You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

Joann Saladino and Marcus Weisgerber, from Long Island, New York, bought the General Electric appliance for $100 in 1979, although it was reportedly built in 1923.
They showed Inside Edition how it worked. "I've been cooking on it since the day I got it," Saladino said. The design was among the first line of automatic electric stoves produced by General Electric under the Hotpoint brand, which was born after Earl H. Richardson, a meter reader for the Ontario Power Company, found out how to introduce electricity into household appliances. Hotpoint started with electric irons before branching out to toasters, coffeepots, stoves, and more.

[Lee Stewart]

In 2011, a still-functioning Marconi 702 went up for auction in London. The TV, which had a 12-inch screen inside a walnut and mahogany case, was first bought in 1936, just three weeks after transmissions in the UK started. Unfortunately, the original owner had only been able to watch it in their London home for a few hours before a nearby transmitter burned down. Picture wasn't restored to the area until a decade later in 1946, according to Time. The original owner bought it for £100 ($130), which was half of an average annual salary in the 1930s.

[Lee Stewart]

A 1933 Bakelite phone, just like that pictured above, has been used by a small British pub for decades. "Most people are quite stunned when they realize it still works. The sound is a bit muffled and you get crackly noises but I still love using it," Glenys Crampton, the landlady of the Birch Hill Inn in North Yorkshire, England, told the York Press in 2015. The pub itself dates back to 1860. The phone, which was also the first in the village, is only used by the pub occasionally to help preserve it, the Press reported.

[Lee Stewart]

Charles Darwin's personal pet tortoise didn't die until recently. Okay, technically she wasn't his pet, but after his tour of the Galapagos Islands, Charles Darwin brought back a 5-year-old tortoise he named Harriet. She outlived her adopter by 124 years, ultimately making it to a whopping 176 years old. Harriet lived out her final years as part of the family of Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin in Australia, until she passed away in 2006.

[Lee Stewart]

The apex predator with the highest kill rate is not the lion, the cheetah, or the wolf, it's the African wild dog. According to researchers, these lean, big-eared canines are noted for having a kill rate of 85 percent—lions get just 17 to 19 percent—while peregrine falcons get 47 percent of their targets. Another animal with surprisingly high kill rates? Domestic cats, which kill more than 30 percent of their targets.

[Lee Stewart]

Those annoying foil seals on the top of medicine bottles were put in place after a rash of poisonings occurred in 1982, in which seven people in the Chicago area were killed after ingesting Tylenol laced with potassium cyanide.

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]