English £5 coin.  You can't see it in this photo, but it's got ridges around the edge. Most coins minted in the world today are round.  This is how it’s been for most of history.  But if you look at the edges of most coins of most countries today, you might have noticed they’re covered with even ridges.  The ridges don’t seem to add much to the aesthetic appeal of the coins, but they persist on every one of them.  But why are they there? If you’ve noticed the ridges, you might have noticed that in the countries where they’re used, they don’t appear on every coin.  In the United States, the two lowest denominated coins—the penny and the nickel—don’t have ridges.  (The nickel’s five-cent predecessor, the half dime, which was minted until 1883, did have ridges.  The penny never did.)  This is no accident.  The ridges appear on the edges of the larger coins to prevent an ancient problem: shaving. Coins have long been made of various metals like copper, nickel,

Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, who started it all.  Maybe. According to legend, presidents elected during years ending in zero will die in office.  This did happen to a long string of American presidents who were elected in zero years, so it was widely attributed to the Curse of Tecumseh.  This Curse has its roots in the Battle of Tippecanoe, which took place in Indiana in 1811.  American forces were led by General William Henry Harrison, who were victorious over the Shawnee people and their allies in the war.  The allied peoples rallied together to stop American westward expansion following a shady treaty that Harrison had negotiated with Tecumseh, the leader of the Shawnee, before the war. Following the defeat, legend has it that Tecumseh’s brother, popularly known as The Prophet, put a curse on Harrison and all other presidents elected in years ending with the same digit as he was.  This seems unlikely, since the war ended in 1811, and Harrison wasn’t elected president

The King James Bible was written in 1605, which means that there had previously been centuries of Bible writing and rewriting.  King James' version is one of the more famous, but it certainly wasn't the first, and it certainly wasn't the last.  There have been many others who have tried their hands at rewriting the Bible since then—telling the same story, only with different words.  Since the copyright has almost certainly lapsed by now, I figure I might as well take a crack at it.  Here's Genesis I. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.   Before that, God created God, because the creation of God was such a good yet complicated idea that only a Perfect Being could think of how to do it, which is why God created Himself.   It was pretty dark, so God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light; and God liked it so much He renamed it day, and let day go on all day, and when day was over the darkness came back, and He renamed the da

Copy of a handbill from a play about the famous Sam Patch. The first person ever to go over Niagara Falls and live to tell about it was a man named Sam Patch, who accomplished the feat in October 1829.  He earned the nickname the Yankee Leaper as a result.  His jump was part of a campaign to turn the Falls into a more popular tourist attraction.  It worked, too: a crowd of about 10,000 gathered to watch the 22-year-old Patch do it. Patch promised a second jump because his first one was delayed due to technical problems—the ladder he was to climb out to the middle of the falls on broke and had to be repaired—and bad weather pushed his jump back to 4:00 in the afternoon.  His second jump saw conditions that allowed the jump and was much better attended, turning Patch into a household name. Handbill from Sam Patch's final jump, 1829.  This jump was not done as well as others. Patch had already achieved a certain amount of fame for jumping off of waterfalls.  T