Betty solved it by making a hook. She did it in front of Oxford scientists who had never taught her how, and the result ran in Science in 2002. It became one of the most famous animal-intelligence stories of the century. The twist is that the scientists who started the story were not the ones who complicated it. Betty herself did that, years later, without meaning to.

Quick answer

In 2002, a captive New Caledonian crow named Betty bent a straight piece of wire into a hook to lift a bucket of food from a tube. She did it with no demonstration and almost no experience with wire. Later research suggests the skill may be part of what these crows naturally do, though the scientists disagree over how much insight Betty showed.

Two crows, one hooked wire

The experiment was run by Alex Weir, Jackie Chappell and Alex Kacelnik, then at the University of Oxford. Their subjects were New Caledonian crows, a species from the Pacific island group of the same name. In the wild these birds are known for making tools. They tear strips from pandanus leaves and trim twigs and ferns into hooks to pull insects out of crevices.

Betty and Abel were captive birds, and Betty had been wild-caught as a young bird. The researchers wanted to see whether the crows would choose a hooked wire over a straight one to fish the bucket out of the tube. They did. Then, on one trial, Abel took the hooked wire and left Betty with the straight one.

According to the Oxford group’s own account, Betty wedged one end of the straight wire under a piece of sticky tape and pulled on the other end with her beak. The wire bent. She had made a hook. The group says this came on only the fifth time the crows had encountered wire or any bendable material at all.

Not a fluke

A single lucky bend would have been a curiosity. Betty kept going. The Science paper, titled “Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows,” reported that she repeatedly bent wire into hooks, using a variety of techniques. Her hooks worked, and she used them to lift the bucket.

The Oxford team described this as the first time an animal had been seen making a new tool for a specific task without a long stretch of trial and error. That framing made Betty a textbook example of animal intelligence, and the paper ran in the 9 August 2002 issue of Science.

Betty later took on harder tests. In a 2006 follow-up, she was given aluminium strips that sometimes had to be bent and sometimes had to be straightened to fit the task. She adjusted them appropriately, including on four of five trials that required unbending. That test was designed to rule out a single memorized movement.

The plot twist: are crows just born to bend?

Here the tale gets an asterisk, and the asterisk is the honest part. Betty was wild-caught. Nobody could say what she had done with sticks and leaves as a young bird in New Caledonia. “Never taught by a person” is not the same as “never did anything similar before.”

In 2016 a study in Royal Society Open Science went looking for the answer. It examined 18 wild-caught New Caledonian crows in aviaries. Together they produced 85 hooked tools, and 10 of the 18 birds deliberately bent their tools, using three distinct techniques. Its authors concluded that tool bending is part of the natural behavioural repertoire of these crows.

That does not make Betty ordinary. It does mean her wire hook may have been an existing skill applied to a new material, rather than a flash of invention. The researchers of the 2016 paper say Betty may well have shown behaviour that was already part of her repertoire. They also report that experiments with eight other captive crows showed similar bending without convincing evidence of insightful behaviour.

The part most people miss

The popular retelling usually stops at the hook. The layer that matters more is that the debate never had a clean winner. One camp saw a bird reasoning about how hooks work. The other saw a species with a built-in knack for shaping hooked tools, one that Betty happened to show off with wire. Both camps used Betty’s data, and neither could re-run her life story.

Betty died in 2005, and the 2016 authors note that later work on other crows did not settle the insight question. What her wire did was force scientists to ask how they would tell invention from instinct in the first place. That question is now a standard part of animal-cognition research, and a straight piece of garden wire started it.

So the dinner-table version is this. A crow bent a wire into a hook, and it may have been genius or it may have been talent. The fact that no one can cleanly separate the two is what made her famous.

Sources

Behavioural Ecology Research Group, University of Oxford: page on crow tool manufacture (Betty, Abel and the wire hook).

Royal Society Open Science, “Tool bending in New Caledonian crows” (2016), via PubMed Central.

Weir and Kacelnik, “A New Caledonian crow (Corvus moneduloides) creatively re-designs tools by bending or unbending aluminium strips” (2006), Oxford Behavioural Ecology Research Group PDF.

Weir, Chappell and Kacelnik, “Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows,” Science 297:981 (2002).

