A Katzenklavier is a musical instrument with polyphonic aftertouch described by Athanasius Kircher. It consists of a line of cats fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard. Tails would be placed under the keys, causing the cats to cry out in pain when a key was pressed. The cats would be arranged according to the natural tone of their voices.
Serge Voronoff was a French surgeon of Russian extraction who gained fame for his technique of grafting monkey testicle tissue on to the testicles of men for purportedly therapeutic purposes while working in France in the 1920s and 1930s. The technique brought him a great deal of money, although he was already independently wealthy. As his work fell out of favour, he went from being highly respected to a subject of ridicule. In 1999, some speculated that the AIDS virus discovered in the 1980s entered the human population through Voronoff's transfer of monkey parts into humans in the 1920s.
Mathias Rust is a German man known for his illegal landing near Red Square in Moscow in 1987. As an amateur aviator, he flew from Finland to Moscow, being tracked several times by Soviet air defence and interceptors. The Soviet fighters never received permission to shoot him down, and several times he was mistaken for a friendly aircraft. He landed on Vasilevski Spusk next to Red Square near the Kremlin in the capital of the USSR.
Roy Shaw is an English millionaire, real estate investor, author and businessman from the East End of London who was formerly a notorious criminal and Category A prisoner. During the 1970s-1980s, Shaw was a well known and respected figure in the criminal underworld of London and was frequently associated with the Kray twins. Shaw is perhaps best remembered today for his infamous careers as both a professional boxer and an unlicensed fighter, becoming a legend in bare-knuckle boxing and during which time he became arch-rival with the also legendary Lenny McLean.
TransMedics is a medical device company. They have developed a technology capable of maintaining donor organs in a near-physiological state outside the body from donor to recipient: the heart is beating, lungs are breathing, and liver is making bile. The portable technology was designed to be transported in all modes of transportation typically used for organ retrieval, to reduce the time-dependent damage associated with cold storage.
In 1979, Vlada Vasiljević stole a white Porsche-Targa 911-s, and then, for about ten evenings drove the police mad with his reckless driving to the Slavija Square in Belgrade. During an official visit of the president Tito to Cuba in 1979, the attention of the capital was directed to the phantom in the white Porsche. The mysterious driver that drove like crazy in a stolen car over the square Slavija made in the midnight hours a real spectacle, constantly managed to get away from the police. Over the radio he openly called the police to catch him, which was the first oppositional act in the post-war Yugoslavia. Several tens of thousand people went on the streets to support him.
Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel.
After WW2, the new democratic government suffered from serious lack of money, so it ordered the national bank to manufacture banknotes quickly and cheaply. There was little time to design new notes, thus the plates of banknotes printed in 1926 were reused as well as portraits from other notes. Beginning with the 1000 pengő note, only denominations of integer powers of ten were used. The uncontrolled banknote issuing aggravated inflation. In 1946 Hungary issued a 100 Million B-Pengo, which was the the largest circulated banknote at the time, unfortunately it was worth only about $0.20 USD in 1946. Hungary also printed a 1 Milliard B-Pengo, but it was never released into circulation. The 1 Milliard B-Pengo translates into 1 trillion Pengos.
Originating in India before 2000 BC, the deadly art of sword swallowing has a long and varied history. The art takes about three to seven years to learn and approximately five more to master.
Phineas P. Gage was a railroad construction foreman now remembered for his incredible survival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying one or both of his brain's frontal lobes.