Strange Facts in History

On February 12, 1818, Chile was proclaimed an independent republic under O'Higgins' leadership. An army led by Bernardo O'Higgins, Chile's most renowned patriot, and José de San Martín, hero of Argentine independence, crossed the Andes into Chile and defeated the royalists.

O'Higgins was born in Chillán, Chile. As noted in his certificate of Baptism, he was the illegitimate son of Ambrosio O'Higgins, a Spanish officer from County Sligo in Ireland, who became governor of Chile and later viceroy of Peru. His mother was Isabel Riquelme, a prominent lady of Chillán.

It just struck me as strange that a guy name O'Higgins would be Chile's most renowned patriot.

Joseph C. Gayetty of New York started producing the first packaged toilet paper in the U.S. in 1857. It consisted of pre-moistened flat sheets medicated with aloe and was named "Gayetty’s Medicated Paper". Gayetty's name was printed on every sheet. [continued with many more fascinating facts from the rear gaurd]

The term typography comes from the Greek terms for "impression" plus "writing." The type known as Caroline minuscule dates back to the reign of Charlemagne, late in the 8th century. The name of the Frankish ruler Charlemagne—King Charles—gave us the Latinism Caroline or Carolingian. The word minuscule, which comes from the Latin term meaning "rather small," originally named "script composed of lower case letters."

Got all that? Then we're ready to move ahead to explain how that script came into being. Charlemagne, whose efforts as a grown man to teach himself to write had been met, according to his biographer, with ill-success, commissioned the development of a standardized and legible script to be used throughout his lands.

During the Renaissance, Italian printers looking for a less Teutonic style of print borrowed the Carolingian minuscule under the impression they had discovered a script dating back to Ancient Rome. They were wrong, but the clean Carolingian retained its popularity long enough to be considered the basis of modern typefaces.