1. Brook Farm (or, Ripley’s Follow Me or Not)

Perhaps the best-known utopian community in America, Brook Farm was founded in 1841 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, by George and Sophia Ripley. The commune was built on a 200-acre farm with four buildings and centered on the ideals of radical social reform and self-reliance. For free tuition in the community school and one year’s worth of room and board, the residents were asked to complete 300 days of labor by either farming, working in the manufacturing shops, performing domestic chores or grounds maintenance, or planning the community’s recreation projects. The community prospered in 1842–1843 and was visited by numerous dignitaries and utopian writers.

However, Ripley joined the unpopular Fourierism movement, which meant that soon the young people (out of a “sense of honor”) had to do all the dirty work like repairing roads, cleaning stables, and slaughtering the animals. This caused many residents, especially the younger ones, to leave. Things went downhill from there. The community was hit by an outbreak of smallpox followed by fire and finally collapsed in 1847.

2. Fruitlands: A Utopian Community (for Six Months Anyway)

After visiting Brook Farm and finding it almost too worldly by their standards, Bronson Alcott (the father of Louisa May) and Charles Lane founded the Fruitlands Commune in June 1843, in Harvard, Massachusetts. Structured around the British reformist model, the commune’s members were against the ownership of property, were political anarchists, believed in free love, and were vegetarians. The group of 11 adults and a small number of children were forbidden to eat meat or use any animal products such as honey, wool, beeswax, or manure. They were also not allowed to use animals for labor and only planted produce that grew up out of the soil so as not to disturb worms and other organisms living in the soil.

Many in the group of residents saw manual labor as spiritually inhibiting and soon it became evident that the commune could not provide enough food to sustain its members. The strict diet of grains and fruits left many in the group malnourished and sick. Given this situation, many of the members left and the community collapsed in January 1844.

3. The Shakers

Officially known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the Shakers were founded in Manchester, England, in 1747. As a group of dissenting Quakers under the charismatic leadership of Mother Ann Lee, the Shakers came to America in 1774.

Like most reformist movements of the time, the Shakers were agriculturally based, and believed in common ownership of all property and the confession of sins. Unlike most of the other groups, the Shakers practiced celibacy, or the lack of procreation. Membership came via converts or by adopting children. Shaker families consisted of “brothers” and “sisters” who lived in gender-segregated communal homes of up to 100 individuals. During the required Sunday community meetings it was not uncommon for members to break into a spontaneous dance, thus giving them the Shaker label.

As pacifists they were exempted from military service and became the United States’ first conscientious objectors during the Civil War. Currently, however, there isn’t a whole lot of Shaking going on. As the younger members left the community, converts quit coming, and the older ones died off, many of the communities were forced to close. Of the original 19 communities, most had closed by the early 1900s.

4. Pullman’s Capitalist Utopia

Located 15 miles south of Chicago, the town of Pullman was founded in the 1880s by George Pullman (of luxury railway car fame) as a utopian community based on the notion that capitalism was the best way to meet all material and spiritual needs. According to Pullman’s creed, the community was built to provide Pullman’s employees with a place where they could exercise proper moral values and where each resident had to adhere to the strict tenets of capitalism under the direction and leadership of Pullman. The community was run on a for-profit basis—the town had to return a profit of 7% annually. This was done by giving the employees two paychecks, one for rent, which was automatically turned back in to Pullman, and one for everything else. Interestingly, the utopian community had very rigid social class barriers, with the management and skilled workers living in stately homes and the unskilled laborers living in tenements. The experiment lasted longer than many of the other settlements, but ultimately failed. Pullman began demanding more and more rent to offset company losses, while union sentiment grew among the employee residents.

This article originally appeared in the mental_floss book Forbidden Knowledge, which is available in our store.

1. The “Computer” That Outsmarted Napoléon

Centuries before Deep Blue started whuppin’ on Russian grand masters, a chess-playing automaton nicknamed “the Turk” was thrashing all manner of chess players. Atop a wheeled wooden cabinet was a seated, life-sized mannequin made of wood and dressed in Turkish garb. The Turk held a chessboard in his wooden lap, and he beat ’most all comers—including Napoléon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Premiering in the 1770s, the creation of Wolfgang von Kempelen moved its wooden arms, seemingly without human assistance, around the board. The secret? The Turk’s arms were operated by a diminutive chess expert crouched inside the cabinet, who operated gears and pulleys to move the Turk’s arms. After traveling the world for almost a century, the Turk ended up mothballed in Philadelphia—where it was destroyed in a fire in 1854. [Photo is of John Gaughan's reconstruction of "The Turk."]

2. Microsoft Buys the Catholic Church!

While the pranksters are still unknown, few press releases have had the impact of the 1994 doozy sent out supposedly by Microsoft, announcing Bill Gates’s purchase of the Catholic Church. As reported, Microsoft not only would get sole electronic rights to the good book, but also would pitch in to the church’s efforts, namely by engineering a means for delivering the sacraments online. Needless to say, the prank tricked a few folks. So many customers rang up Microsoft in protest that the distraught company finally felt obligated to clear up the mess via (you guessed it!) another press release. The statement full-out denied the allegations, and further said that it hoped to alleviate customer concerns by declaring that the company had no intentions of purchasing any religious institutions, Catholic or otherwise. Of course, it wasn’t long before another “press release” surfaced, this one touting IBM’s response to Microsoft: a merger with the Episcopal Church.

3. This Is Your Brain on Bananas

When the alternative newspaper the Berkeley Barb published a satirical article in 1967 claiming that smoking dried banana peels could lead to intoxication, they never expected to be taken seriously. But the oh-so-square national news media didn’t get the joke, and publicized the report throughout the nation. Since then, countless wayward teens have been duped into smoking bananas (which can make you nauseated, but not pleasantly so). The hoax really took off, though, in 1970 with the publication of William Powell’s The Anarchist’s Cookbook, which covers all manner of craft pleasantries from building pipe bombs to manufacturing LSD. Not surprisingly, it also provides a recipe for turning your banana peels into “a fine, black powder” suitable for smoking. Even though no one’s ever gotten high from bananas (although they are a great energy fruit, according to Dr. Atkins!), the Barb’s hoax has had a stunning shelf life.

4. The Social Text Fiasco

In 1996, the respected cultural studies journal Social Text published several complex and dense articles, mainly because that’s what respected academic journals do. But one, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was a hoax by NYU physics professor Alan Sokal, who sought to prove that academic journals will publish any paper that uses big words. To the extent that Sokal’s article is readable, it makes a grandly silly argument about the political implications of quantum gravity. Among other ludicrous assertions, the article claims that physical reality does not exist, that the laws of physics are social constructs, and that feminism has implications for mathematical set theory. It’s hilarious, if you like that kind of thing, but it’s also utter nonsense. After Sokal revealed his hoax in Lingua Franca, many academic journals beefed up their peer review process.

This article originally appeared in the mental_floss book Forbidden Knowledge, which is available in our store.

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The Dilemma: You want to look preppy. But how?

People You Can Impress: Polo players, Republicans, everyone at the club

The Quick Trick: Get a Lacoste shirt and you’ll have the best of both worlds.

The Explanation:

As it turns out, Lacoste is a subbrand of IZOD. As Aristotle would put it: All Lacostes are IZODs, but not all IZODs are Lacostes. These days, both brands are owned by the garment giant Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation, so the difference between Lacoste IZODs and non-Lacoste IZODs is primarily marketing. But the difference between the men behind IZOD and Lacoste is vast indeed. Jack Izod owned a tailoring shop in London, and billed himself as the “Shirtmaker to the King.” Indeed, he made shirts for King George VI (1895–1951) in the 1930s. One day in the late ’30s, a women’s apparel magnate named Vin Draddy visited IZOD’s tailoring shop. Looking to start a line of men’s clothing, Draddy recognized that his own last name would make a poor name for a clothing line, but he quite liked the ring of IZOD. So he bought the rights to the IZOD’s name and began making clothes under the IZOD moniker. Oddly enough, the brand’s namesake, Jack Izod, never designed a single item for the company.

René Lacoste, on the other hand, really did design the famous shirts named for him, which is all the more remarkable because he was not a tailor. He was a professional tennis player.Between 1925 and 1928, Lacoste won seven Grand Slam events, and might have won more had he not become ridiculously rich by inventing the world’s first good tennis shirt. In the 1920s, tennis players wore long-sleeved, heavily starched dress shirts (often with ties!). Lacoste grew weary of the outfits, and by 1929, he’d designed a short-sleeved shirt with a longer shirttail in the back and a flat collar. Further proving he was ahead of his time, Lacoste generally played the game with his collar turned up, though it was more to block out the sun than anything else. But back to the shirts! Light and comfortable, Lacoste’s garments were an immediate hit when he began mass-producing them in 1933. By 1951, he’d sold the brand to IZOD.

Lacoste’s other significant contribution to fashion has to do with the iconic crocodile (it’s not an alligator—see below) on his shirts. Known as “Le Crocodile” for his on-court tenacity, Lacoste added the crocodile to his shirts in the mid-1930s—the first time a logo is known to have appeared on the outside of a shirt. Not a bad fashion record for a guy who mostly just wanted to win tennis tournaments.

Alligator vs. Crocodile

So how can you tell the Lacoste symbol is a crocodile not an alligator? You can’t, really, unless you know the story of Le Crocodile. But a real alligator and crocodile have many differences. For starters, crocodiles are much more likely to kill you. But also: Crocodiles have a narrower, almost pointy snout. A crocodile’s lower teeth are always visible; an alligator’s disappear when its mouth is closed. Alligators are usually gray; crocodiles, a light brown.

Excerpted from the book What’s the Difference?, which is available in our store.

1. Martin Luther King Jr: I Heard a Dream (Which Subsequently Became My Dream)

When writing about the Lord God Almighty, one is generally well advised not to break the eighth commandment, but Martin Luther King Jr. managed to turn out pretty well in spite of his tendency to borrow others’ words without attribution. King received a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955 on the strength of a dissertation comparing the theologians Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Weiman. In a 1989–1990 review, though, the university discovered that King had plagiarized about a third of his thesis from a previous student’s dissertation. And although it was closer to liberal adaptation than outright plagiarism, King’s seminal “I Have a Dream” speech was, well, let’s say “inspired by” a speech that an African American preacher named Archibald Carey Jr. gave to the Republican National Convention in 1952.

2. Alex Haley and the Roots of Roots

Haley initially gained prominence for being the “as told to” author behind The Autobiography of Malcolm X and then went on to publish the epic Roots: The Saga of an American Family in 1976, supposedly a true story that traced Haley’s ancestry back to an African man, Kunta Kinte. Haley won a Pulitzer the next year, and the book was made into a wildly popular miniseries. After the book’s publication, though, Haley admitted that he made up large swaths of the Roots story and, in a further embarrassment, was sued by author Harold Courlander for plagiarism. Haley acknowledged lifting (accidentally, he claimed) three paragraphs from Courlander’s work and settled the suit out of court.

3. Stendhal: The Politician’s Plagiarist

When asked by Oprah Winfrey about his favorite book during the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore cited Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, a novel set in post-Napoleonic France. The book’s protagonist, Julien Sorel, is an ambitious young womanizer who adopts the hypocrisy of his time in order to move up in the world. In his own time, Stendhal, whose real name was Henri Beyle, was most famous not for his novels, but for his books about art and travel. In one, The Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, Stendhal plagiarized extensively from two previous biographies. Confronted with overwhelming evidence of theft, Stendhal added forgery to the list of his literary crimes, manufacturing correspondence in the hopes of exonerating himself.

4. John Milton: In His Own Words

Was the half-blind creator of Paradise Lost a plagiarist? Well, no. But William Lauder, an 18th-century scholar, sure wanted you to think so. Bitter about his professional failures, Lauder published several essays in 1747 claiming to “prove” that Milton had stolen almost all of Paradise Lost from various 17th-century poets. One problem, though. Lauder had forged the poems, interpolating text from Paradise Lost into the original documents. For a while, many (including the great Samuel Johnson) supported Lauder, but it soon became clear by studying extant copies of the old poems that Lauder, not Milton, was the cheat. And cheating, at least in this case, didn’t pay: Exiled to the West Indies, Lauder died an impoverished shopkeeper.

This article was excerpted from the mental_floss book ‘Forbidden Knowledge.’

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The Dilemma: You’ve recently been diagnosed with ADHD and are wondering whether or not your doctor has prescribed you crank to treat your hyperactivity. Because while you’re not an MD or anything, that seems like a bad idea.

People You Can Impress: This is the rare bit of knowledge you can use to impress both chemists and drug addicts.

The Quick Trick: If you’re taking diet pills, that’s amphetamine. If you’re smoking crystal, that’s methamphetamine (and also not so good for you).

The Explanation: The difference here, we regret to report, involves some polysyllabic chemistry, but on the up side, the periodic table need not be mentioned. Both drugs are stimulants of the central nervous system, just like MDMA, commonly known as Ecstasy. But amphetamine is known technically as methylated phenylethylamine, while methamphetamine is known as double methylated phenylethylamine. The second methylation (to make up a word) changes the compound’s interaction with the body.

Regular amphetamine can be plenty bad for you. Speed is found in everything from the ADHD drug Adderall to diet pills. Many nations, including the U.S., also sometimes give amphetamines to members of the armed forces to increase alertness. But it comes with more than a couple problems: First, it’s addictive. Second, it can cause heart attacks. Third, it can cause “amphetamine psychosis,” which is very similar to schizophrenia except you have more energy. But such side effects are rarely a problem for those who take amphetamines as prescribed.

Methamphetamine, on the other hand, is widely considered too dangerous to be prescribed. Somewhat stronger than an amphetamine, meth was first synthesized by a Japanese scientist in 1919. Widely prescribed in America and abroad in the 1950s, meth was used to treat everything from alcoholism (ironic because, at best, it only caused a switch in addictions) to Parkinson’s (ironic because meth causes involuntary body tics). The production of meth, which involves mixing over-the-counter cold medication with hydriodic acid, wasn’t even illegal in much of the U.S. until 1986.

Long known as a drug abused mostly by truckers and bikers, meth only spread into the larger population in the 1980s. But by the year 2000, 4 percent of Americans polled acknowledged having used meth at least once. The allure of meth is that it’s very cheap and makes you very high—the drug gives you a feeling of ecstasy caused by dopamine flooding the central nervous syndrome. Unfortunately, this eventually leads to irreversible brain damage.

But that’s not all. Chronic abuse is associated with paranoia, hallucinations, strokes, and dementia. Also, it is exceptionally bad for your breath. And it’s no fun to get off the stuff : Withdrawal symptoms include seizures.

This post was excerpted from the mental_floss book What’s the Difference? For more columns like this, click here.

The first wheelchairs didn’t just transport the disabled. They were also good for toting dirt, stone and construction supplies around town.

Nobody likes to be tied down. Disabled or not, we all prefer our lives have a little zoom, zoom, zoom, as they say. So it’s no wonder that people have been rigging up ways to make furniture portable since the earliest days of classical civilization. In fact, the first recorded instance of wheeled furniture, a child’s bed depicted in a frieze on a Greek vase, dates all the way back to the 6th century B.C.E. However, we don’t know exactly how this bed was used or for whom. The first records of wheeled seats being used, for transporting both the firm and disabled, date to three centuries later in China. Here, the Chinese used their newly invented wheelbarrow to move people as well as heavy objects. A distinction between the two functions wasn’t apparently made for another several hundred years, around 525 C.E., when images of wheeled chairs made specifically to carry people begin popping up in Chinese art.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Lazy

However obvious it might be to us today, the elderly and disabled weren’t always the target audience of wheelchair makers. Instead, these potentially life-changing devices often became a plaything, suited to the lifestyles of the rich and lazy. Turns out, at least one medieval European king had quite a bit in common with George Costanza. Although primarily known for getting rejected by Queen Elizabeth I and retorting with the Spanish Armada, Philip II of Spain is also remarkable for using a “rolling chair” around 1595. Essentially an elaborate, portable throne, the chair was made of wood, leather, and iron and included comfy footrests.

Freewheeling Geniuses

Philip’s chair was designed especially for him by a Flemish nobleman, but many advances in the evolution of the wheelchair were actually designed and built by the very people who needed them. In 1655, paraplegic 22-year-old Stephen Farfler built himself what turned out to be more than just your average wheeled chair. A watchmaker by trade, Farfler parlayed his knowledge of cranks and cogwheels into the world’s first chair capable of moving under its own power. This invention would have been extremely liberating, finally allowing people like Farfler to go about their day without having arranged for a friend to push them from place to place.

Another major advance in mobility, the folding chair, was also designed by a paraplegic. Herbert Everest was a mining engineer who’d been confined to a wheelchair later in life by an on-the-job accident. In 1933, he teamed up with a mechanical engineer named Harold C. Jennings to design a wheelchair that was lightweight and that could be folded up for easy auto transport. The result of their work was a 50-pound model built of tubular steel, a far cry from the massive wood and wicker monstrosities in use since the Civil War. Built on a collapsible X-shaped frame, the Everest & Jennings chair would become the industry standard for years to come. Better yet, in the 1950s, the two men were responsible for developing the first powered wheelchair. Run by a transistor-based electrical motor, the E & J powered chair was the first to make chairs both motorized and relatively lightweight.

This article was written by Maggie Koerth-Baker and excerpted from the mental_floss book In the Beginning: The Origins of Everything. You can pick up a copy in our store.

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1. His Son: Napoléon II

Sadly, Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte (aka Napoléon II, or, as we like to call him, “the Deuce”), never had a chance to fill his father’s shoes. Despite being the son of Emperor Napoléon I, and garnering the title King of Rome at birth in 1811, poor Napoléon II never ruled anything. By the time of his fourth birthday, the First French Empire had already collapsed. Then, after Napoléon I’s brief return to power and his final military defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the emperor abdicated in favor of his son. This proved a futile gesture, however. The brilliantly resourceful statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, a high official in Napoléon’s government, had arranged for Louis XVIII to take over a new royalist government. Napoléon’s escape from exile on the island of Elba and his short-lived return as emperor didn’t convince the French senate to anoint young Napoléon II instead of Louis XVIII.

That wasn’t the worst of it for junior, however. Under formal terms of the treaty ending the Napoleonic Wars, young Napoléon also was barred from ever ruling his mother’s Italian lands. As duke of Reichstadt (a title based on his mother’s Hapsburg lineage), Napoléon the younger spent his short life essentially under guard in Austria, where he died of tuberculosis in 1832. He wasn’t confined to Austria forever, though. In 1940, a fellow with an even more nefarious name, Adolf Hitler, disinterred Napoléon’s body and sent it packing to Paris, where it could be entombed beside his father’s.

2. His Quirk: The Napoleon Complex

A Napoleon complex is nothing more than an inferiority complex that vertically challenged individuals self-treat with an unhealthy dose of belligerence, a healthy pursuit of achievement, or both. Think of the tough little brawler, eager to take on all challengers—especially big ones. Think of singer-songwriter Paul Simon (5-foot-3) and actors Judy Garland (4-foot-11), Danny DeVito (5-feet), Michael J. Fox (5-foot-4), and David Spade (5-foot-7). Then there are basketball’s Earl Boykins (5-foot-5) and football’s Wayne Chrebet and Doug Flutie (both 5-foot-10). Overachievers all. Think of Britain’s prime minister Winston Churchill, for that matter, or Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. At 5-feet, 6-inches each (the same, by modern measure, as Napoléon I), either of the World War II–era leaders could have had the complex named after him if Napoléon had not gotten there first.

The idea of a psychological “complex,” by the way, wasn’t around in Napoléon’s time. It arose in 1899, with the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. In that groundbreaking book, Vienna’s pioneer of psychoanalysis introduced the term “Oedipus complex,” referring to a child’s repressed sexual desire for the parent of the opposite gender. Freud can’t claim “Napoléon complex,” however. It seems to have arisen in the early 1900s as a casual term, more a backhanded insult than a psychological diagnosis.

3. A Pig Named Napoleon

George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm tells of a revolt strikingly close to the one that transformed the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. That is, except for one minor detail: Orwell’s rebels and revolutionaries are a bunch of animals (in the farm sense of the word). Feeling a little oppressed, Mr. Jones’s barnyard creatures turn against their owner, drive him off the land, and begin running things themselves under an “all animals are equal” banner.

However, idealism crumbles pretty quickly as an unscrupulous pig named (you guessed it!) Napoleon wrests control, turns on his comrades, and becomes more tyrannical than old Jones ever was. In fact, the sacred “all animals are equal” mantra quickly finds itself warped into something significantly less utopian: “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” In an allegorical sense, Napoleon stands for the USSR’s Stalin. But the evil porker’s name, after the corporal who hijacked the French Revolution, certainly fits.

4. Napoleon Solo (1964–1968 Vintage)

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. premiered in 1964 as TV’s answer to the James Bond movies, and each episode was packed with espionage, intrigue, sophistication, and action. With Robert Vaughn in the role of Napoleon Solo, a dashing secret agent and ladies’ man, the show’s popularity grew through the first two seasons. In season three, however, the producers fell under the spell of the competing TV series Batman, starring Adam West. Impressed by the ratings Batman was drawing with its tongue-in-cheek comedy approach to action-adventure, they began taking The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in distinctly comic book directions. The lowest comic denominator didn’t work out for the show’s ratings, though, and Solo quickly degenerated from sophisticated to camp. In the worst episode, Vaughn danced with a man in a gorilla suit.

5. An Anthropologist Named Napoleon

Until 2000, Napoleon Chagnon was known as author of the best-selling anthropology text of all time: Yanomamö: The Fierce People. But since then, his research has been mired in controversy. The anthropologist, along with geneticist James Neel, inoculated many of the Venezuelan tribe’s members. Unfortunately, it was right about this time that the Yanomami experienced their first-ever measles epidemic, leading to thousands of deaths in the region and reducing the tribe to half its original size.

Coincidence? Perhaps. Allegations against Chagnon have divided the anthropological community. Many defend the expedition, claiming it would be impossible for a vaccine to spark such an outbreak. Critics, however, point to the expedition’s financier, the Atomic Energy Commission, as proof that the accused were using the Yanomami as human test subjects. Either way, the scandal raised serious questions about the practices of studying indigenous peoples.

6. The Napoléon Complex Martini

What’s terrible about one part Napoléon Mandarin Liqueur to three parts vodka with an orange peel twist? Nothing, we guess, unless you’re a martini purist. No offense to Chez Napoléon on West 50th Street in Manhattan, where the Napoléon Complex is a bartender’s specialty, but we’ll take ours classic: fine, juniper-scented gin (not vodka); the merest suggestion of dry vermouth (wave the vermouth bottle in the general vicinity of the shaker); and a fat, green, pimento-stuffed olive on a toothpick.

This article was excerpted from Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to History’s Naughtiest Bits. You can pick up a copy in the mental_floss store.