Page 7 - History Facts

Shakespeare may have smoked pot!

Some of his metaphors are starting to make a lot more sense now, aren’t they?

The clay pipe fragments from Shakespeare’s Startford-upon-Avon home were inspected by Inspector Tommie van der Merwe of the South African Police Service’s Forensic Laboratory. In them, there were trace amounts of cocaine and myristic acid-a hallucinogentic derived from plants like nutmeg, and cannabis.

Shakespeare may not have been a closeted druggie either. Several of his more personal poems reference drugs. For example, his Sonnet #76 is known as the “noted weed” sonnet. Other historical treasures that may have gotten high at one point or another: George Washington and Queen Victoria.

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Ben Frankling wanted scientists to work on making farts smell better!

One of our forefathers, Benjamin Franklin, wrote an essay referred to as “Fart Proudly” in 1781 ( I didn’t even know people farted back then) while he was living abroad as United States Ambassador of France. The essay was composed in response to a call for scientific paper from the Royal Academy of Brussels.

Franklin believed that the various scientific societies in Europe were increasingly pretentious and concerned with the impractical. So, Franklin responded with an essay suggesting research and experimentation be done in improving the odor of human flatulence. The essay of submitted but sent as a letter to Richard Price, a Welsh philosopher. To get a whiff of this hilarious correspondence, check out the source.

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Toilet paper was made available 63 years after it was first invented!

The toilet paper is often taken for granted nowadays, but it is a precious commodity. If it did not exist, our existence would be a lot more annoying. It was invented by a paper maker named Joseph Gayetty in 1857. However, it was only made widely available in the 1920’s due to patent complications.

Original advertisements for the product used the tagline “The greatest necessity of the age” as if the human race was not functioning without toilet paper for all of these millennia. It was followed with “Gayetty’s medicated paper for the water-closet.” Twenty-six billion rolls of toilet paper, worth about $24 billion, are sold in the US alone. Americans use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year.

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The CIA once produced a porno to defame a president!

Nice to see the people in charge of national security keeping it classy.

President Sukarno ruled Indonoesia from 1959 to 1966 and was deemed pro-Communist by the CIA. In an effort to provide an intelligent response to Sukarno regarding this opinion of his, the CIA produced a porn film starring a Sukarno look-alike. The plot (or any semblance of a plot that porn films have) consisted to Sukarno first rejecting a woman and the succumbing to her seduction.

The film was affectionately titled “Happy Days.” The purpose of it was to degrade Sukarno’s image to his people. The film went as far as production, still were made, but unfortunately, the CIA could not finish.

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The West Virginia coal mining strike of 1912 became open warfare between the company and the miners

The Paint Creek Mine War started on April 18, 1912 and lasted until July 1913. The conflict was between striking coal miners and coal operators in Kanawha County, West Virginia. The conflict caused around 50 violent deaths and numerous indirect deaths from malnutrition and starvation.

The violence began with a United Mine Workers of America strike in 1912. At the time, there were 96 coal mines in operation in Paint Creek and Cabin Creek and they employed around 7500 miners.

The Paint Creek miners received 2.5 cents left per ton compared to the workers in the surrounding mines. During the strike negotiations, they demanded that their compensation be raised. The first month of the strike was not violent but turned so when officials tried to break the strike with brute force. A Senate resolution in May 1913 led to an investigation of West Virginia mining conditions.

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