Wikipedia, “New Caledonian crow” (background on wild tool use).

Explore more: More Wild Animal Tales.

Betty the crow FAQs

Who was Betty the crow?

Betty was a captive female New Caledonian crow at the University of Oxford. In a 2002 experiment led by Alex Weir, Jackie Chappell and Alex Kacelnik, she bent a straight wire into a hook to retrieve food. She died in 2005.

Did anyone teach Betty to bend wire?

No. The researchers reported that she had not been shown how, and that she had almost no prior experience with wire. She was wild-caught, though, so what she did as a young bird in the wild is unknown.

Do wild crows make hooks on their own?

Yes. New Caledonian crows in the wild fashion hooked tools from twigs and ferns to extract insects. A 2016 study also found that 10 of 18 wild-caught crows deliberately bent their tools, which suggests hook-making is part of their natural behaviour.

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Nothing plugged your tooth in. What you felt is the same phenomenon that has split scientists since the 1780s, and dentists were already arguing about it in print in 1880. You supplied the parts yourself: two different metals and a mouthful of saliva.

Quick answer

Biting aluminum foil can hurt when the foil touches a metal filling or crown. The two dissimilar metals and your saliva form a tiny battery, and the small current it produces stimulates the nerve inside the tooth. Dentists call this galvanic shock.

A twitching frog and a grumpy physicist

The story starts before dentistry cared. In 1786, the Italian physician Luigi Galvani found that a frog’s leg would twitch under certain conditions, including when two different metals touched it. He concluded that the twitch came from an innate ‘animal electricity’ inside the tissue.

Alessandro Volta, a professor at the University of Pavia, disagreed. Volta argued that the frog was not the source of anything. The current came from the two different metals, and the leg was just a very sensitive detector. The frog was reacting to the metals, not generating the charge.

The argument was productive. Around 1800, Volta built the voltaic pile, a stack of metal discs separated by an electrolyte layer, as an early battery that needed no living tissue. In the modern account, Volta was right about the metals and Galvani was onto something about nerves. Both halves matter for your teeth.

Your mouth is a very good battery jar

A battery needs two different metals and a conductive liquid between them. Saliva is salty and full of ions, so it fits the role well. An amalgam filling or a gold crown supplies one metal. The foil supplies aluminum, a different one.

When the foil touches the filling, the pair forms a small galvanic cell. Dental sources describe the aluminum as the anode and the filling as the cathode. Current flows through the wet tooth toward the nerve, the nerve fires, and your brain reports pain. Volta’s metals and Galvani’s twitching tissue are both present, only the tissue is yours.

The sources we checked describe the effect as needing metal already in the mouth, such as a filling, crown or braces. A tooth with no metal work has nothing for the foil to pair with. Some dental pages cite exact current figures for the sensation, but they disagree with each other, so we’re leaving those out.

Dentists noticed this in the 1800s

Nineteenth-century dentists were fascinated by this, and often worried about it. Amalgam fillings were new and controversial. In October 1847, The Dental Register printed ‘Galvanic Action and Amalgam’ by E. Slack, M.D. The page images are archived at PubMed Central, but the text isn’t searchable, so we can’t tell you what Slack concluded.

Later, Henry S. Chase of St. Louis, an M.D. and D.D.S., published ‘Some Observations and Experiments Connected with Oral Electricity’ in The American Journal of Dental Science in May 1878. In February 1880 he published an article in The Independent Practitioner with a title that doesn’t hedge: ‘Every Tooth Containing a Metallic Filling Is a Galvanic Battery in Active Operation.’

Not everyone agreed. The same journal ran a rebuttal, ‘No “Battery” in a Tooth,’ and a further article, ‘Straining at a Gnat’ by Chas. E. Francis, M.D., appeared there in May 1885. We could confirm titles, authors and dates but could not read the text of these scans. So we know the argument happened, and we don’t know who won the round.

The part most people miss

The foil isn’t special. Any two dissimilar metals can do this job. Dental writers describe the same kind of shock when different metals in a single mouth touch each other, for example when the fillings on opposite jaws meet as you bite. The foil just happens to be a thin, aluminum-heavy scrap that ends up between your teeth at dinner.

The ‘battery’ also works by contact. Aluminum foil is only a problem when it touches metal, and it stops once the contact ends. The sources we read describe the pain as a quick zap rather than lasting damage, though none of them measured how long it lasts. One trade article did suggest that galvanic currents could damage bone, but it seemed to mean long-term exposure, not a single bite on a baked potato.

So the modern discomfort you feel is a small echo of the 1786 frog experiment. Two metals, a wet conductor and a reacting nerve are all it takes. Volta would say the metals did it, and Galvani would say the nerve reacted. Your tooth demonstrates both at once.

Sources

Today’s RDH, ‘Galvanized Shock: Some Dental Patients Can Still Experience a Shocker.’

Queen’s Park Dental, ‘Why Biting Down on Aluminum Foil Hurts.’

PubMed Central archive of historical dental journals: E. Slack, ‘Galvanic Action and Amalgam,’ The Dental Register (1847); Henry S. Chase, ‘Some Observations and Experiments Connected with Oral Electricity,’ American Journal of Dental Science (1878); Henry S. Chase, ‘Every Tooth Containing a Metallic Filling Is a Galvanic Battery in Active Operation,’ The Independent Practitioner (1880); Chas. E. Francis, ‘Straining at a Gnat,’ The Independent Practitioner (1885).

Wikipedia, ‘Alessandro Volta.’

Explore more: More Amazing Body tales.

galvanic shock FAQs

Why does aluminum foil hurt my teeth?

When foil touches a metal filling or crown, the two different metals and your saliva form a small galvanic cell. The resulting current stimulates the tooth’s nerve, which your brain reads as a sharp zap.

Is the shock from biting aluminum foil dangerous?

The sources we checked describe it as a brief, uncomfortable zap rather than lasting damage, and none of them said a single incident is harmful. If a tooth stays sensitive afterward, mention it to your dentist.

Can it happen if I have no fillings?

The dental sources we consulted describe the effect as needing existing metal in the mouth, such as amalgam fillings, gold or metal crowns, or braces. Without a metal to pair with the aluminum, the effect described there doesn’t occur.

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The popular version says Hoefler coined it over lunch. The real version is messier. He wasn’t the first person to say it. The lunch story comes from a colleague’s memory, not a document. And the accounts of who suggested the phrase to him don’t agree.

Quick answer

Journalist Don Hoefler put “Silicon Valley” into print as the headline of a series in the trade paper Electronic News, dated January 11, 1971 (the Computer History Museum’s catalog entry says January 10). He popularized the name but did not invent it. Who first said it, and who suggested it to him, is still disputed.

A columnist with a nose for gossip

Donald C. Hoefler (1922–1986) had worked as a publicist and reporter for Fairchild Publications, McGraw-Hill, RCA and Fairchild Semiconductor. He knew the chip world from the inside. Later he left Electronic News to start his own newsletter, Microelectronics News, which ran for about 14 years. Most issues are now archived by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

The Computer History Museum describes him with the line “liked by some, disliked by many and read by all.” His newsletter traded in the follies of Valley executives, and much of the gossip was gathered at his unofficial field office: a bar stool at Walker’s Wagon Wheel, a tavern in Mountain View. Executives feared the newsletter, and by most accounts they read it anyway.

In late 1970 he was working on a series about how the semiconductor industry had taken root in the area that, up to then, most people still called the Santa Clara Valley. That name belongs to the geographic valley itself, not to a county. The county is Santa Clara County, and the valley’s name was about geography, not about an industry. The series needed a title.

The lunch (version one)

The lunch story comes from Jim Vincler, who worked with Hoefler. As the Computer History Museum tells it, Hoefler was at a lunch with marketing people when one of them said “Silicon Valley.” Vincler recalled watching Hoefler’s eyes “subtly light up like a poker player who had just filled a straight.” Hoefler then built the phrase into his series on the industry’s growth in the Santa Clara Valley.

In this telling, the phrase came from someone at a meal, not from Hoefler’s own imagination. That makes the lunch account a colleague’s recollection, and it is the kind of detail that gets polished with retelling.

The friend (version two)

Many sources credit a different person: Ralph Vaerst, an entrepreneur and friend of Hoefler’s, who is said to have suggested the name for the series. Wikipedia’s Hoefler entry says so directly.

But when the Vaerst question came up, Vincler said it was “definitely not Vaerst” at that lunch. So there may be two different origin stories, or one story that got tangled over the years.

In 1981 Hoefler gave a tidy rationale, quoted by the Computer History Museum: “These revolutionary semiconductors are made in a valley, from silicon.” Then he added, “How was I to know that the term would quickly be adopted industry-wide?”

The part most people miss

Hoefler wasn’t first. A May 1970 advertisement in the Peninsula Times Tribune described a Palo Alto company that “helps production people in Silicon Valley.” That is about eight months before his headline. The Computer History Museum’s blog on the question cites earlier use outside journalism.

Memory pushes it back further. A SIGCIS discussion of the question notes that advertising executive Regis McKenna remembered first hearing the term in mid-1965, and that other survey respondents recalled 1967 or so. Its author, who arrived in the area in March 1970, said it was still being called the Santa Clara Valley then. The discussion suggests the term came from government R&D people or East Coast communications professionals in the 1960s, and concludes that no one really knows who coined it.

So the name was probably floating around in conversation before a journalist gave it a headline. What Hoefler did was print it, in a paper the whole industry read, at a moment when the industry needed a name. “Santa Clara Valley” described a place. “Silicon Valley” described what the place made, which is why it worked as a brand.

The honest answer to “who named Silicon Valley?” is that nobody knows who said it first. We do know who made it stick.

Why it stuck

Most place nicknames are a bit embarrassing, but this one worked because it was literal. Silicon was the material, the valley was the place, and “USA” in the headline made it sound like a country of its own. Once other publications and companies started using it, the old name had little chance.

Hoefler kept covering the region until his death in April 1986, at 63. By then the name had outgrown its origin. It now describes an industry more than a geography, and it has been copied by places like “Silicon Alley” and “Silicon Fen” that wanted some of the shine.

Sources

Computer History Museum, “Who named Silicon Valley?” (blog post).

Computer History Museum, catalog and Revolution exhibit entry for “Silicon Valley, USA,” Electronic News.

SIGCIS, “Who Coined the Term Silicon Valley?”

Wikipedia, “Don Hoefler” (biography and the Vaerst account).

Smithsonian Institution Archives (SOVA), Don C. Hoefler’s Microelectronic News Collection.

Explore more: More Words & Phrases tales.

Silicon Valley FAQs

Who coined the term Silicon Valley?

Nobody knows for certain. Journalist Don Hoefler was the first to use it as a headline, in Electronic News in January 1971, but evidence shows it was in use earlier, including a May 1970 newspaper ad and recollections dating to the mid-to-late 1960s.

Did Ralph Vaerst name Silicon Valley?

Some accounts, including Wikipedia’s, say Vaerst suggested the phrase to Hoefler. Hoefler’s former colleague Jim Vincler said the person at the lunch was definitely not Vaerst, so the accounts conflict and the question is unresolved.

What was Silicon Valley called before?

The area was commonly called the Santa Clara Valley, after the geographic valley (the county there is Santa Clara County). Some East Coast and government insiders reportedly used variants like “Silicon Gulch” and “Silicon Valley” informally in the 1960s.

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That reflex, the kind that would get you thrown out of any lab today, is the actual origin of aspartame. No white-coated eureka moment, no deliberate hunt for a sugar substitute. Just a chemist named James M. Schlatter, a beaker of leftover research chemical, and an old habit of licking his fingertip to grab a stuck piece of paper.

Quick answer

Aspartame was discovered by accident in December 1965 by James M. Schlatter, a chemist at G.D. Searle & Company, while he was researching an anti-ulcer drug. The compound spilled on his hand, and when he licked his finger to pick up a piece of paper, he noticed an intense sweet taste.

A drug that wasn’t supposed to taste like anything

Schlatter was working on gastrin analogs, peptide compounds meant to help treat ulcers, not sweeten anything. A colleague at Searle, chemist Robert Mazur, had synthesized aspartyl-phenylalanine methyl ester, one of many intermediate compounds in that research chase. Schlatter was heating a batch of it in methanol as part of the synthesis process.

