The Juke 8 was the world's first karaoke machine

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

One disco producer saw 'Star Wars' four times on its opening weekend and was so inspired that he recorded the album 'Star Wars and Other Intergalactic Funk,' which produced a chart-topping single.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

The 1987 Nintendo video game 'Stadium Events' isn't known for being particularly fun, but its scarcity has made it a highly sought-after item that has sold for up to $35K at auction.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

Brian Wilson wrote the Beach Boys' 'Don't Worry Baby' for the Ronettes, but the legendary girl group rejected it.

Jimmy Carter signed a 1978 bill that legalized home brewing, a move credited with kick-starting the craft beer industry.

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

In preparation for this weekend's Eurovision finale, which is something like the World Cup of pop music, here's a young Céline Dion performing (for Switzerland?) at the 1988 competition.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

Fish populations in the Great Barrier Reef have increased after installing waterproof speakers on the ocean floor that played recordings of sounds from healthy coral reefs.

A pickleball's loud 'pop' sound can reach 120 decibels, which is equivalent to a hammer hitting a nail

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

About 2,000 US babies are born annually without some portion of their limbs, potentially leading to a lifetime of pricey prosthetics.

Planeterrellas create artificial auroras that mimic the atmospheric displays of light by setting up an electric field between two metal balls in a jar filled with a small amount of air.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

Venture capital is a form of funding provided to early-stage companies with high growth potential, typically in exchange for an equity (or ownership) stake

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Roughly 43 million US borrowers owe roughly $1.7T in student debt, the second-largest source of consumer debt behind mortgages.

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

Poison ivy was sent to Europe in the 1600s as an exotic, ornamental oddity, where it was purposefully grown in the English royal gardens at Kew, the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and a few other locations.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace