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A seemingly simple Final Jeopardy question stumped all three contestants in 1984

It was only Alex Trebek's second day on the job when all three contestants gave the same wrong answer and all ended up with $0 .

Representative photo by Rosemaryetoufee

"Jeopardy!" is one of the most popular trivia shows in the world.

The popular game show "Jeopardy!" originated in 1964, and for six decades it has stumped contestants and viewers with tough trivia questions and answers (or answers and questions, to be more accurate). Competing on "Jeopardy!" is practically synonymous with being a smartypants, and champions win lifelong bragging rights along with whatever monetary winnings they end up taking home.

To win "Jeopardy!," you place a wager in the Final Jeopardy round with whatever money you've collected through the first two rounds. All three contestants write down their wagers based solely on the category given, then they have 30 seconds to write down the question for the same answer after it's revealed. Very rarely do all three contestants get the Final Jeopardy wrong.

But in 1984, on Alex Trebek's second day hosting the show, a deceptively simple Final Jeopardy answer answer resulted in all three contestants making the same wrong guess and ending the round with $0 each.

The category was "The Calendar," and after the contestants placed their bets, the answer was revealed: "Calendar date with which the 20th century began."

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

The 20th century was the 1900s, as most of us are aware, and all three contestants wrote down identical responses: "What is January 1, 1900?" But they were all incorrect. And unfortunately, all three had wagered their entire amount, leaving them with nothing across the board.

"Oh, I don't believe it!" exclaimed one of the contestants as they all laughed at the absurdity. "I'm at a loss for words," said Trebek.

A member of the audience asked what the correct answer–or question— was, and Trebek shared that the correct response would have been "What is January 1, 1901?"

If that seems confusing, it's probably because we all made a huge deal about the year 2000, marking it as the end of the 21st century as well as the turn of the millennium. But basically, we were wrong. Some people did point it out at the time, but the excitement and momentum of celebrating Y2K had us all in a frenzy and no one was going to wait until January 1, 2001 to celebrate the new millennium.

Why should we have? It all comes down to the fact that in the Gregorian calendar the first year wasn't 0 A.D., it was 1 A.D. The first century spanned from 1 to 100 A.D., the second century from 101 to 200 A.D. and so on, leading up to the 20th century officially being from 1901 to 2000. So January 1, 1901 is actually the date that the 20th century began, despite how unituitive it feels.

To be fair, you'd think a "Jeopardy!" contestant might recognize that the question seemed awfully simple for a Final Jeopardy round, but only having 30 seconds to think under pressure is tough. And it's not like these people lived in the internet era where random trivia questions like this regularly go viral, making us more aware of them. And this episode aired over a decade before the "Seinfeld" episode where Jerry explains the "no year zero" thing to Newman, who had planned a millennium party.

- YouTubeyoutu.be

As one person pointed out, the calendar answer is technically correct, but it's not the way the average person thinks of centuries, just as a tomato is technically fruit but the average person thinks of it (and uses it) as a vegetable. Even though there were some sticklers about the year 2000, most of us just went along with seeing it as the turn of the millennium because it felt like that's how it should be. It's kind of wild how most of us can think of something incorrectly but we just sort of collectively accept our wrongness about it.

The 1984 episode has been making the viral rounds, prompting people to share how much they miss Alex Trebek. The beloved, long-time "Jeopardy!" host died in 2020 at age 80 after a 20-month battle with pancreatic cancer. He worked up until the point where he couldn't anymore, even while undergoing chemotherapy. His final episode included a touching tribute honoring his 37 seasons with the game show, the end of an illustrious and iconic era.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

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People are sharing the most random facts they know. Here are 15 of the most intriguing.

An 18" pizza is more than double the size of a 12" pizza.

via Sydney Troxell/Pexels, Maddie Franz/Pexels, Murray Becker/Wikimedia Commons

The Hindenburg disaster, a slice of pizza and a squirrel.