At some point the mixture bumped and a bit of it splashed onto the outside of the flask, and from there onto his fingers. It was a minor, unremarkable lab mishap, the kind that happens dozens of times a week in any organic chemistry lab. He didn’t think much of it and kept working.

The taste that shouldn’t have been there

Later, reaching for a piece of weighing paper, Schlatter licked his fingertip out of habit. What he noticed, as he later described it, was a very strong, sweet taste, nothing like the bitter or chemical notes he’d expect from a research compound. Curious rather than alarmed, he went back and deliberately tasted a small amount of the aspartyl-phenylalanine methyl ester he’d been synthesizing, confirming the sweetness wasn’t a fluke.

That compound is aspartame. Searle recognized the commercial potential almost immediately. The company filed for a patent, and in 1970 was granted U.S. Patent 3,492,131 covering the sweetening use of the compound. The timing helped: cyclamate, then a leading artificial sweetener, had just been banned by the FDA in 1969 over cancer concerns, and saccharin was facing its own safety questions. A new, intensely sweet compound that used a fraction of the quantity of sugar to achieve the same effect looked like a golden ticket.

The part most people miss

The accidental discovery is the fun part of the story, but the more revealing chapter is what happened after Searle tried to bring aspartame to market. The FDA approved it in 1974, only to have that approval challenged almost immediately by objectors, including attorney Jim Turner and neuroscientist Dr. John Olney, who raised concerns about brain effects and pointed to irregularities in Searle’s own testing data. By 1976, the FDA had stayed its approval and launched an investigation into Searle’s lab practices, which turned up sloppy and, by some accounts, manipulated records. A formal Public Board of Inquiry then convened and, in 1980, voted to keep aspartame off the market, citing unresolved questions about brain tumors in lab animals.

Aspartame stayed in regulatory limbo until a very political moment arrived: Searle’s chief executive at the time was Donald Rumsfeld, who joined Ronald Reagan’s transition team after the 1980 election and reportedly told a Searle sales meeting he intended to push hard to get the additive approved. Reagan’s newly appointed FDA commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes Jr., took office in April 1981 and had no prior background in food-additive regulation. Rather than accept the Board of Inquiry’s ruling, Hayes convened his own advisory panel of FDA scientists and a lawyer, who identified what they called errors in the board’s reasoning. In July 1981, Hayes used his authority as commissioner to personally overrule the Public Board of Inquiry and approve aspartame for dry foods. Approval for use in carbonated drinks followed in 1983, and Hayes left the agency later that year amid conflict-of-interest questions before taking a position with a public relations firm that counted Searle among its clients. Whatever you make of aspartame’s safety record since, which regulatory bodies worldwide have continued to review and uphold, the path from spilled beaker to supermarket shelf ran through a genuinely contested regulatory fight, not a straight line from lab bench to soda can.

Sources

Wikipedia’s entry on James M. Schlatter documents his biography and the December 1965 discovery circumstances at G.D. Searle & Company.

Wikipedia’s entry on NutraSweet covers the aspartame patent (U.S. 3,492,131), Searle’s commercialization, and the compound’s regulatory timeline.

Wikipedia’s entries on the Aspartame controversy and on Arthur H. Hayes Jr. detail the 1980 Public Board of Inquiry decision and Hayes’s 1981 overruling of that board as FDA commissioner.

Explore more: more accidental inventions.

aspartame FAQs

Who discovered aspartame and when?

James M. Schlatter, a chemist at G.D. Searle & Company, discovered aspartame’s sweet taste in December 1965 while researching an anti-ulcer drug.

Was aspartame really discovered by accident?

Yes. Schlatter wasn’t looking for a sweetener at all. A research compound spilled on his hand, and he tasted it by chance when he licked his finger to handle a piece of paper.

Why was aspartame’s approval controversial?

A Public Board of Inquiry voted in 1980 to keep aspartame off the market over unresolved safety questions. In 1981, newly appointed FDA commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. overruled that board and approved it, a decision that drew scrutiny given Searle CEO Donald Rumsfeld’s political ties to the incoming Reagan administration.

