make someone want to steal another person’s shoes?
Short Story: Educated Women Are Unfit as Wives (1904)
The Womanless Library (1930)
During the Great Depression, Le Mars, Iowa, was front-page news for three seemingly unrelated stories, all tied together by an incredibly misogynistic bequest made by one of its prominent attorneys.
PART 4: Hoaxes & Con Artists
The Search for Lucinda Trow (1938)
Maybelle Knox was the center of perhaps the greatest mystery to ever occur in Le Mars. A story so fantastic, it captured the attention of an entire nation.
The Salem Trade School Football Team (1929)
Perhaps the worst high school football team to have ever played was located around Salem, Massachusetts. There was a very good reason as to why they performed so poorly, and it had nothing to do with the quality of the team’s players.
The Strange Case of the Jitterbug Coal (1944)
You’ve certainly heard about Mexican jumping beans, but have you ever witnessed jumping coal? Such a phenomenon was observed at a schoolhouse. At first, no one could explain why the coal was acting so strangely. Was it alive? Could the school have been haunted?
Short Story: Man Inherits Fortune from Women He Never Met (1912)
Two Weeks on Venus (1956)
In 1954, Harold Jesse Berney, head of a Washington, DC, television antenna manufacturing operation, said he was chosen by the United States government to be its main contact with Uccelles, a prince visiting our planet from Venus.
The Crayola Caper (1973)
The Concord Hotel in Kiamesha Lake, New York, was once the largest resort in the Catskill Mountains. Few people remember today, but it was once central to one of the most bizarre extortion schemes ever.
PART 5: Heroes & Survivors
The Rescue of Charles Nalle (1860)
The amazing story of the only person in the United States to have been rescued from slavery four times.
Short Story: It Doesn’t Always Pay to Be a Hero (1957)
Beached Steel (1868)
Nothing on earth is permanent. As sure as there are forces that push mountains upward, there are opposing forces that will eventually bring them all back down. And no matter how hard humans may try, nature always wins in the end.
Short Story: Falling Girl Saved by Spike (1911)
The Last Man Standing (1885)
Nearly everyone wishes for a long, healthy, happy life. But a long life will most likely make you outlive everyone you know, which begs the question: is living a long life worth it?
Short Story: Can’t Take It Anymore (1936)
PART 6: Newsworthy: Past & Present
The Average Man (1927)
How would you describe the average man? Clearly, there is far more to him than physical characteristics like height and weight. In 1927, a search was held to find the man who best typified the average male.
Short Story: One-a-Day Triplets (1950)
Ferryboat O’Brien (1952))
The strange, true story of Michael Patrick O’Brien. He belonged to no country, and it seemed as though he’d be stuck sailing the same back-and-forth trip every single day for the rest of his life.
Short Story: Inventor of the Other Teddy Bear (1940)
New York’s Romeo and Juliet (1939)
A story about two lovers who wished to marry over parental objections.
Short Story: Sixty-Seven-Year-Old Has His First Birthday Party (1920)
Mary Jane (2004)
Sources
Acknowledgements
About the Author
During the winter of 1993, Principal Brian Howard of Chatham High School, the school where I spent my entire career as an educator, asked me to attend a seminar at the University of Albany on the teaching of authentic science research at the high school level. I never could have imagined how that one evening would change my life forever.
As presenter Daniel Wulff detailed how the program worked, he repeatedly referenced something that I’m quite certain the majority of the audience had never heard of: the internet, specifically email, which was necessary for students to keep in touch with researchers around the world.
It’s difficult to describe how slow and clunky the internet was to use in 1993, particularly when accessing it from the rural setting of our school district. It required painfully slow dial-up modem connections over costly long-distance telephone lines that used text-based UNIX commands. As awful as this may all seem, it was cutting edge for its day, and I was immediately hooked.
Fast forward to the summer of 1994 and I read about a new invention called the World Wide Web. I fired off an email message to Steve Janover—instructional coordinator at the Northeastern Regional Information Center (NERIC), and my internet guru in those early days—questioning him about it. He told me that NERIC was testing the web out, but he wasn’t sure if it would catch on. I drove up to see him and he demonstrated the World Wide Web to me.
Upon returning home, I immediately set to work on my first webpage: my resume. A few days later, I began to construct my first real website. I simply uploaded some interesting facts that I had shared with my close friend Jamie Keenan. This included how they placed the Ms onto M&Ms, the history of Vaseline, and other similar stories. For lack of a better title, I remembered that one of my students, Steve Lotz, had told me that I knew more useless information than anyone else. So I typed the words “Useless Information” at the top of the page, and my website was born.
Initially, few people ever looked at what I wrote. However, everything changed over the 1997 Fourth of July holiday. Yahoo had chosen my website as their Pick of the Week, and it wasn’t long before my page began receiving more than one million views per year—an astronomical number of visitors for that time period. From that website, two compendiums of my favorite stories were published in book form: Einstein’s Refrigerator and Lindbergh’s Artificial Heart.
With the advent of e-books, it was predicted that physical copies of books would ultimately become obsolete. As a result, I gave up on the idea of ever writing a third volume of stories and turned my attention toward a new technology: podcasting. On January 27, 2008, the Useless Information Podcast was born. I have been researching, writing, and recording new stories for the podcast ever since.
Yet as I write this, the prediction that print books would become just a memory has still not yet happened. When I was first
