Page 131 - History Facts

J.R.R Tolkien used the only car he ever owned to accelerate dangerously down the street screaming “Charge ‘em and they scatter!”

On top of other little things, J.R.R Tolkien was famous for his extreme dislike of cars. However he did purchase a Morris Cowley in 1932 and nicknamed it “Jo” after the first two letters on its registration. 

On a simple ride to visit his sister, he put poor “Jo” through quite a bit; she sustained two punctures and knocked down part of a wall. Some months later, he charged down a busy street on Oxford in order to get to the side street. He ignored all other vehicles and screamed “Charge ‘em and they Scatter”- and his prediction was pretty much correct. 

After some time however, he saw what the internal combustion engine and new roads were doing the landscape, and never took hold of the wheel again. I’m assuming that they didn’t have driving tests back them, or the instructor would have definitely said “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” 

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The first tanks were so loud that it was impossible to communicate via radio; instead they used carrier pigeons!

The Mark I was the world’s first combat tank made by the British Army during World War I. it was developed to be able to cross trenches, resist small arms fire, travel over difficult terrain, carry supplies, and to capture fortified enemy positions. 

The noise inside the tank was deafening and the driver used hand signals to communicate with the gearsmen. He first got their attention by banging on the engine block with a heavy spanner. There was no wireless radio communication. 

Communication with command posts was by means of carrier pigeons that had their own small exit hatch in the sponsons, or by runners. The noise and vibration was too great to use any other form of communication and early experiments showed that carrier pigeons were the best route. 

Tanks had major flaws when they came out. However, British propaganda often used tanks and promoted them. They portrayed them as the wonder weapon that would quickly win World War I. They were featured in films and popular songs. 

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It’s been speculated that Annie Oakley could have prevented World War I.

Annie Oakley was a famous American sharpshooter in the late 19th century. In 1889, Annie Oakley was performing at the Berlin Charlottenburg Race Course, where Kaiser Wilhelm II (the German Emperor whose support of Austria-Hungary in 1914 led to the first world war) had a box seat.

As part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Annie announced she would shoot the ashes off any man or woman’s Havana cigar.

Normally, her husband Frank Butler would come out of the audience as part of the act so that no volunteers were actually harmed. But on that day, Kaiser Wilhem II took her up on her offer.

Because nobody usually volunteered, Annie was taken aback, but couldn’t back down since she made her dare. So she measured the distance and the Kaiser took out a cigar. The German police thought it was a joke until the Kaiser told them to get out of the way.

Annie Oakley raised her pistol and blew the ashes right off. Had she missed and hit him, he might not have been around to support Austria-Hungary 25 years later, which might have avoided the first world war. In 1914, when The Great War started, Oakley wrote the Kaiser asking for a second chance. He did not respond.

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Rasputin’s penis was allegedly severed after his death and put on display!

Gregori Rasputin was apparently a lady’s man with a sizeable male member. There are two stories of how he was castrated after his death. The first says that his assassins castrated him and the maid who cleaned up after them found his member discarded and kept it. 

The other story says that one of his lady friends took it as a souvenir after his autopsy. Either way, the penis surfaced in the 1920s in Paris, where a group is said to have worshiped it for fertility reasons. Rasputin’s daughter, Marie, demanded that it be returned to her. 

Then in 1994 the penis resurfaced. A man in California supposedly came into possession of it after buying some things from a Dr. Ripple. Ripple was said to have been collaborating with Marie Rasputin on a hagiography of Gregori Rasputin and had inherited Rasputin’s penis after Marie passed away. It ended up being a dessicated sea-cucumber. 

Alas, another Rasputin penis showed up in the hands of a Russian doctor who opened an erotica museum. The penis has not been tested yet. The penis is 11 inches long, but Marie said her father’s was 13 inches long. Some experts think the penis on display in the museum is an ostracized organ of a horse or bovine animal. 

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A nun stuffed Bruce Springsteen into a trash can when he was in the 3rd grade.

Bruce Springsteen has been rocking and rolling for the past four decades, and there’s no sign of his stopping. In the last 5 years, he’s toured the globe twice, released The Rising and Devils and Dust, and overseen the 30th anniversary edition of Born to Run. 

But his life wasn’t always dedicated to making musical history. In the third grade, a nun stuffed him into a trash can she kept under his desk and told him that that was where he “belonged.” 

Well she wasn’t completely correct; instead he ended up belonging at second place consistently, as surprisingly, none of his songs have been No.1.

But second-best doesn’t mean he’s not valuable; producer Robert Stigwood offered him more than $10 million to play Che in Evita. So that’s the story of Bruce Springsteen; from the trash to treasure. 

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