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Klar wasn’t chasing a hairstyling mystery. He studies yeast and cell division at the National Cancer Institute, and he had a hunch that the tiny spiral on top of your head might be wired to the same genetic switch that decides whether you write with your left hand or your right. What he found in that mall wasn’t proof, exactly. But it was strange enough, and stubborn enough, that scientists are still arguing about it decades later.

Quick answer

Most people’s hair whorls spin clockwise (roughly 85-90% in typical population samples, though the exact figure shifts by country), and researchers have found that counterclockwise whorls show up far more often in left-handed people. The leading explanation is that whorl direction and handedness may share an early genetic or developmental origin, though scientists disagree on exactly how strong or reliable that link really is.

A geneticist, a mall, and a lot of staring at strangers

Amar Klar’s method was refreshingly low-tech: stand somewhere heads are visible, tally the direction of each whorl, move on. Across his surveys of the general population, he recorded that about 92% of people had a clockwise whorl and roughly 8% counterclockwise — a number that lines up closely with figures reported in later summaries of his work. He hadn’t asked anyone their dominant hand, but he didn’t need to for the first step, since roughly 90% of people are right-handed, and the two ratios were suspiciously close.

The real test came next. Klar tracked down a separate group of people who specifically had counterclockwise whorls and asked about their handedness directly. If whorl direction and handedness were unrelated, you’d expect this group to be about 90% right-handed too, just like everyone else. Instead, it split close to 50/50 between right-handers and non-right-handers. Something about growing a counterclockwise whorl seemed to erase the usual right-handed advantage.

One gene trying to do two jobs

Klar published his data in the journal Genetics in 2003 and proposed a tidy explanation: a single gene, with a dominant version that pushes a person toward both a clockwise whorl and right-handedness. If you inherit even one copy of that dominant version, the theory goes, you’ll likely be a clockwise-whorled righty. But if you end up with two copies of the recessive version, the gene stops steering — your whorl direction and your handedness both become, in effect, a coin flip.

It’s an elegant idea, and it would explain why left-handed and ambidextrous people show something close to an even split of whorl directions while right-handed people overwhelmingly cluster clockwise. But ‘elegant’ and ‘confirmed’ are different things. A single gene controlling something as complex as hand preference, brain lateralization, and hair follicle geometry all at once is a bold claim, and follow-up studies haven’t all agreed. Some later research found no significant link between whorl direction and handedness or language dominance at all, and modern genetics generally treats handedness as influenced by dozens of genes, not one master switch.

The part most people miss

The other tempting explanation for cowlicks — that they spin whichever way the Coriolis effect nudges them, the same force people blame for draining toilets swirling differently in each hemisphere — is a joke that escaped the lab. French pediatric geneticist Marjolaine Willems and her colleagues actually tested it, comparing hair whorls in twins and unrelated children born in France versus Chile, on opposite sides of the equator. Their verdict, delivered with a straight face in the citation for their 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Anatomy: ‘if toilets aren’t subject to Coriolis forces, hair certainly isn’t either.’ Their real finding was more interesting anyway — identical twins matched each other’s whorl direction far more often than chance would predict, but counterclockwise whorls were also noticeably more common among the Chilean children than the French ones, hinting that whorl direction isn’t pure genetics. Something in early development, possibly linked to the womb environment, appears to nudge it too.

Sources

Wikipedia’s entry on ‘Hair whorl,’ which summarizes Amar Klar’s 2003 findings and the genetic model built around them, along with the criticism that later research has raised.

The Conversation, ‘Why aren’t you a lefty? A geneticist finds clues in kangaroos and shopping malls’ (2018), which details Klar’s mall-based data collection and his proposed single-gene mechanism.

Scientific American, ‘Does the Coriolis Effect Cause Your Cowlick?’, covering Marjolaine Willems’s twin and cross-hemisphere study and its 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Anatomy.

Explore more: more true stories about the amazing human body.

cowlicks FAQs

Do most people’s cowlicks really spin clockwise?

Yes. Population surveys generally find clockwise whorls are the majority pattern, though the exact percentage varies by study and country, ranging from roughly half in some Japanese samples to over 80% in some U.S. and German samples.

Is it true that left-handed people are more likely to have a counterclockwise cowlick?

Research by geneticist Amar Klar found left-handed people were far more likely than right-handed people to have a counterclockwise whorl, but the link isn’t absolute, and other studies have failed to replicate a strong association.

