The first person to go over Niagara Fall in a barrel was actually a woman. Hoping to make money from the publicity, schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor climbed into a pickle barrel on Oct. 24, 1901, and was set adrift north of Goat Island. Twenty minutes later she emerged downstream with only a gash on her forehead.

But “if it was with my dying breath,” she later said, “I would caution anyone against attempting the feat. … I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the fall.”

There are some reports that she was accompanied by a black kitten. One says it emerged as a white kitten.

See also Niagara in a Barrel and “Sending Vessels Over Niagara Falls.”

On April 15, 1912, the German liner Prinze Adelbert was steaming through the North Atlantic when its chief steward noticed an iceberg with a curious scar bearing red paint. He took this photo.

He learned only later that the Titanic had gone down in those waters less than 12 hours earlier.

In December 1796, a young man named Graham, a resident of Lancaster, went to Workington, to fulfil a promise of marriage made to a young woman of that town. — On entering the room in which she also was, he became indisposed, and tottering to where she sat, fell dead at her feet.

— Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum, 1803

Charter pilot Trevor Wright was flying over South Australia in 1998 when he discovered something astonishing: the colossal image of a human being, 4.2 kilometers long, carved into the earth.

It must have taken weeks to etch the figure into the arid soil with a tractor and a plough. Even planning the work probably required aerial photography or satellite imagery, surveying skill, and GPS technology.

But no one knows who created the figure, when, or why.