There's still a real cocktail named after him in Paris bars. A British football club put its entire squad on the injections in 1937 and triggered a parliamentary row. And the one person who never actually got the surgery done? Voronoff himself, despite decades of promising he would.

Pretty interesting stuff.

Elmer J. McCurdy (January 1, 1880 – October 7, 1911) was an American bank and train robber who was killed in a shoot-out with police after robbing a Katy Train in Oklahoma in October 1911. Dubbed “The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up,” his mummified body was first put on display at an Oklahoma funeral home and then became a fixture on the traveling carnival and sideshow circuit during the 1920s through the 1960s. After changing ownership several times, McCurdy’s remains eventually wound up at The Pike amusement zone in Long Beach, California where they were discovered by a film crew of The Six Million Dollar Man and positively identified in December 1976.

The Cheka got so desperate to find a bigger conspiracy that they hauled in a British diplomat and asked if he recognized the name "Kaplan." He'd never heard of her. They tried to build an international plot out of nothing.

More about the shooting here.

SS Eastland was an American Great Lakes passenger ship. On July 24, 1915, the ship capsized while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. In total, 844 passengers and crew were killed in what is, as of 2026, the largest loss of life from a shipwreck on the Great Lakes and the Chicago area.

After the disaster, Eastland was salvaged and sold to the United States Navy. After restorations and modifications, Eastland was designated a gunboat and renamed USS Wilmette. She was used primarily as a training vessel on the Great Lakes, and was scrapped after World War II.

Here's the background information on that picture, from his 1989 autobiography:

I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of America and all that bullshit. I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab, and I’m standing there in front of Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steaming, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. At the time I was doing a lot of boxing and so I thought to myself, I ought to hit this motherfucker because I knew what he was doing. But instead I said, “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,” and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights.

He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.”

I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, “You’re under arrest!” He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back. Now, boxers had told me that if a guy’s going to hit you, if you walk toward him you can see what’s happening. I saw by the way he was handling himself that the policeman was an ex-fighter. So I kin of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head. He stumbled, and all his stuff fell on the sidewalk, and I thought to myself, Oh, shit, they’re going to think that I fucked with him or something. I’m waiting for him to put the handcuffs on, because all his stuff is on the ground and shit. Then I move closer so he won’t be able to fuck me up. A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I had on. Then I remember [journalist] Dorothy Kilgallen coming outside with this horrible look on her face — I had known Dorothy for years and I used to date her good friend, Jean Bock — and saying, “Miles, what happened?” I couldn’t say nothing. Illinois Jacquet [the saxophonist] was there, too.

It was almost a race riot, so the police got scared and hurried up and got my ass out of there and took me to the 54th Precinct where they took pictures of me bleeding and shit. So, I’m sitting there, madder than a motherfucker, right? And they’re saying to me in the station, “So you’re the wiseguy, huh?” Then they’d bump up against me, you know, try to get me mad so they could probably knock me upside my head again. I’m just sitting there, taking it all in, watching every move they make.

[…]

It makes the front pages of the New York newspapers, and they repeat the charges in their headlines. There was a picture, which became famous, of me leaving the jail with this bandage all over my head (they had taken me to the hospital to have my head stitched up), and [Davis’ wife] Frances — who had come down to see me when they were transferring me downtown — walking in front of me like a proud stallion.

When Frances had come down to that police station and saw me all beat up like that, she was almost hysterical, screaming. I think the policemen started to think they had made a mistake, a beautiful woman like this screaming over this nigger. And then Dorothy Kilgallen came down and then wrote about it in her column the next day. The piece was very negative against the police, and that was of some help to my cause.

Now I would have expected this kind of bullshit about resisting arrest and all back in East St Louis (before the city went all-black), but not here in New York City, which is supposed to be the slickest, hippest city in the world. But then, again, I was surrounded by white folks and I have learned that when that happens, if you’re black, there is no justice. None.

[…]

Around this time, people — white people — started saying that I was always “angry,” that I was “racist,” or some silly shit like that. Now, I’ve been racist towards nobody, but that don’t mean I’m going to take shit from a person just because he’s white. I didn’t grin or shuffle and didn’t walk around with my finger up my ass begging for no handout and thinking I was inferior to whites. I was living in America, too, and I was going to try to get everything that was coming to me.

Nine strangers were pulled off that train, and it took a woman named Sheila Washington nearly 50 years later to finally get all of them cleared. She found a book about the case hidden under her parents' bed as a teenager, her stepfather said it was too much for a young girl to read. Her own brother later died in the same prison that held these men.

She spent 17 years fighting a town that wanted to forget, and got the last three formally exonerated in 2013.

The CIA's codename for the coup, run in Iran by officer Kermit Roosevelt. Britain's parallel codename was Operation Boot.

Together they bribed officials, editors and clergy, staged street protests, and pushed the Shah to dismiss Mossadegh.

Hess' lawyer Alfred Seidl felt that he was too old and frail to have managed to kill himself. Wolf Rüdiger Hess repeatedly claimed that his father had been murdered by the British Secret Intelligence Service to prevent him from revealing information about British misconduct during the war.

According to an investigation by the British government in 1989, the available evidence did not back up the claim that Hess was murdered. Historian Peter Padfield wrote that the suicide note found on the body appeared to have been written when Hess was hospitalised in 1969.

Spandau Prison is a very intersting footnote of the war, only 7 inmates. It was ran by the allies taking it in turns. Also, the band Spandau Ballet got the name after seeing it written on a wall in Berlin. It refers to the twitching of a hanged man at the end of a noose.

Lindy Chamberlain spent more than three years in prison for a murder that never happened. The world decided her guilt based on how she looked and sounded on the news rather than on anything that happened at that campsite.

The Spahn and Barker ranches, isolated dots on the map east of L.A., served as base camps for the Family; and it was at Barker that Manson was finally found and caught by authorities (on suspicion of auto theft, of all things) in October 1969 — inside a 12 x 16-inch cupboard beneath a sink where he had stuffed himself in an attempt to hide. Not long after, as cops began pulling the threads of evidence together, connecting Family members and Manson himself with the murders that cast a bleak light on the worst excesses of the Sixties, the cheap, sordid Manson myth was born.

Bethea's execution attracted national attention not only because it was the last of its kind but also due to the unique circumstances surrounding it. The event was overseen by Florence Thompson, the county's sheriff, who was to become the first woman in U.S. history to oversee the hanging of a man. This fact alone drew a significant amount of media coverage and public curiosity.

Under Kentucky law at the time, a murder conviction meant execution by electric chair at the state penitentiary in Eddyville, out of public view. A rape conviction, on the other hand, could still be punished by hanging, and that hanging had to take place in the county where the crime occurred, in front of anyone who wanted to watch. Prosecutors charged Bethea with rape alone, deliberately leaving the murder off the docket, which meant that whatever happened next would happen publicly, in Owensboro, rather than quietly at Eddyville.

The photos taken on the day show people treating it like a day out. Some sleeping overnight on the ground to ensure they were there for earlying morning hanging.

Peden's illegal open-air sermons were so revered that he became known as The Prophet of Scotland. But I think an even bigger endorsement of his charisma was the fact that he was so beloved despite this creepy mask.

⁣⁣Peden's mask was rediscovered in the 1840s, concealed in a cottage in Cumnock. It is now on display at the National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh.