12
Nutella was invented for chocolate lovers.
After World War II, chocolate supplies were
low in Italy. Pietro Ferrero knew Italians would
still want their chocolate fix, so he came up with
a way to stretch what he had by creating a sweet
paste made of sugar, hazelnuts, and just a little cocoa.13
The CIA has a top
secret coffee shop.
Yes, it’s called Starbucks,
but the branch in the
CIA’s Langley, Virginia,
headquarters is unlike
any you might have
visited. The baris-
tas have to pass
extensive back-
ground checks
and can’t write
customers’ names
on the cups, since
some of them are
undercover agents.
The store’s name on
the receipt isn’t even
Starbucks, but “Store
Number 1.”14
The shortest war
in history lasted
38 minutes. In 1896,
the sultan of British-
protected Zanzibar died
and a new one took
over without British
approval. The Brits
were not happy,
especially when
Sultan Khalid bin
Barghash refused
to step down.
British warships
spent less than
40 minutes bombarding
the palace before Khalid
fled, marking the end
of the (very quick)
Anglo-Zanzibar War.15
The longest word in the
English language has
189,819 letters.
It’s the technical name of
a protein, which lists its
entire amino acid sequence and would take
about three and a half hours to say out loud.Cover Story TRUEmatthew cohen (cup). profiles in history/solentnews/shutterstock (shoe)
16
Dorothy’s slippers
in The Wizard of Oz
weren’t always ruby red.
In L. Frank Baum’s
1900 novel, he describes
them as “silver shoes
with pointed toes.” But
the 1939 movie was
being shot with the new
Technicolor technique,
and red shoes made a
more eye-catching
choice than silver ones.
There were at least four
pairs made for the film,
one of which was re-
covered only last year
after having been stolen
from the Judy Garland
Museum in 2005.rd.com 63