59
votes
Accepted
Did Andrew Tate claim his job was to seduce women and get them on a webcam?
Yes, it was on his website
But the process to verify that is convoluted, so bear with me:
The quote was posted to his website (cobratate.com)
Someone backed that page up to the Internet Archive in ...
- 30.8k
54
votes
Did the Golden Gate Bridge 'flatten' under the weight of 300,000 people in 1987?
Yes, according to the 27 May 1987 Desert Sun article 250,000 jammed Golden Gate span’s deck Engineer: Bridge crowd not close to load limit:
[Engineer Dan] Mohn said the 250,000 people who packed onto ...
- 106k
38
votes
Accepted
Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin (Rohrpost) cleared with wine?
Landrath, "Die Rohrpost-Anlage in Berlin und Charlottenburg." Archiv für Post und Telegraphie , Vol. 16, No. 12, Jun. 1888, pp. 354-369 describes, among other items, the initial version of ...
- 496
37
votes
Did Napoléon Bonaparte ask his wife Josephine not to bathe for several days in a letter before his arrival?
It was an urban legend years before the alleged 1981 origin
I was able to find some snippets and they mostly throw doubt on it being a real Napoleon quote, not least because it's been attributed to so ...
- 30.8k
36
votes
Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin (Rohrpost) cleared with wine?
Annual report of the Postmaster General, 1891 is as close to a primary source as I could find:
In working the line of Berlin tubes a number of defects became apparent in course of time, caused partly ...
- 30.8k
34
votes
Was "red, gold, and green" used to display gay pride?
Unlikely.
The linked Genius annotation seems to be the source of this claim - it was posted in September 2012 by a user with no other contributions to the site, and has since been copied verbatim to ...
- 3,713
34
votes
Accepted
Did Emperor Norton ever kneel in defiance of racist mobs?
The answer to this and other Norton-related questions can be found at The Emperor Norton Trust.
First, the story of the prayer comes from a 1939 book by a man named Ryder. The Trust believes that the ...
- 44.9k
32
votes
Accepted
Did Minecraft sell 600 million copies?
Minecraft has not sold 600 million copies
As far as I've been able to find, Microsoft has not released a new total or annual count of Minecraft sales since the 238 million figure. Comparing to past ...
- 2,401
24
votes
Was "L" placed at the beginning of the LGBT acronym because of the AIDS crisis?
Neither word was used much until the late 1990s, by which time the AIDS epidemic had been around for over a decade.
"GLBT" had a brief surge in popularity in the early 2000s, but its usage ...
- 3,986
22
votes
Did the Golden Gate Bridge 'flatten' under the weight of 300,000 people in 1987?
A NYT article from two days after the event already contains the claim that "The bridge flattened out - its whole arch disappeared." That quote is from Gary Giacomini, president of the ...
- 3,125
15
votes
Is this infographic about Palestinian loss of land since 1947 accurate?
The maps have problems and many inaccuracies.
In the first map, the green area is described as "Palestinian land". Before 1947 the term "Palestinian" referred to any inhabitant of ...
- 57.5k
13
votes
Accepted
Would US president Theodore Roosevelt refer to his political enemies as "vermin"?
Google Books is too limited for me to get the full context, but this is what I have, evidently from a letter he wrote in 1900. From The years of preparation, 1868-1900 - Page 1356:
…which will help ...
- 30.8k
10
votes
Accepted
Did Tsar Nicholas II really call for a "short, victorious war"?
This quote is actually attributed to Vyacheslav von Plehve, the minister of interior during Nicholas II reign (and, AFAIR, marked as such in the beginning of David Weber's book).
The quote comes from ...
- 116
9
votes
Accepted
Was "L" placed at the beginning of the LGBT acronym because of the AIDS crisis?
A 2007 University of South Carolina document says:
LGBTQ: Is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning. The acronym can be used interchangeably: GLBT, GLBTQ, LGBT, etc....
- 106k
9
votes
Was the oven mitt first developed by Earl Mitt?
I found some evidence (all of which points very strongly against any "Earl Mitt") and assembled a timeline:
1757: Mitt (a clipping of "mitten" with the same meaning) is first ...