How is it that some people seem to know a lot of random facts and are great at trivia, while others can’t get a question right while watching “Jeopardy!”? A big reason is curiosity. People interested in many different subjects have a more significant knowledge base than those who do not.

Further, when people are genuinely interested in a subject, they retain knowledge much better than if they heard the information in passing. So, while two students may learn the same thing in class, the genuinely interested one will remember the information, while the other will quickly forget it.

Studies show that curiosity is one of the most significant predictors of having a high IQ.

A Redditor named TechSavvy_Ryan asked the curious folks on the platform to share the facts that “most people don’t know.” The post went viral, inspiring over 8,000 responses in just two days. So, we cobbled together a list of the 15 most intriguing facts so you can wow people at your next trivia night or cocktail party.

Here are 15 facts that “most people don’t know."

1. Hindenburg survivors

"Most the people involved in the Hindenburg disaster lived." — CaligulaMonkey

"It was said 62 of the 97 people survived. You can see them running away in the nick of time as they touched the ground." — Rook2Pawn

2. Freaky fish

"Irukandji jellyfish grow only to about 1 cubic cm in size, but have an incredibly painful sting. One symptom of the sting is a strong impending sense of doom. Victims have begged their doctor to be killed as they were certain they would die anyways." — NikkiRex

3. Dangerous laughter

"You can collapse your lungs from laughing." — ContentTask2032

"So you can technically die from laughing?" -PaptaLopikju-

4. Dark side of cruises

"The amount of murder, rape and suicide that happens on cruise ships. Most of them unresolved, too." — PeacefulKillah

"Most newer cruise ships also operate an onboard morgue, as they are now considered cheaper options to retirement homes. Last time I was on a cruise, a crew member let slip that there were 2 deaths from natural causes." — Kegman83

5. Happy birthday

"A company called Warner Chappell Music collected licensing fees for use of the song 'Happy Birthday to You' all the way until 2015. That’s why characters in movies often sing other songs like 'For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”'and restaurant chains often have their own birthday songs they sing to customers." — ItsMeCourtney

6. Burial facts

"A burial plot is called a graveyard if it's part of a church lot. It's called a cemetery if separate." — Missusmidas

"The backyard is only a graveyard if they can find the body." — Diels_Alder

7. Spanish Africa

"The only Spanish-speaking country in Africa is Equatorial Guinea. Its capital, Malabo, is on an island slightly northwest of the country’s mainland." — Dre_Lake

8. A case of bad nerves

"If your nerve is broken in the wrong way, the nerve will send a pain signal to the brain and it won't stop." — RhiannonCrystalLady

9. Pizza truth

"An 18-inch pizza is more than two 12-inch pizzas. To do the math, the surface area of a circle is pi x r squared. Pi is the constant. 18 in pizza has a 9 in radius, or r. 12 inch has 6. 9 squared is 81, 6 squared is 36. 36 x 2 is 72. 81 is greater than 72." — Who_Else_But_Macho

"Not only that but if you assume that each pizza has a 1" wide crust all the way around, the 18-inch pizza is 79% toppings and 21% crust, while the two 12-inch pizzas are only 70% toppings and 30% crust. So not only do you get MORE pizza, you get a more efficient pizza with a greater toppings-to-crust ratio." — Tajwriggly

10. Declare your pacemaker

"When a body is to be cremated, the funeral director will first ensure that any rubber sole shoes, watches, phones, glasses, and sealed glass/metal containers are removed. Any sealed container becomes a pressure vessel when exposed to temperatures exceeding 1000°c. These will explode and do significant damage to the crematorium. This is the same reason why any electrical devices or items with batteries are removed, including most watches, and also pacemakers. When an undertaker asks whether your loved on had any medical implants or pacemakers, this is the reason why.
Glasses often tend to leave a silica residue on the bottom of the cremator which is just awkward to clean up and can build over time. Rubber soles are just incredibly polluting and are often not caught by the many filtration systems. This usually results in a black plume of smoke coming from the chimneys. Also, all metal residues and materials which are collected after the cremation is completed are gathered up and can either be returned to the family (upon request) or else treated and recycled, with proceeds from the recycling going towards a worthy charity." — Flaky_Tumbleweed

11. Scuba or S.C.U.B.A.?

"Scuba is an acronym, standing for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus." — JackCooper_7274

12. Squirrel speed

"Squirrels run faster up trees than on flat surfaces." — sstebbinss

13. Battleships

"Battleships in museums/ on display that are WW2 and later cannot start their engines because they have preservative grease inside in case the Navy has to bring the ship back into service." — Stravata

14. Sharkgevity

"Sharks predate trees." — External_Crazy_6568

"Well duh, they're predators." — Flowcahrt83

15. Code-shifting cells

"Your immune system has at least 1 cell to combat every single infection that could ever exist. Your T-cells are cells that, when created, go through a sort of training phase in the thymus where they are allowed to change their genetic code at random, in order to be able to battle 1 random very specific disease. During this, the body also kills any T-cells that are accidentally adapted to kill human cells. Then the T-cells are sent to lymph nodes, to be found later by presenting an antigen (a part of a pathogen) to it. Basically, you have something for everything in your body, the problem is just finding it, as it takes a good few days for your body to locate the specific one." — Chipperland4471


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These fun facts about how 5 well-known things got their names are blowing people's minds

Did you know that the name "Idaho" was made up by a con artist who tried to pass it off as a Native American word?

Photo by Karen Green on Unsplash, Merriam-Webster/Facebook

From how Idaho got its name to why we capitalize "B" in "dB," here are some fascinating factoids.

The "I was today years old when I learned" meme might be a bit overdone at this point, but thanks to the random factoids people share on the internet, it's a near-daily reality. Rarely do we go an entire day without seeing some surprising, delightful or head-scratching piece of info cross our feeds.

Let's take the etymology of words, for example. Did you know that the word "jumbo" originated from an exceptionally large elephant named "Jumbo," and not the other way around? Or that the word "muscle" comes from the Latin musculus, meaning "little mouse," because the Romans thought that muscles moving looked like mice running under the skin?

It's fun to see where things come from, but sometimes we can be surprised by an origin that we thought for sure couldn't be right, but actually is. For instance:

Michelin star ratings for fancy restaurants come from the Michelin tire company.

Yes, really. The assumption many of us have been operating under is that Michelin the restaurant review guide must have been founded by some hoity toity French restaurant critic and not the tire company with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man mascot. Yet here we are, being all wrong.

They don't even try to hide it, so it's surprising that many of us don't know this. The logo and the Michelin man are right there at the top of the Michelin guide website, and the story of how the guide came about is shared on the About Us page:

"It all started in Clermont-Ferrand in central France in 1889, when brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin founded their eponymous tire company, fuelled by a grand vision for the French automobile industry at a time when there were fewer than 3,000 cars in the country. In order to help motorists develop their trips - thereby boosting car sales and in turn, tyre purchases - the Michelin brothers produced a small guide filled with handy information for travellers, such as maps, information on how to change a tyre, where to fill up on petrol, and wonderfully - for the traveller in search of respite from the adventures of the day - a listing of places to eat or take shelter for the night."

The Michelins gave away the guide for free until one of them saw a tire shop using them to prop up a workbench. They decided to demonstrate the value of the guide by charging money for it. They also started sending mystery diners to review restaurants anonymously, and over the next hundred years they'd hone the star rating system that restaurants now aspire to impress with.

The "Guinness" of The Guinness Book of World Records is actually the same Guinness as the beer company.

Similar story here—who knew this was the same Guinness? Only this time, the offshoot was founded not by Guinness himself but by British engineer and industrialist Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery. He conceived of the idea in the early 1950s to satisfy bar patrons who asked trivia questions.

The impetus was Beaver himself getting into an argument over what was the fastest game bird in Europe during a shooting match. But he couldn't find the answer in any reference books. So he decided to create a book with the help of a couple of sports journalists, and the Guinness Book of World Records was born.

The first book was 190 pages and had 4,000 entries. As of 2022, more than 60,000 Guinness world records had been catalogued in the world records database.

The reason the "B" in dB, the abbreviation for "decibel," is capitalized is because it's named after Alexander Graham Bell.

This is one that came out of left field for a lot of folks. How many years did we spend in school without learning this simple fact?


Remember Hansen's Natural soda? It morphed into Monster.

If you were a child of the 80s or 90s, and especially if you had parents who were anti-Big Soda or anti-high fructose corn syrup, you probably drank your fair share of Hansen's Natural soda.

If you weren't paying close attention, you may not know that in 2012, Hansen's Natural Corporation officially changed its name…to Monster Beverage Corporation. That's right, as in Monster energy drinks. Apparently, they found that energy drinks had become their bread and butter, so they leaned into it full force.

Talk about a wild pendulum swing of a rebrand.

"Idaho" was made up by as sketchy congressional delegate who tried to pass it off as a Native American word

There are some unclear spots in the story, but the gist is that back in 1860, the Western territory of that would become Colorado was soon to become a state and needed a name. Congress wanted the state to have a Native American name and someone suggested Idaho, a name allegedly coined by congressional delegate George M. Willing, who claimed it was a Native American word from the Shoshone that meant "Gem of the Mountains." It wasn't and it didn't. He totally made it up.

Congress approved "Idaho" as the name for Colorado at first, but then took it back after they found out it wasn't actually a Native American name. (Did they then choose a Native American name? No, they went with the Spanish name of Colorado.)

In the meantime, someone had named a steamboat in the Pacific Northwest "Idaho," and then some mines got named after the steamboat, and after a few years and several "named after" iterations, people forgot that Idaho was a fake, made-up word, and Congress gave the state its name.

And now, Idaho is not only a state but the last name of a fan-favorite character in one of the best loved sci-fi stories of all time that takes place 10,000 years into the future. A conman's word forever immortalized. God bless America.

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Internet

People are sharing the most random facts they know. Here's 20 of the most interesting.

All animals pee for the same amount of time?

via Pixabay/Pexels and Voyager 2/Wikimedia Commons

A penguin and the planet SAturn.

Some folks just have a knack for remembering all sorts of random facts. They're the stars at trivia nights, but sometimes, they come off as too much of a know-it-all.

Do you ever wonder why some people seem to be better at recalling random facts than others? Monica Thieu, a multi-time “Jeopardy!” contestant, studied the phenomenon and found that people who are great at trivia and remember random facts could also recall the situation and content when they first learned the fact.

So, someone who is excellent at remembering random facts won’t just remember that Grant is buried in Grant's Tomb. They will also remember that they learned it on a sunny day while on a walking tour of Riverside, New York.

(President Ulysses Grant is buried in Grant’s Tomb, which is located in Riverside, New York.)

A Reddit user challenged people on the AskReddit subforum to share the most random facts they knew, and the responses were both educational and head-scratching. Many people shared facts that didn't seem true at first, but after some thought (and Googling!), they really are true.

The most mind-blowing fact is about Reno, Nevada and Los Angeles. (Read more about it at #6.)

We looked at the responses and shared the 20 most interesting “random facts” shared on Reddit.

1. Match works too well

"The guy who started Match.com made his wife family friends and employees sign up to increase traffic to the site. His wife later divorced him for someone she met on match.com." — Acrobatic_News_9986·

2. The world is buzzed

"On average, 0.7% of the world's population is drunk at any given time." — Maleficent_Nobody_75

3. Cold desert

"Antarctica is the world's biggest desert." — NarkOne

"I always have fun with people's initial reactions to this one: What continent has the highest average IQ?" — Apple-Hair

Answer: Antarctica because of all the researchers.

4. Everyone pees (for the same amount of time)

"Almost all mammals pee for 22 seconds with a full bladder (I tell this to everyone I meet)." — ART_IS_IN_THE_SKY

"Not if you have a problem prostate." — JohnKnightuk

5. The good side of eugenics

"Anni-Frid Synni Lyngstad, a founding member of Swedish pop band Abba, is the product of a Nazi breeding program where German men were sent to Norway to impregnate Norwegian women. She was one of the children that was resulted." — Ov3rStt1mulate3d

6. The west is further west than the west coast

"Reno, Nevada is further west than Los Angeles." — SeahawksWin43-8

"In the same vein, Seattle is further north than Toronto, as is Portland. And Salem. The southern tip of Canada is further south than the northern border of California. Maine is about 1000 miles closer to Africa than Florida is. The South American continent is east of Orlando, Florida." — Drone30389

7. Laser facts

"The acronym for 'LASER' means light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." — FatCatLaundromat

8. Redundant names

"Not really a single fact, but just the concept of tautological place names for various features that are just the word for that type of feature in a different language. Some examples:

Gobi Desert (Desert Desert)
Lake Michigan (Lake Large Lake)
Mississippi River (Big River River)
The La Brea Tar Pits (The The Tar Tar Pits)

One of my favorites is The Los Angeles Angels baseball team, or The The Angels Angels." — Locclo

9. We smell dirt

"Human's ability smell petrichor (smell of wet earth from rain) is greater than a Shark's ability to smell blood in water." — ParticulaWR

10. The most terrifying word

"The fear of long words is called Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia." — NemoTheOneTrueGod

11. Hell does freeze

"There's a town in Norway called Hell' and it freezes over every winter. Talk about a cold and hellish place to live." — Unpredictablecutie

"The place name in evolved from the Norwegian word 'heller,' meaning a cave under a rock overhang. There are, however, several hundred places in Norway named Helvete, the Norwegian word for Hell." — Apple-hair

12. Trees > Stars

"There are more trees (about 3 trillion) on Earth than stars (100-400 billion) in the Milky Way Galaxy." — Moon_Jewel90

"I didn't believe you, I had to Google it. You're right! The idea of there being 3 trillion of anything on Earth, let alone something as big as trees in a world as deforested as it is, is incredible!" — _MrGullible

13. Forever honey

"Did you know that honey never spoils? It's like the eternal optimist of the food world—forever sweet and never bitter, just like my outlook on life... well, most days." — TheLatinaFemdom

14. Who killed the moose?

"One of The only predators of the Canadian moose is the orca; whilst there have been no sightings of a whale attacking a moose, there have been moose carcasses torn up in the ocean, and it is the only logical conclusion. Also, moose can swim." — NegrosAmigos

15. Saturn floats

"50% of the sun's mass is focused in just 2% of its volume and if you put the planet Saturn into a bag to keep it together, it would float in water (assuming a suitable body of water could be found)." — Ben_M31

16. Penguin hydration

"Penguins have an organ above their eyes that converts salt water into fresh water." — DowntownFarmer2615

17. This gun's for hire

"Someone made a 'rent a hitman' website that actually got people arrested." — SolarVisor23

18. High 5

"That the 'high 5' was started accidentally during an LA Dodgers game in 1977 when a player raised his hand before another player crossed home plate. The runner slapped the raised hand without any thought. It became a dodgers ritual that permeated into popular culture." — Swel403

19. Skeeter facts

"Only female mosquitoes bite. They are attracted to people with type o blood and those who release more carbon dioxide. The reason a mosquito bite itches is because they inject their saliva to clot the blood when they're done." — Fallowsong

20. Schizophrenia facts

"Schizophrenia can lie dormant in your body. It can be triggered by certain things. For example, if someone has done a specific drug and they say 'I haven’t stopped tripping since.' They’re no longer 'tripping.' Their schizophrenia was activated." — Inner_Earth4710

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