When electricity was first installed in the White House in 1891, President Benjamin Harrison and his wife were afraid of electrocution because of the new concept. They refused to touch light switches, so the staff had to turn the lights on and off for them.
100 Mind-Blowing Concept Facts
You’re likely familiar with the concept of fingerprints, but people also have a “noseprint,” a set of distinct and unique impressions on the inside of your nose.
Dead people get goosebumps. One of the not-so-fun but amazing fun facts: When people die, the tiny muscles under their hair follicles contract. This gives skin the appearance of their hair standing on end. If you think death is a hair-raising concept, you are right.
Digging a hole into China is possible if you start in Argentina. One of the most intriguing fun facts about Argentina is that you could dig a hole in China from there. As a feat usually done by cartoon or comic book characters, travelling to China underground is possible in theory, but not so much in practice. Underground conditions such as heat, pressure, and lack of oxygen are just one of the few realities that keep this cartoonish concept just that – a concept for cartoons.
Bubble wrap was originally designed to be used as wallpaper. Bubble wrap was born in 1957 when engineer Al Fielding and Swiss inventor Marc Chavannes tried creating a textured wallpaper. However, their product was rejected. They also tried marketing it as a greenhouse insulator, but the material still fell short. However, when IBM released a new computer, Fielding and Chavannes pitched their concept as a protective covering for computer shipments. From then on, bubble wrap was adopted as the go-to protective wrap. The third time’s the charm, I guess.
Greeks once believed that the mother’s milk originated from the uterus. During the Middle Ages, there was a vague understanding of the concept of breast milk. Many believed that this was produced in the uterus and travelled to the breast organ via a special vessel in the woman’s body.
A house fire inspired The Sims. Will Wight was inspired to create The Sims after suffering a house fire in 1991, where he lost everything. When he had a vision of rebuilding his house, he thought of a game concept where one could create a “virtual dollhouse.” From there, The Sims was born. Talk about WTF facts with a plot twist.
Scientists used to believe there were little people inside sperm. In the 1600s, “preformationism” was a widely believed theory: People believed that tiny, fully-formed humans were curled up in sperm cells or egg cells. Sounds like a surrealist horror concept, if you ask me.
The movie explores the concept of a “bucket list.” A bucket list is a list of things a person wants to accomplish or experience before they die. In the movie, the protagonists create a bucket list and set out to achieve their dreams.
The film explores the concept of legacy. Through their adventures, the characters contemplate the impact they will leave behind and what they want to be remembered for.
The movie’s title has become synonymous with the concept of a bucket list. Since its release, The Bucket List has popularized the term “bucket list” as a way to describe a list of life goals and dreams.
Stan Lee created the character for Iron Man as a challenge. Stan Lee had been playing around with the idea of a businessman superhero for a while and finally bit the bullet in 1963 when he came up with the concept for Iron Man. Marvel’s readers at the time were very much against war, so he thought it would be a unique challenge to create a character who fans would originally hate but come to love – and it worked!
The author of the James Bond novels wrote the first book to take his mind off the fear of getting married. Ian Fleming was a bachelor of 44 years when he wrote Casino Royale in 1952, the first in a long series about the devilishly handsome British spy. Many years later, Fleming wrote in his memoirs that he was so terrified at the concept of finally getting married that he wrote his first Bond novel. Some authors doubt this dismissal, claiming he simply wrote it as a quick cash job, but it makes a hell of a good story!
The Style Wars began in the 1970s and introduced the concept of bombing. Graffiti artists created bigger and bigger pieces in an attempt to achieve fame. They would often “bomb,” or “hit,” one area, which meant painting many surfaces in an area. For the sake of time, they often threw up tags instead of complex pieces.
Einstein’s theory also states that gravity can warp time. If you’ve seen the 2014 movie Interstellar, this concept may seem familiar. The closer you are to a massive body—which, in the case of Interstellar, is a giant black hole—the slower time will pass for you.
After an engineer named Sandford Fleming missed a train in 1876, he set out to change the way time worked. Fleming originally proposed a concept he called “Cosmic Time,” in which the world would run off an imaginary clock located at the planet’s centre, essentially a line from the centre of the planet to the sun. He then suggested splitting the world into 24 time zones labelled with a letter of the alphabet, with each zone spanning 15 degrees of longitude. His original plan to create a standard “Cosmic Time” was rejected, but it did lay the groundwork for a similar standardisation, so-called Universal Time. Nations present at the 1884 International Meridian Conference laid the groundwork for dividing the world into 24 time zones, with the Prime Meridian, also known as Longitude 0°, running through Greenwich, England.
Sundials read differently depending on the hemisphere you’re in. In the Northern Hemisphere, the sun casts a shadow that moves from north to east, to south, to west. In the Southern Hemisphere, the shadow moves in the opposite direction. Our concept of “clockwise” is based on the way sundials in the Northern Hemisphere told time.
The first ATM launched in 1967 in London: John Shepherd-Barron is credited with the invention of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM). The first ATM was set up at a branch of Barclay’s Bank on a street in Enfield, London in June 1967. The first ATM in the US was launched in September 1969 at the Chemical Bank branch in Rockville Centre in New York. In 1970, a British engineer called James Goodfellow created the concept of a personal identification number (PIN).
The concept of money in the UK has evolved from commodity money, such as precious metals and livestock, to representative money like banknotes and coins, and now to digital money, such as online banking and cryptocurrency.
AI has been around for decades. While AI is often thought of as a new technology, the concept has been around since the 1950s. Early AI systems were used to perform tasks such as playing chess and solving mathematical problems.