History isn’t made by regular folk — it’s made by the crazy geniuses who kick history in the balls until history barfs up bilious renown and luck. And what rarely gets are highlighted in our history books is how these idealists kicked back after a hard period of being awesome and relax. Unsurprisingly, these visionaries’ pastimes were often as eccentric and ahead of their period as they themselves were. For example…
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Louis Armstrong Really, Really Enjoyed His Laxatives
Louis Armstrong Really, Really Enjoyed His Laxatives
It’s always a thrill to receive something from a celebrity, like a handshake, an autograph, or a cocktail napkin with a room number written on it. But big devotees of jazz virtuoso extraordinaire Louis Armstrong could sometimes get something much more intimate of his in the mail: a picture of Satchmo shitting on the lavatory, happy as a clam.
Thomas Pluck
You go fishing through a keyhole, you’re bound to catch a boot .
Let’s threw all of this butt stuff into context. For most of his adult life, Louis Armstrong was a yo-yo dieter: He’d lose an immense amount of weight, gain the weight back, lose it again, and so and so forth. He reached most of his dramatic weight loss through a constant use of laxatives, especially Pluto Water — a brand of mineral water with bowel-loosening side effect. Nonetheless, it was hard to transport and even more difficult to find whilst out on the road. At a loss for a new way to give his gale section some oomph, Armstrong stumbled onto a new product called Swiss Kriss.
How does it run? According to the man himself, the first time he applied Swiss Kriss resulted in something that “sounded like applause” and forced him to crawl back to bed when the implementation of its was finished. Yeah, we favor his earlier work in that regard.
Slim Aarons/ Getty Images
If merely he had detected sugar-free gummy carries .
Satchmo was hooked. Before starting his Swiss Kriss regimen, he was the heaviest he’d ever seen. Within one year, he’d lost 100 pounds. So many devotees wrote to him ask questions his secret that he had to have custom-printed cards made up of him with his cheeks touching porcelain. This wasn’t a paying sponsorship by the way, which is probably the same dedication that stimulated him one of the best musicians of all time. Have “youve been” desired something enough that you decided to spread the word by mailing pictures of you spreading your cheeks? Louis Armstrong did. And that’s why he was the greatest.
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Ben Franklin’s Morning Routine Was Sitting Around With His Dong Out
Ben Franklin’s Morning Routine Was Sitting Around With His Dong Out
We all have a special thing that we like to do in the mornings to get us pumped for the daily grind: a glass of orange juice, some light exert, checking your notifications, or cocaine. It was no different for Benjamin Franklin, though his morning routine didn’t involve coffee or crossword puzzles, but letting his old John Hancock flap freely in the wind.
Franklin called his morning nudism “air baths, “ a delightfully old-timey way of describing going about your morning ablutions with your snips depicting. We’re talking everything from bringing in the newspaper and eating cereal to catching up on your correspondence and straighten the house whilst airing out his birthday suit. As he describing him to a friend 😛 TAGEND
“I rise early almost every morning, and sit in my enclosure, without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing.”
And where did he like to sit while waving around his Washington monument? Slap-bang in front of the window, of course. Dedicated his reputation as one of history’s greatest horndogs, this must have been a grody scheme to invite any patriotic passersby to come in and fulfill the Pounding Father himself.
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Charles Dickens Became His Dead Cat Into A Letter Opener
Charles Dickens Became His Dead Cat Into A Letter Opener
Charles Dickens was a complex man with many love — ghosts, class warfare, gruel — but most important of them all, however, was the affection he felt for his cats. His mansion was crammed fully completed, so much so that one cat even trained itself to snuff out candles in a desperate bid for attention. His favorite was a small deaf feline called Bob. The two were inseparable, leading Dickens to once ask, “What greater enjoy than the enjoy of a feline? “
MilanEXPO/ iStock
“Ebenezer Scrooge beamed at Cratchit. ‘I’m a changed man. From now on, you’ll be paid in cats.'”
When Bob passed in 1862, Dickens was distraught and ached for a way to immortalize his faithful friend. Perhaps dedicate a volume to him, or give one of his unfortunate protagonists a feline companion to traipse through the London sewers with? As an writer, he had plenty of options, which is why we’ll never understand why he had Bob’s paw removed, stuffed, and turned into a letter opener. And not only any letter opener, however, but one with an ivory blade inscribed with “C.D. In Recollection of Bob 1862, ” because sometimes history writes National Treasure sequel plots for you.
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H.G. Wells Was The First Ever Wargaming Nerd
H.G. Wells Was The First Ever Wargaming Nerd
H.G. Wells was likely the most influential early science-fiction novelist on how we look at the genre today, writing about period travel, genetic experimentation, dystopias, and bikes becoming the dominant way of transport( they can’t all be winners ). But, implausibly, being an Edwardian sci-fi writer was by no means the nerdiest part of Wells’ life. That honor be applicable to where reference is are determined to invent tabletop wargaming on a whim.
“Nuh uh! “
One night, Wells and his friend Jerome K. Jerome( where’s this guy’s biography, right ?) were sitting around the house when they decided to make a game out of firing a toy cannon at some doll soldiers they had laying around. It was pretty fun, but that wasn’t enough for Wells. Inspired by the conflict simulation used to train officers in the Prussian army, Kriegsspiel , Wells set about constructing a proper game with rules because, as a proto-wargamer, he had to know precisely how many turns it took to capture a cannon before the fun could start.
By the end of the night, Wells had designed the first recreational wargame, Little Wars . The basics were at first simple. Making a battlefield terrain from whatever everyday household objects they had laying around, such as volumes, candlesticks, and servants, the game would start and, applying a formula of Wells’ invention, injury “wouldve been” dished out, pieces would be captured, and someone would wind up going to the POW camp( a shoebox ). It was a brutal game, too. The cannons that they used, for example, actually fired inch-long pegs that easily beheaded the hollow figurines in their desperate charge.
