Until 2016, the “Happy Birthday” song was not for public use. Meaning that before 2016, the song was copyrighted, and you had to pay a license to use it.
100 Mind-Blowing Pay Facts
The only window that opens on the presidential car is the driver’s window to pay tolls. It also has no keyholes, and only the Secret Service knows how to open the doors.
Queen Elizabeth II saved up post-war clothing ration coupons to pay for her wedding dress in 1947.
President Ulysses S. Grant was arrested while in office. He was charged, booked, and released for speeding on a horse and had to pay a fine.
Baseball umpires used to sit in rocking chairs. People have been playing baseball since the mid-19th century. In the early days, umpires would officiate the games while reclining in a rocking chair located 20 feet behind home plate. By 1878, the National League also declared that home teams must pay umpires $5 per game.
Neil Armstrong’s hair was sold in 2004 for $3,000. The lucky buyer, John Reznikoff, holds the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of hair from historical celebrities, reports NBC. But Armstrong’s lawyers threatened to sue Marx Sizemore, the not-so-lucky barber who cut the former astronaut’s hair; they said he violated an Ohio law that protects the rights of famous people. Sizemore said he wouldn’t pay, and Reznikoff said he wouldn’t give back the hair but that he’d donate $3,000 to charity.
A seaman once set a ship on fire to get out of work early. One of the “don’t-try-this-at-home” fun facts: A civil employee once started a fire that ravaged the nuclear submarine USS Miami which was docked at a Naval Shipyard. Though the cause of the fire was unclear at first, civilian employee Casey J. Fury soon admitted to starting the fire for an early dismissal from work. Fury was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $400 million in damages.
T-shirts were originally made for unmarried men who didn’t know how to sew buttons on collared shirts. However, people didn’t pay much mind to T-shirts until the 1950s.
Geckos eat the skin they shed. This is to prevent predators from finding and eating them. A small price to pay for survival.
An American man tried to fake his death so he wouldn’t have to pay his phone bill. In 2007, Corey Taylor attempted to fake his death to get out of his smartphone contract without paying for anything. However, despite his efforts, it did not work.
A man once wore 60 shirts and 9 pairs of jeans to the airport to avoid extra fees. On a flight from China to Africa, a man wore 60 shirts and nine pairs of jeans because he didn’t want to pay for extra baggage. He wore it throughout an 11-and-a-half-hour flight.
There’s a company you can pay to kidnap you. The Ultíme Réalité is a French company that offers kidnapping services. If you pay them a fee, they will come to kidnap you when you least expect it – ropes, binds, and all. They won’t do it immediately, though. They’ll wait for a certain period so you won’t remember that you paid someone to kidnap you.
Pencils are yellow because of Chinese royalty. In the 1800s, the best graphite in the world came from China. The Americans wanted to pay tribute to the Chinese for the graphite used in their pencils. Yellow means royalty and respect in China, which is why the Americans manufactured their pencils in yellow. To this day, the default colour for pencils is still yellow.
Before alarm clocks, people would pay someone to knock on their windows and wake them up. They were called knocker-uppers.
Historians think that the narwhals are what the unicorn myth is based on. During the Middle Ages, unicorn horns were so coveted that royalty would pay extraordinary prices for them, often the weight of the horn in gold. Hunters travelled to Northern Europe to try and capture the narwhals and bring back their horns (which they would tell the royals were from unicorns).
Charles Dickens’s novels were so popular in his day that poor people who couldn’t read would collectively pay someone to read his stories out loud. Charles Dickens was undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest novelists, at least in the Victorian era. While his works filled the shelves of aristocrats’ libraries worldwide, one of his greatest feats was his ability to reach out and inspire all classes of society. Masses of impoverished and illiterate fans would each pay a halfpenny (£0.25/$0.35 today) to have each of his monthly updates read out to them.
Finding a security bug in Facebook’s code will pay off. To be exact, Facebook pays $500 for reporting any vulnerability in its security. Even better, $500 is just the minimum that it starts at, so you could potentially earn more!
The Linux development community is incredibly active. Changes to the kernel were merged at an average rate of 7.8 patches per hour over the past 15 months, according to numbers crunched by the folks at the non-profit The Linux Foundation (who pay Linus’ salary).
Uber tried to pay off hackers to delete the stolen data of 57 million users and keep the breach quiet. (Bloomberg)
Only eight per cent of businesses that pay ransom to hackers receive all of their data in return. (Sophos)
The BBC domestic television channels do not broadcast advertisements; as they are funded by TV viewers who are required to pay an annual television license fee.
Two new forms of currency launched in the 21st Century: Mobile payment technology and virtual currency are two new forms of currency that launched in the 21st Century. Mobile payments are used to pay for products and services through a smartphone or tablet, while virtual currency is a digital representation of value that functions as a medium of exchange. It is not controlled or regulated by a central bank.
This Century Is Transforming Money: The 2000s ushered in a new way for us to pay for things: mobile payment technology like Venmo, PayPal and Google Pay. Approximately 25% of people worldwide use mobile and digital wallets, ahead of credit cards (22.4%), debit cards (22.3%), and cash (20.5%), says Moneytransfers.com. Globally, the mobile payment market was worth $1.97 trillion in 2021, up 27.9% from the year prior.
The phrase ‘to pay through the nose’ dates back to the Danes who would slit the noses of the Irish who wouldn’t pay their poll tax.