Think croissants are French? Think again. Croissants originated in Austria, not France. Few things are as quintessentially French as croissants, which, in addition to being delicious, provide an opportunity to test your most egregious French accent when you talk about them. As it turns out, however, croissants aren’t originally from Paris or anywhere else in France — they actually originated in Vienna and are known in Austria as kipferl, the German word for “crescent.” (As you may imagine, that’s also what “croissant” means.) According to legend (though it’s most likely apocryphal), kipferl were created in celebration of a 1683 military victory against the Ottoman Empire, with their shape mimicking that of the Ottoman crescent moon symbol. Others have traced the pastry’s origins as far back as the 13th century. Croissants are classified as viennoiserie in France, a term referring to breakfast pastries made in the Viennese style, and they became popular in France after an Austrian baker opened a shop in Paris in the 1830s — though they were less flaky and buttery than the croissants we know today, as French bakers began using a laminated dough in the early 20th century. Croissants share their surprising origins with another pastry that’s usually associated with a different country: Danishes, which, despite their name, aren’t Danish. They also hail from Vienna, hence why they’re known as wienerbrød (“Viennese bread”) in Denmark. Maybe it’s time Austrian bakers were given their well-earned due.

Today April 23rd, 1969 Sirhan Sirhan receives death penalty for assassination of Robert F. Kennedy On April 23, 1969, Sirhan Sirhan is sentenced to the death penalty after being convicted in the assassination of politician Robert F. Kennedy. In 1972, Sirhan’s sentence was commuted to life in prison after California abolished the death penalty. In the early morning hours of June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy, a U.S. senator from New York who had just won California’s Democratic presidential primary, gave a victory speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. After the speech, Kennedy was making his way toward the hotel kitchen to greet supporters when he was shot three times at close range by Sirhan Sirhan with a .22 caliber revolver; a fourth bullet went through Kennedy’s jacket. Five other people were shot as well, none fatally. Several of the senator’s friends and aides subdued Sirhan on the scene. Kennedy died at the hospital the next day, June 6, at age 42. The funeral for Kennedy, who served as U.S. attorney general from 1961 to 1964 and had been a senator since 1965, was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. His body was then taken to Washington, D.C., by train, with thousands of people lining the route to pay their respects. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant born in Jerusalem in 1944, moved to the United States with his family as a boy and attended high school in California. He later stated he killed Robert Kennedy because the senator had supported Israel in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Following a three-month trial, during which Sirhan’s lawyers argued he was mentally unstable at the time of the murder, he was convicted on April 17, 1969. On April 23, he was given the death penalty. However, in 1972, the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty and Sirhan’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. His requests for parole have been denied over a dozen times, and he continues to serve his time in a California prison.

Americans once paid to receive their mail, not send it. Popping to the post office to purchase a book of stamps is a routine task for many Americans, though it wasn’t the norm until 175 years ago. At one time, American letter senders didn’t pay postage — the recipient of their message did. That is, until 1847, when Congress allowed the U.S. Postal Service to issue its first official stamp. Although mail service had existed in America since the Revolutionary period, by the 1840s the USPS was operating at a budget deficit, in part because delivery fees weren’t always paid upon delivery. Postage upon delivery was not cheap — the cost of sending a letter from New York City to Buffalo, New York, was as much as 25 cents at a time when many workers barely earned $1 a day. Mail recipients could refuse letters, meaning the postal service was on the hook for the round-trip delivery cost. Many Americans were skeptical of prepaying postage, believing it an insult that suggested the recipient was too poor to cover the fee, but by 1855 Congress’ mail reforms made stamps mandatory, while also standardizing and lowering the cost of mail delivery.

How did the Pacific Ocean get its name? The Pacific Ocean was named because Ferdinand Magellan thought it was "pacific," or peaceful. The largest and oldest ocean basin on Earth, the Pacific has roughly twice as much water as the Atlantic. Yet it didn’t receive the name we know today until the 16th century. On November 28, 1520, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan — after 38 days of weathering the treacherous waters of the strait that’s now named after him at the tip of southern Chile — became the first European to reach the ocean by way of the Atlantic. Happy to have the harrowing journey behind him, Magellan referred to this new ocean as “Mar Pacifico,” meaning “Peaceful Sea.” While the moniker made sense at the time, today we know that both the Pacific and Atlantic can be tumultuous at times. Yet “Pacific” isn’t the only name this big blue expanse has been known by. In 1513 — seven years before Magellan glimpsed the Pacific — Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa led an expedition across the isthmus of Panama and named the sea he found on the other side the far less poetic “el mar del sul,” or the “South Sea.” However, the most authentic moniker for the Pacific Ocean may be the Hawaiian term “Moananuiākea.” Interestingly, this name — perhaps over a thousand years old — is closely related to the Maori “Te Moana Nui a Kiwa,” meaning the “Great Ocean of Kiwa” (Kiwa being a Maori guardian of the sea). So while “Pacific” is the name most of us now know, it’s certainly not the one used by the people who mapped and sailed the Pacific’s 63 million square miles for centuries before the Europeans arrived. Ferdinand Magellan wasn’t the first person to circumnavigate the globe. Most people learn in history class that Ferdinand Magellan was the first person to circumnavigate the globe during his famous voyage from 1519 to 1522, but the truth is a lot more complicated. For one, the famous (or infamous) explorer never actually finished the voyage from Spain to the Moluccas (Spice Islands), because he was killed in the Philippines in 1521. Another mariner on his expedition, Juan Sebastián del Cano, brought the Victoria, the last surviving vessel of Magellan’s fleet, back to Spain in September 1522. But even if Magellan had survived that skirmish, the first person to actually circumnavigate the globe may have been an enslaved individual named Enrique, whom Magellan had seized during the Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511. Eight years later, Enrique served as an interpreter on Magellan’s globe-trotting quest. After Magellan’s death, Enrique abandoned the mission only a few hundred miles short of Malacca. If he returned home in 1521 (we’ll likely never know), then he’d officially be the first person to ever travel the entire globe.

Coca-Cola accepted mobile payments in the 1990s. Though they’re commonplace today, digital payments didn’t exist before the 1990s. The first legitimate online transaction was in 1994, when someone purchased a copy of the Sting album Ten Summoner’s Tales online for $12.48 plus shipping. In 1997, Coca-Cola launched a rudimentary method of paying for products with a cellphone. The company installed two vending machines in Helsinki, Finland, allowing customers to send payment using SMS text. The service was called “Dial-a-Coke,” and the charges were eventually added to the customer’s monthly telephone bill. The idea caught on, with just under one-third of the vending machines’ cans successfully purchased with a mobile phone. The concept later expanded to Tallinn, Estonia, by 1999 and Australia in 2001.

Credit cards were invented because of this one mistake. Credit cards were invented because a businessman forgot his wallet. The modern credit card may not exist if it weren’t for a businessman who forgot his wallet more than 75 years ago. In 1949, Frank McNamara was dining with clients at Major’s Cabin Grill in New York City, when he realized he didn’t have any cash on him and couldn’t pay. Accounts differ about whether McNamara’s wife came to his rescue or he simply promised to pay the restaurant back later. In either case, he was reportedly determined never to allow this embarrassing situation to occur again and began brainstorming new ways for people to pay if they also found themselves cashless. With the help of lawyer Ralph Schneider, McNamara conceived of a company called the Diners Club, which issued pocket-sized cardboard credit cards featuring details such as a person’s name, address, and membership number. The idea was for members to use the cards at participating restaurants, each of which kept track of a running personal monthly tab connected to each card. While the concept of a running tab wasn’t new, this was the first card that could be used at an array of businesses instead of one establishment. At the end of each month, each eatery would tell the Diners Club how much debt was owed, and the company would collect money from its members and send the necessary amount to each restaurant, minus a processing fee. The service made its debut on February 8, 1950, when McNamara returned to Major’s Cabin Grill for a dinner that Diners Club International now refers to as the “First Supper.” At the end of the meal, McNamara provided his charge card and signed his name, serving as proof of purchase. The Diners Club became an immediate sensation, amassing more than 330 participating businesses and 42,000 card holders within a year.

The “greatest single act of corporate espionage in history” The British once sent a spy to China to steal secrets about tea. What one historian called the “greatest single act of corporate espionage in history” wasn’t in search of stock market tips or a coveted algorithm. It was about tea, which by 1800 was the most popular drink among the British — something of a problem for the empire, as all tea was produced in China at the time. And so the English did something at once sinister and cunning: They sent a botanist to steal tea seeds and bring them to India, a British colony at the time. The thief in question was Robert Fortune, who was recruited by the East India Trading Company for the job. This leafy skulduggery inspired the aforementioned historian Sarah Rose to write For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History. The book details how Fortune not only came into possession of precious seeds but also learned the tools of the trade: how tea leaves were cultivated, dried, processed, and manufactured. The plan succeeded, with India overtaking China as the world’s largest tea producer within Fortune’s lifetime. China eventually reclaimed that title, but it took more than a century, and India remains the second-largest today.

Did you know? Neither China nor England drinks the most tea per capita. Though both countries are synonymous with tea — China for growing it, England for consuming it — neither drinks the most tea per capita. An astonishing 1.6 billion pounds are drunk in China each year, the most overall, but on a per capita basis, that isn’t even enough to crack the top 15. Far ahead of either country is Turkey, which drinks 6.9 pounds of tea per person every year — a full 2 pounds more than No. 2 on the list, Ireland (4.8 pounds). The United Kingdom comes in third at 4.2 pounds, with Russia (3.05 pounds) and Morocco (2.6 pounds) rounding out the top five.

The U.S. once banned sliced bread. Sliced bread was first sold commercially in 1928 and quickly grew into a culinary sensation — until its rise came to an abrupt halt when it was briefly banned 15 years later. On January 18, 1943, amid World War II, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard announced a ban on selling sliced bread in an effort to conserve wartime resources. The government hoped this ban would preserve the country’s supply of alloyed steel (used to build slicing machines) and wax paper (used to both wrap sliced bread, which required thicker wrapping than unsliced loaves, and protect military equipment from the elements). It was a common practice to ask Americans back home to ration goods in the name of the war effort, but the ban on sliced bread was met with furious and immediate backlash. U.S. housewives in particular were dismayed over the ban. One woman named Sue Forrester wrote to The New York Times, “I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household.” While hotels and restaurants were given a 60-day grace period to prepare, bakeries weren’t so lucky, and saw sales decline up to 10% while facing sizable fines for defying the ban. Given the ration’s widespread unpopularity, many government bureaucrats played dumb and refused to admit being involved, pointing fingers at others instead. Wickard finally rescinded the ban on sliced bread on March 8, 1943, claiming, “The savings are not as much as we expected,” while conveniently neglecting to acknowledge any public outcry. Weeks the ban on sliced bread lasted 7 Age (in years) of the oldest bread crumb ever discovered 14,400+ Did you know? A sack of flour was auctioned off for over $275,000 in 1864. In 1864, a Nevada merchant named Reuel Colt Gridley auctioned off a single sack of flour over and over again, raising a staggering sum for the U.S. Sanitary Commission (a precursor to the Red Cross). It all began after Gridley lost a friendly wager and was forced to carry a 50-pound sack of flour through town. He took the defeat in stride, decorating the sack with red, white, and blue ribbons and parading it around accompanied by a marching band. The spectacle attracted a crowd, and it was eventually suggested that Gridley auction off the famed flour sack to raise funds for charity. The winner paid $250, but didn’t actually want the flour, and suggested Gridley auction the sack again. The process repeated itself, and Gridley raised more than $5,000 by day’s end. In the weeks that followed, he traveled across the country holding auctions for the flour sack, raking in more than $275,000 (about $5.4 million today) for the cause. The flour was ultimately used to bake cakes at the 1864 Sanitary Fair in St. Louis.

What do you call a single spaghetti noodle? The name for a single spaghetti noodle is “spaghetto.” If you go into an Italian restaurant and order spaghetto, chances are you’ll leave hungry. That’s because “spaghetto” refers to just a lone pasta strand; it’s the singular form of the plural “spaghetti.” Other beloved Italian foods share this same grammatical distinction — one cannoli is actually a “cannolo,” and it's a single cheese-filled “raviolo” or “panino” sandwich. Though this may seem strange given that these plural terms are so ingrained in the English lexicon, Italian language rules state that a word ending in -i means it’s plural, whereas an -o or -a suffix (depending on whether it’s a masculine or feminine term) denotes singularity. (Similarly, “paparazzo” is the singular form of the plural “paparazzi.”) As for the term for the beloved pasta dish itself, “spaghetti” was inspired by the Italian word “spago,” which means “twine” or “string.” Despite pasta’s deep association with Italy, it’s far from an Italian invention. Though its precise origins are somewhat obscure, Arab traders are thought to have introduced pasta to Sicily sometime in the eighth or ninth centuries. Even pasta sauce isn’t originally Italian: Tomatoes were brought to Europe in the 16th century by explorers from the New World, with the first tomato sauce recipe appearing in a 1692 Italian cookbook written by chef Antonio Latini. More than 300 years later, spaghetti is a perennially popular dish, even if most of us haven't always known what to call it. Weight (in pounds) of the world’s largest bowl of pasta 17,417 Cans of SpaghettiOs sold per year 175 million Length (in feet) of the longest pasta noodle 12,388 Thomas Jefferson helped popularize pasta in the United States. Around the time he served as U.S. minister to France (1784–1789), future President Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The best maccaroni in Italy is made with a particular sort of flour called Semola, in Naples.” Jefferson even tasked his secretary and diplomat William Short with tracking down a machine for making “maccaroni,” a term he used to describe pasta in general. Jefferson was known for offering pasta to his dinner guests during his presidency, and even had his own written recipe for an early form of mac and cheese that survives to this day. He was also known for serving White House visitors other European delicacies of the time, such as macaroons and ice cream. Though Jefferson was the famous face often connected to pasta’s growing popularity, his Black, enslaved cooks were the ones truly responsible for crafting the delicious dishes – among them James Hemings, Peter Hemings, Edith Hern Fossett, and Frances Gillette Hern.