But like the perfect archetype of a certain kind of gamer, Wells became annoyed by their battleground constantly being disturbed by “a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors. They regarded the objects upon the flooring with the empty dislike of their sex for all imaginative things.” The typical social setup of the British parlor, with its coarse carpets and noisy daughters, just didn’t work for Wells. He and Jerome decided to seclude themselves and using their blended model-building smarts, creating everything from houses to bridges to trees, committing their game both an awesome looking and the ability to recreate real-life skirmishes such as the Battle of Gettysburg.
Wells eventually turned all of this into a volume entitled Little Wars , which soon kickstarted a countrywide tendency for fake-blowing material up. This was secretly Wells’ hope. He was a pacifist and hoped that Little Wars would go old-timey viral not only because he wanted to build bank, but because it could give everyone an outlet for their murderous tendencies and prevent another devastating conflict. As he described it, “You merely have to play at Little Wars three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be.”
Little Wars was published in 1913. The Great War kicked off in 1914. Guess he should have stimulated the game a little bit shorter( and easier to assemble ).
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Mark Twain Was A Joan of Arc Fanboy
Mark Twain Was A Joan of Arc Fanboy
It’s hard to think of Mark Twain having any hobbies beyond falling sick burns and combing his moustache. But for most of his life, “hes spent” his free time being chairwoman, vice-president, and treasurer of his very( very) own Joan of Arc fan club. In reality, he seemed to adore her in the same way some people adore whatever anime character is on their own bodies pillow.
According to his official biographer, Twain’s obsession started when he was a young printmaker and stumbled upon a page describing Joan of Arc swimming the breeze. His infatuation with the French martyr grew such that he subsequently invested 12 years traveling across Europe snaffling up every piece of studies that he could find about their own lives. If Twain were alive today, he’d be submitting regular pieces to fanfiction.net in which they journeyed off into the sunset together to start an organic farm outside of Toulouse.
The result of this massive research bender was Personal Recollections Of Joan Of Arc , a biography written from the in-universe perspective of a fictional maid of Joan, Sieur Louis de Conte. The volume recounted every moment of Joan’s life from childhood( which she spent playing with forest nymph, apparently ), her fateful one-on-one with The Almighty, to her taking up limbs against the English.
But Twain, who took venerating Joan of Arc as serious as a heart attack, didn’t crave readers to pick up a facsimile of the book expecting his logo humor and flair for the dramatic. He therefore arranged for it to be serialized in Harper’s Magazine and credited to the fictional de Conte. This foolproof program worked for approximately 10 seconds. Twain’s popularity caught up with him, much to the disappointment of his devotees. Where was the repartee? The boys swimming on rafts? WHAT ABOUT AMERICA, MARK?
Twain didn’t care, and continued to champion his crush — to the point where he would publicly chide fellow authors for portraying Joan as a peasant daughter as opposed to a radiant, heavenly charm she was in his head. Fortunately, Twain lived long enough to see Joan adopted as a figure of strength by the suffragette movement. But of all the exuberance venerating Joan of Arc made him, this one must have been the greatest: Whilst committing a lecture in 1905 to the Society of Illustrators, the organisers secretly arranged for a Joan of Arc impersonator to enter the room, wordlessly glide towards him, and hand him a laurel wreath, before wordlessly gliding out again. For the first time in his life, Mark Twain didn’t have a snappy comeback.
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Nikola Tesla Really Fricking Loved Pigeons
Nikola Tesla Really Fricking Loved Pigeons
Nikola Tesla had a reputation for represent one of the craaaaziest people in the history of science, but that’s an insultingly reductive take over a man whose genius was thwarted every step of the way. Tesla was sabotaged by his rivals, pursued by the government and even had all of his work burnt to a crisp. And while he didn’t possess the necessary social abilities to hug away his sadness and annoyance, he did have many non-human friends to turn to: pigeons, including with regard to the heartbreaking intrigue he struck up with one special bird.
Tesla invested much of his adult life living in New York City, where he lived out of a small inn room — because getting someone else to change his sheets made him more time to science( also, people like Edison continued him quite poor ). At the stroke of midnight, he would stroll down to the New York Public Library, and feed the multitudes of pigeons waiting for him. But when this arrangement became unfeasible( or he just felt lazy ), he would simply fling open the windows of whatever inn was staying at, fling seed all over the room, and invite the fowls inside.
Unsurprisingly, the inns didn’t like this. His devotion to his pigeons expenditure Tesla tenancy at the St. Regis, the Hotel Pennsylvania, and the Hotel Governor Clinton. When he moved into the New Yorker, the inn toyed with evicting him for his bird-feeding shenanigans, but chose against it when they realised that the bad advertising would expenditure them more than the warehouse of bleach they would need to clean his room every day.
Towards the end of his life, Tesla withdrew more and more into his homeless lady shtick. After he was knocked down by a taxi and rendered unable to walk, he was so afraid that his beloved pigeons would go hungry he would dispatch Western Union messengers to his usual haunt to dump out his birdseed, constantly haranguing them by telephone until “its been” done.
It gets a lot sadder when you learn that Tesla actually fell in love with one of these fowls, a beautiful all-white specimen that could, allegedly, find him wherever he was in the city. That’s not us being hyperbolic when we speak of enjoy, either. As he describing him, “I desired that bird as a man loves a woman, and she desired me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.” When the bird became sick, Tesla stopped going to work at his lab just to tend to her. And when she died, he lost all will to live, even becoming his back on his scientific pursuits.
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