The Origin of Everyday

Sunday

The first standalone insurance policy was issued in 1343 in Genoa, and insured a ship and cargo if they were lost at sea. Before this, provisions for loss had only been within separate loans and contracts.

Monday

In the US, private health insurance did not really develop until the 1930s, but “sickness funds” had been around since at least the Civil War, wherein workers put about 1% of their wages into a fund which would then pay for medical care when a member was too sick or hurt to work.

Tuesday

Life insurance evolved from pooled funds created to cover members’ funerals, an idea which itself goes back to the “burial clubs” of ancient Rome. The first life insurance company in the US was established in 1759 with the extremely descriptive name of “Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of Presbyterian Ministers.”

Wednesday

Celebrities sometimes insure the body parts which helped bring them fame. This includes: Legs (Tina Turner, Rhianna, Mariah Carey, Heidi Klum), tongue (Gene Simmons), smile (America Ferrara), voice (Bruce Springsteen), hands (Keith Richards), and chest hair (Tom Jones), among others.

Thursday

Insurance policies can be extremely specialized. When the Russian satellite Sputnik was launched in 1957, a policy against “death by falling Sputnik” was written. Moms-to-be can get extra expenses covered by “multiple birth insurance” if they later deliver a plural. Businesses can be insured if employees buy the winning office lottery ticket and then all quit. Several agencies insure against alien abductions, including the cost of post-abduction psychiatric care and enduring the sarcasm of those you tell your story to.

Friday

Though it may be amusing to hear about people faking their deaths or deliberately crashing cars to collect insurance money, the most common type of insurance fraud is far more banal. “Premium diversion” is when an insurance agent (whether real or phony) simply keeps the premium payments they receive, rather than forwarding them to the underwriting insurance company which they claim to represent.

Saturday

Since most homeowners insurance is private, companies can protect themselves by simply refusing to sell it in certain high-risk areas. After massive damage caused by recent natural disasters in Florida and California, this is increasingly true in these US states.

Sunday

Rice cultivation is old. Evidence of domestication in Asia goes back as far as 7,000 BC.

Monday

Rice is Asia’s biggest crop by far, where 90% of the world’s 500,000,000-ton annual harvest is grown.

Tuesday

Rice is very, very, varied. There are 40,000-120,000 different rice varieties in the world, but only a fraction of that amount are commonly eaten. It is grown on every continent but Antarctica.

Wednesday

The product called “wild rice” isn’t related to other rice varieties but comes from an aquatic grass native to North America and was first harvested by Native Americans.

Thursday

All rice starts as “brown” or “whole grain” rice. The bran, germ, and endosperm make it darker in color and add nutrition and fiber, but these are removed to make “white” rice, which is the remaining starchy grain.

Friday

Rice can stick stubbornly to your cooking pot and also hold massive structures up. Sticky rice was added to standard lime mortar during China’s Ming Dynasty used in many large structures, including bridges, temples, tombs, and sections of the Great Wall of China. Centuries later, scientists concluded the addition of sticky rice added strength and resilience to these structures, as well as being the first known use of a mortar made with organic and inorganic ingredients.

Saturday

Because rice paddies are already so wet, letting fish swim in them is a beneficial and less chemically-intensive way to fertilize the soil.

Sunday

Bells are old. They first appeared in China about 4,000 years ago, initially made of clay, then later of metal as metallurgy and metal casting developed.

Monday

Early bells were employed for practical uses as well as musical and religious ones. They could signify an individual’s rank, act as warnings or signals, help locate strayed livestock, or just act as ornamentation.

Tuesday

The world’s largest surviving bell has never been rung. At nearly 20 feet tall and 200 tons in weight, Russia’s Tsar Bell was nearly completed in 1737 when a fire broke out in its housing structure. Efforts to extinguish the blaze also hopelessly damaged the bell, though it remains on display in Moscow. More recently, researchers were able to digitally produce the sound the completed bell would have made. Apparently an even larger bell, at 380 tons, was forged 250 years earlier in what is now Myanmar, but sunk in a river during an attempt to transport and recast the metal into cannons, foreshadowing Wednesday’s fact…

Wednesday

The world wars were very bad for people and bells alike. The bells of Europe, some many centuries old, were often melted and reforged into weapons and munitions. During WWII alone, 175,000 bells across Europe met this fate at Nazi hands. Further, bells were forbidden from ringing 1940-43 in England so that people could hear the sirens from the frequent air raids.

Thursday

Traditional metal bells continue to be carried on naval ships six centuries after the practice began, though they are now used mostly for ceremonies and announcing important persons, rather than earlier practical uses, such as timekeeping or safety in fog.

Friday

Spherical or semi-spherical bells such as sleigh bells or jingle bells are not true bells with a swinging clapper but instead have a loose pellet inside so are technically a type of rattle known as “crotals.”

Saturday

As if bicycling 100 miles weren’t impressive enough, a 2014 race also began in London with the ringing of 639 bicycle bells, making it the world record largest bicycle bell ensemble.

Among the many common male name-derived female names:

Monday

Roberta, Robin from Robert

Tuesday

Josephine, Jody from Joseph

Wednesday

Danielle, Daniella from Daniel

Thursday

Georgia, Georgina, Georgiana, Gina from George

Friday

Carly, Carol, Charlotte, Charlene from Charles

Saturday

Paula, Paulette from Paul

Sunday

Fans are old. They’ve been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, including Tut’s. However, palm leaves, used to fan Egyptian royalty since at least 4000BC, were the natural precursor to man-made fans.

Monday

The first electric fan was developed by Dr. Shuyler Skaats Wheeler in 1886. It was brass, heavy, used DC electricity, made to sit on your desk and spun two blades with no protective cage, making it a dangerous type of cool.

Tuesday

Fans move air, but don’t reduce air temperature. The cooling you perceive is because the fan pushes warm air away from your skin and evaporates sweat. This increases heat transfer away from your body, or convection, making you feel cooler. This is also called the wind chill effect. Ironically, the a fan’s electric motor generates heat, so a sealed room with an electric fan would get hotter over time.

Wednesday

Fans have fans, such that there are at least three museums in the world dedicated to fans, their history, and their art.

Thursday

Ceiling fans can also warm a house in the winter. Most have a switch which reverses the blade direction to clockwise. This pushes naturally-rising warm air back down to warm you instead.

Friday

The largest fan on record was just under 28 feet long, presented at a store in Hong Kong in 2009, and made of wood and paper.

Saturday

The art of using an elaborate fan dance to conceal one’s nearly-nude body was famously pioneered by Sally Rand (real name Harriet Beck), spawned competitors and imitators, gained her admirers and Hollywood friends, and got her arrested often.

Sunday

History’s first elevator was likely invented by Archimedes in about 236 BC. It involved a rope wound around a drum and driven by a capstan powered directly by humans, and became the standard Greek design at the time.

Monday

The first elevator of the modern era was installed in a New York department store in 1857, but was so unpopular with visitors that it was removed after just 3 years.

Tuesday

Before elevators, there was no status to higher floors in an apartment building, because these meant more stairs to climb, and there were certainly no top-floor penthouses to brag of. In fact, higher floors meant lower rent, not higher.

Wednesday

Before elevators were automated, an “elevator operator,” who answered the bell when waiting passengers summoned and pulled the brake when the car reached the right floor, was a regular profession, but is now extremely rare.

Thursday

In the US, about 27 people die annually from elevator-related injuries, but this is still darn safe compared to stairs, which kill about 12,000 people a year (not to mention that about 18 billion passenger elevator trips are taken every year).

Friday

Elevators are too modern to have a designated Greek ” ___phobia” name, but those little boxes can trigger plenty of other existing (and named) phobias, such as a fear of small spaces, fear of being trapped, fear of hard-to-escape social situations, fear of heights, and fear of falling.

Saturday

At some point, weight of the heavy steel cable which holds an elevator becomes a limiting factor to how high it can go; you might have noticed changing elevators halfway when going to the top of very tall buildings. For this reason, next-generation elevators may involve lighter cables of advanced metals or cable-less, electromagnetic elevators which can also go sideways.

For historical reasons, many familiar legal terms are two synonymous words connected with an “and” even when either word alone could do. Among the most familiar:

Sunday

Cease and desist

Monday

Will and testament

Tuesday

Arbitrary and capricious

Wednesday

True and correct

Thursday

Null and void

Friday

Furnish and supply

Saturday

Covenant and agree

Sunday

Kissing is old. Records from Mesopotamia and Egypt dating to 2500 BC mention it. However, it is not universal, since about half of the world’s cultures simply don’t practice romantic kissing.

Monday

Animals display kiss-like behavior too, though sometimes for different reasons than humans. Bonobo apes, however, kiss in a way strikingly similar to humans, including kissing to “make up” after a fight.

Tuesday

About two-thirds (64.5%) of people turn their heads to the right when kissing, though unsurprisingly, people turn their heads to match their kissing partners’ heads.

Wednesday

Though kissing has waxed and waned in popularity over the centuries, it was banned outright in England by Henry VI in 1439 in an attempt to control the devastating spread of bubonic plague. Nobody then knew the plague was caused by bacteria, or even what bacteria was, so this ban was helpful despite ignorance of how the disease spread.

Thursday

Kissing the ring of a secular or religious authority is a centuries-old way to show respect and subordination, but recent popes, bishops, and cardinals have begun to eschew the practice, whether to show more equality with the faithful, reduce germ spreading, or for other reasons.

Friday

Some kisses are especially undesirable. A “Judas kiss” is a hidden betrayal, since Judas Iscariot used a kiss to identify Jesus to Roman authorities. A “Glasgow kiss” is no more a kiss than a Molotov cocktail is a tasty drink; it is a headbutt to the face.

Saturday

The study of kissing is called philematology.

Sunday

Banking is an old concept. Going back about 4,000 years to the temples of ancient Mesopotamia, priests, farmers, and merchants took part in well-documented lending, especially of crop seeds. About 600 BC, the ancient Greeks standardized coinage, further developing banking.

Monday

Italy is home to the world’s oldest continuously-operating bank, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which has been operating every year since 1472.

Tuesday

These days, having a bank account is popular, but not universal. Globally, About 18% of people are “unbanked,” with no bank or credit union account at all.

Wednesday

Although big banks tend to dominate headlines, there are still over 4,000 small banks in the US, more than any other country and more than in all European Union nations combined. A distrust of big city banks among early rural Americans fueled an early small bank boom with remaining echoes today.

Thursday

In most countries, the government will reimburse you for lost accounts if your bank goes, well, bankrupt. But before institutions like the FDIC, you’d have no recourse if an insolvent bank lost all your money. This was a major contributor to the Great Depression in the US, when 9,000 banks failed, and with them $7 billion disappeared ($121B in 2024 dollars).

Friday

Not-for-profit by nature, credit unions are a common alternative to banks, with about 400 million members globally and about 1/3 of Americans belonging to one.

Saturday

Bank robberies had their heyday about a century ago, but in recent history they have been declining in frequency since 1991. In the US, there are still about 20 banks robbed every business day, but the thefts are far less dramatic and lucrative than Hollywood would suggest.