wauchope, a captain in the British navy, created the time ball in 1829. The raised balls were visible to ships along the British coastline, and they were manually dropped at the same time each day, allowing ships to set their chronometers to the time at their port of departure. At sea, navigators would calculate longitude based on local time, which they could determine from the angle of the sun, and the time on their chronometer. 

The Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball has dropped every year since 1907.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fib

Nearly, but not quite: The New York ball drop has a stunning record only dimmed by World War II. Revelers gathered in Times Square in 1942 and 1943, but no ball drop took place, thanks to wartime blackouts. Instead, the new year was marked by a minute of silence followed by chimes.

Time balls emerged as a timekeeping feature throughout the world, though evidence of them is hard to find today. The U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., installed one in 1845, which would later help history record the precise time of Lincoln’s assassination; it dropped daily through 1936. But the time ball’s reign was short-lived. The devices fell out of fashion by the 1880s, thanks to the availability of self-winding clocks. The concept would eventually be co-opted by The New York Times in 1907, when the newspaper’s formerly explosive New Year’s Eve celebrations were barred from using fireworks. Organizers took a chance by looking back at the time ball’s influence, and decided a lighted midnight drop was the perfect way to honor the occasion.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Flight attendants make our journeys through the sky safer and more comfortable. Yet they do more than just serve peanuts and soda; they’re trained to respond to safety and medical emergencies, necessary skills for cruising at 35,000 feet. However, modern flight attendants don’t have to have in-depth medical training the way the first American in-air staff did — the earliest commercial airlines equipped with flight attendants required their staff to be registered nurses.

There are more nurses than doctors in the U.S.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

While doctors often make the diagnoses, it’s nurses who do much of the hands-on work of caring for patients — which is why it’s a good thing there are so many of them. The U.S. has three times as many registered nurses as doctors.

The first flight attendants to board U.S. commercial flights were led by Ellen Church, a nurse who was also a licensed aviator. Unable to find work as a pilot due to gender discrimination, Church found another way into the sky by pitching airlines the concept of the “flight stewardess,” who could use her nursing skills to aid sick or injured passengers while also easing nerves at a time when flying was still somewhat dangerous and often uncomfortable for passengers. Boeing Air Transport tested Church’s idea in May 1930, hiring Church and seven other nurses for flights between San Francisco and Chicago (with 13 stops in between). In air, the attendants were tasked with serving meals, cleaning the plane’s interior, securing the seats to the floor, and even keeping passengers from accidentally opening the emergency exit door. After a successful three-month stint, other airlines picked up Church’s idea, putting out calls for nurses in their early 20s to join the first flight crews — standard requirements until World War II, when nurses overwhelmingly joined the war effort, leaving room for more women of all backgrounds to enter the aviation field.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email