The Holocaust – perhaps the ultimate symbol of human evil – wouldn’t have been possible without a highly advanced railway system (Reichsbahn). At its peak, 1.6 million workers were employed to develop the network – the main transportation to concentration camps. One historian called the Reichsbahn “the largest enterprise in the capitalist world between 1920 and 1945.”
History
Treadmills were originally designed for punishing prisoners. Their designer, Sir William Cubitt, proposed using their muscle power to both cure their idleness and produce useful work.
UK homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This comes from a 1902 regulation drafted by designers who determined this was closest they could be to each other before they could see the other’s nipples through their shirts.
Commitment devices go back to 800 B.C. In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses hears of the sirens whose enchanting songs bewitch sailors to jump off their ships. So he asks the crew to tie him to the ship’s mast long before they cross paths with the sirens, and tells them to plug their ears with beeswax so they can’t hear the noise.
This is statistically true. But it’s largely because child mortality was so high – around one half of children died before they were 10 – and because many people died in battle. For those who safely made it into adulthood, life expectancy was actually good. Romans routinely lived until their 70s, and in fact to be consul you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency.
In the 1800s citizens needed a full day’s horseback ride to reach polling sites after Sunday church.
Britain wouldn’t have cracked the German code without the Enigma machine – but they wouldn’t have done it without human creativity either. To narrow down the 159 quintillion possible combinations, the Bletchley Park team made educated guesses at certain words the message would contain; for instance they knew that the German forces sent out a daily ‘weather report’, and they knew that most messages would contain the phrase ‘heil Hitler’.