He was a former preacher turned comedian who rose to fame with an intense, often sacrilegious routine that was punctuated with his trademark screams.

The 10-second snippet of a man singing Au Clair de la Lune is the oldest known recorded sound of a human voice.

The story goes that Sir Francis Bacon was traveling through a blizzard in a carriage when he was suddenly struck with the idea of preserving meat with snow.

A drill instructor ordered 74 Marine Corps recruits on a disciplinary march through a swamp. Some of the men could not swim and 6 of them drowned.

In 1934 Christiansen formed a stand alone toy company called Lego. It got its name from the Danish phrase "leg godt" which translates to "play well."

In their first year, Swanson & Sons sold over 10 million TV dinners.

When Canada blew up an underwater mountain, it was one of the largest planned non-nuclear explosions of all time.

His 133 days all alone in the life raft still stands as the longest ordeal survived by a single man at sea.
 

It's now estimated that one in every three homes in America has a Scrabble game.

He was the first American president to die in office.

The Church of St. John on the Greek island of Rhodes was blown to smithereens.

A one-legged Canadian broke the world record with a high jump of 6 feet and 8.25 inches.

A tragic loss inspired him to pioneer a method of sharing news instantaneously.

The BBC aired remarkable footage of a unique colony of flying penguins.

This was the day the BBC pulled off one of the greatest April Fools' hoaxes of all time.

His crime is the only documented fatality related to poisoned Halloween candy - ever.

586,412 square miles of Alaska were purchased from Russia for $7.2 million.

A Philadelphian named Hymen Lipman filed a patent for a pencil with an attached eraser.

A farmer out for a late night stroll noticed something odd. The silence. The thundering sound of a gazillion gallons of water flowing over Niagara Falls was gone.

She was the stepmother and matriarch behind the Trapp Family Singers, who are immortalized in The Sound of Music.