On average, twins are delivered just a few minutes apart — but this isn’t always the case. In 1996, for instance, a Maryland woman named Lesa West gave birth to fraternal twins over a span of 90 days. On January 1 of that year, Lesa and her partner David welcomed their daughter Molly into the world, who was born premature. After Molly’s birth, doctors were able to stop Lesa’s contractions so she could carry the other baby to full term. Three months later, on March 30, Lesa finally gave birth to little Benjamin, setting an all-time record for the longest gap between the birth of two twins.

Four babies were born at a Rolling Stones concert in 1969.

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On December 6, 1969, the Rolling Stones headlined the Altamont Free Concert in California, alongside Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and others. According to the American Red Cross, four concertgoers gave birth during the six-hour spectacle, which was attended by roughly 300,000 people.

When it comes to triplets, the longest recorded interval between births is shorter, albeit still quite substantial. On September 20, 2004, Kara McBurney of Missouri gave birth prematurely to her son Lorne. Kara then remained in the hospital for weeks until she delivered her son Sullivan 17 days, 18 hours, and 55 minutes later, and her son Isaac shortly after. There have also been two recorded instances of women delivering quadruplets over the span of several days. In general, twins are delivered earlier than single-baby pregnancies, and less than one in every two twin pregnancies lasts beyond 37 weeks. Once the first baby is delivered, it’s preferable to deliver the next child in about 15 minutes to avoid complications, and the majority of twins are delivered within 30 minutes. It doesn’t always take that long, however: The shortest recorded time between twin births was a Canadian woman named Amanda Dorris, whose twins were born just 22.976 seconds apart on April 6, 2017.

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Today Captain Morgan is one of the world’s most well-known buccaneers — not for the Welshman’s very real 17th-century exploits (of which there were many), but because of the spiced rum bottles that bear his name. History knows him as Sir Henry Morgan, lieutenant governor of Jamaica and arguably the most infamous buccaneer who ever lived. In the 17th and 18th centuries, buccaneers were a distinct flavor of privateer (sort of a legal pirate), usually bankrolled by the English, who harassed the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean. 

Disney invented “pirate speak.”

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Historians don’t know how pirates spoke when sailing the high seas, but the pirate-speak of today (“arrg,” “ye matey,” etc.) can be traced to the 1950 Disney film “Treasure Island,” with Robert Newton as Long John Silver. Newton created the accent based on his West Country dialect.

Morgan first arrived in the Caribbean around 1654, and became captain of a privateer vessel eight years later. Soon, he was plundering Spanish colonies in the Caribbean with support from the English crown. Morgan proved so adept at the trade that he amassed a great fortune, established sugar plantations in Jamaica, and by the decade’s end, had 36 ships and around 1,800 men under his command. Then, in 1671, Morgan attacked Spanish-held Panama City, not knowing that England had signed a treaty with Spain a year earlier. To appease the enraged Spanish, England arrested Morgan and sent him to London, but he received a hero’s welcome there, with King Charles II knighting him in 1674. Morgan soon returned to Jamaica, where he lived out the rest of his days. Even before his death in 1688, published stories detailed Morgan’s buccaneering career. Around 250 years later, in 1944, a distiller named Seagram’s bought a spiced rum recipe from a Jamaican pharmacy. The infamous Captain Morgan seemed a fitting namesake for the Caribbean-born liquor.

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"Thirty Days Hath September" may be a useful mnemonic device, but there are times when that poem might have led you astray. In 1752, September was only 19 days long in the U.K., due to the Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750. That parliamentary move transferred the country from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar — the former having overestimated each year's length by about 11 minutes.

Back in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII had declared that all countries under the dominion of the Catholic Church needed to adopt the Gregorian calendar, but many Protestant nations — such as England — resisted the pope's demands. During the 18th century, as international trade and diplomacy increased, Britain and its colonies began to view the adherence to a now-antiquated Julian calendar — first implemented in Rome by Julius Caesar in the first century BCE — as more spiteful than practical. When the U.K. finally converted to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, they jumped straight from September 2 to September 14, skipping the 11 days in between to make up for the errors of the Julian calendar. Though protests against the law arose among some anti-reformers — who purportedly rallied behind the slogan "Give us back our 11 days!" — the calendar was adopted without any further delay. 

New Year's Day used to occur in March.

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The Babylonians of ancient Mesopotamia celebrated the new year in March, because the holiday was tied to the vernal equinox. The concept of a January 1 new year was introduced by the Romans in 153 BCE, though that date wasn't adopted globally until Pope Gregory's reforms in 1582.

Eastern Orthodox nations, such as Russia and Greece, also initially resisted the papal decree, waiting to transition to the Gregorian calendar until 1918 and 1923, respectively. By then, so much time had passed that those two countries skipped 13 days to bring their calendars up to speed. Russia's stubbornness also affected Alaska — upon being sold to the U.S. in 1867, the former Russian territory leapt straight from October 6 to October 18.

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