- 30.8k
7
votes
Accepted
Did "MP3" surpass "sex" as the most-searched term online in 1999?
Yes, according to searchterms.com, which I believe is the source of the information.
In December 1998, sex was first and mp3 was second. In April 1999, mp3 was first and sex was second.
According to ...
- 30.8k
7
votes
Accepted
Did Voltaire say/write "Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."?
Partial answer
Not found in French
Looking for Voltaire's citations in French with related words ("vérité", "vrai") on various websites doesn't bring any hit that could be the ...
- 1,984
6
votes
Did Napoléon Bonaparte ask his wife Josephine not to bathe for several days in a letter before his arrival?
The earliest example I see so far of this claim is from 1963:
See Car and Driver volume 8, June 1963, page 75 (alternative link to University of Michigan source):
Your room , which will be spotless , ...
- 106k
6
votes
Accepted
Did the Joint Intelligence Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff claim the USSR would convince all Japanese?
The quote appears in some other papers like this 1991 one by Alperovitz & Messer with reference to the primary sources, which however are almost certainly not online:
Aside from the fact that it ...
- 59.8k
6
votes
Accepted
Is yellow safer than white for center line road markings?
There are problems with that story
To start with a technicality, Alaska and Hawaii did not become states until 1959, so all-states-but-one would have been 47 states in 1955.
Yellow lines were already ...
- 5,736
6
votes
Did one of the 9/11 hijackers use a Conch Republic passport to enter the United States?
No. The Conch Republic is a self-declared microstate in Florida. As such, their passports would not really help enter the US. The US would not recognize them, or else they'd be admitting some other ...
- 59.8k
6
votes
Did ancient Peru use electroplating?
Yes, possibly.
While we associate electroplating with a bench-top current source, it is also possible to use an aqueous solution of a gold compound, the work-piece, a piece of pyrite and one wire to ...
- 1,625
6
votes
Is this the Oath to become a Master Mason?
The same oath also occurs in Morgan's Exposure of Freemasonry, on pages 47 and 48. However, it seems that Freemasonry has never confirmed any of the exposures. Therefore, we can never know for certain....
- 1,083
5
votes
Was it ever common in the USA for women to use their husbands' Social Security Numbers as their own?
Yes.
...it has long been nearly impossible to function in the US without a number...
While Social Security numbers (SSN) are ubiquitous today, and women's rights have advanced, I believe this ...
- 17.7k
5
votes
Accepted
Were the Finns ever considered as the Negroes of the North?
Some such comparisons were made, but shouldn't be exaggerated.
In the July 1861 Brownson's Quarterly Review writings of Vincenzo Gioberti state:
the Finns and Negroes, the two most degenerate ...
- 106k
4
votes
Was it ever common in the USA for women to use their husbands' Social Security Numbers as their own?
According to Tools for Evaluating Health Technologies (1995), a publication of the 103rd Congress, at page 50 in a portion written by Jeff Whittle of the Veterans Administration:
For example, women ...
- 106k
4
votes
Was "L" placed at the beginning of the LGBT acronym because of the AIDS crisis?
It has nothing to do with their role in the AIDS crisis. It was placed first as an optics strategy and it originates from second-wave feminism. The insinuation that their solidarity with gay men wasn'...
- 57
4
votes
Did Andrew Tate claim his job was to seduce women and get them on a webcam?
In an interview with Tripp Kramer, Tate says something similiar to the description of the PHD program. At 6:05 in the video Andrew Tate LIED he says:
That teaches basically how I got girls, how I met ...
- 41
3
votes
Were South Korean workers forcibly injected with amphetamines?
According to a summary of the 1995 biographical film A Single Spark:
Tae-il is a tailor and starts working at the Seoul Peace Market, where he witnesses squalid working conditions, with cruel bosses ...
- 106k
3
votes
Accepted
Did Napoléon Bonaparte ask his wife Josephine not to bathe for several days in a letter before his arrival?
I obtained the purported citation Lettres d’amour à Joséphine (Fayard, 1981), which was also mentioned by Chantal Jacquet in Le Monde in 2013. Page 155 does not contain anything like the phrase “Ne te ...
- 44.9k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible