Ridiculous History

Have you ever taken an IQ test? Originally envisioned as a way to determine which French children should be locked in asylums, Alfred Binet's attempt to quantify human intelligence took the modern wor...

Don't do lead, kids! Nowadays everyone knows the dangers this substance poses to humans -- especially children in their formative years -- but back in the day, lead was everywhere. Ancient Rome was ri...

In this week's Classic episode: In 1918, as the planet was consumed by World War I, the government of California found itself combating an unexpected and catastrophic enemy: Ground squirrels. The rode...

Most people think of yo-yos as a fun, old-school toy for kids: a pretty simple, clever device leveraging physics with a string and a weight. Yet as Ben, Noel and Max discover in today's episode, the s...

The results are in: pretty much everyone loves pizza... but what doth a pizza make varies from place to place. Obsessed with a game-changing message from a former pizzaiolo on the inside, Ben, Noel an...

In this week's Classic episode: Were it not for the coal mine, the town of Vulcan, West Virginia may well have never existed. As a rural and geographically isolated community, Vulcan relied on a singl...

Espionage takes many forms. As Ben, Noel and Max learned in the first part of this two-part series, one of those forms was knitting. In today's episode, the guys explore the stories of phenomenal spie...

For a lot of folks in the modern day, knitting is more a relaxing hobby than a household necessity. However, not too long ago, this needlecraft was a genuine -- and effective! -- tool for spies. In th...

Language is beautiful and, in many cases, continually evolving. As a result, we end up with hundreds of strange idioms and figures of speech that we use on a daily basis, with little to no understandi...

We all know pi, right? It's one of the most famous 'irrational numbers' in history, and mathematicians are still trying to figure it out in the modern day. While this may seem arcane to some of us non...