Does the Coriolis effect cause hair whorl direction?

No. Researchers who studied this directly, including the team behind a 2024 Ig Nobel Prize-winning study, concluded the Coriolis effect is far too weak to influence something as small as a hair follicle.

Is cowlick direction purely genetic?

It appears to be influenced by genetics but not determined by it alone. Twin studies show identical twins often share whorl direction, but not always, and environmental factors during early development may also play a role.

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The real story involves a 1990 civil rights law, a museum curator with thousands of elevator parts in a collection, and a radio show that turned a hallway superstition into a viral fact. But here’s the twist nobody mentions when they repeat the trivia: the two loudest authorities on the subject — a federal-law explanation from the elevator trade group and a hands-on-the-hardware claim from an elevator historian — don’t actually agree on what’s happening inside the wall.

Quick answer

Two different, only partly compatible explanations circulate for why the close-door button doesn’t seem to work: the elevator industry’s trade group says the buttons are wired but effectively overridden by a 1990 accessibility law that sets a minimum door-open time, while an elevator museum curator says a large share of buttons were simply never connected to anything in the first place. Both are treated as fact online; only one comes from someone who has opened up the panels.

The button that outlived its own reason to exist

Door-close buttons showed up on elevator panels well before anyone worried about accessibility — building owners wanted a way to hustle passengers along and squeeze more trips out of a car during rush hour. For decades, pressing it did exactly what it looked like it should do: it cut the wait short and closed the doors immediately.

Then came the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed in 1990. Its accessibility guidelines specify how long elevator doors have to remain open at each stop, giving someone using a cane, crutches, or a wheelchair enough time to get across the threshold. Karen W. Penafiel, then executive director of the trade group National Elevator Industry Inc., told the New York Times in October 2016 that once that legal minimum kicks in, “the riding public would not be able to make those doors close any faster” — her explanation for why, in her account, the buttons still exist but rarely have any window left to act in.

How a hallway habit became an internet fact

That’s the tidy version. But the story that actually went viral came from somewhere else entirely. In a 2014 Radiolab segment called ‘Buttons Not Buttons,’ producer Latif Nasser visited the Elevator Museum in Long Island City, New York, where curator Patrick Carr made a much blunter claim than anything about ADA timing. Asked why the buttons don’t work, Carr didn’t mention the law at all. “Because they were never wired up,” he said. “Never. Most of the time we don’t do it. About 80 percent of them don’t work.”

That’s a different failure mode than Penafiel’s. Penafiel describes buttons that are wired and functional but neutralized by a legal minimum hold time. Carr describes buttons that were never connected to the control system to begin with, an installation shortcut with nothing to do with disability law. Both claims got quoted everywhere as if they were the same fact, and they got compressed into one tidy narrative that the button is ‘fake.’ In reality, elevator company employees have pushed back publicly, in comment sections and on the button’s Wikipedia entry, insisting plenty of close-door buttons are wired and do work under specific conditions — meaning nobody has actually settled which explanation covers more elevators, or whether both are true in different buildings.

The part most people miss

Whichever explanation applies to the elevator you’re standing in, the button almost certainly still has a job to do somewhere in the building’s wiring — just not for you. Elevator safety code (ASME A17.1, the standard inspectors test against) requires a functioning close-door capability for fire service operations, so that firefighters or maintenance staff can use a key switch to override the standard hold time and shut the doors on demand. That requirement is also why Carr’s 80 percent figure, striking as it is, comes from one curator’s estimate rather than an industry-wide audit — nobody has published a study checking a representative sample of elevators to see whether ‘never wired’ or ‘wired but overridden’ is the more common story. The honest answer is that both mechanisms are real, both have been confirmed by people who work on elevators for a living, and the popular retelling just quietly picked the more dramatic one and dropped the disagreement.

Sources

The New York Times, ‘Explaining a Mystery: Why Don’t Elevator ‘Door Close’ Buttons Work?’ (October 27, 2016), featuring comments from Karen W. Penafiel of National Elevator Industry Inc.

Radiolab, ‘Buttons Not Buttons’ (2014), featuring curator Patrick Carr of the Elevator Museum in Long Island City, New York, stating that roughly 80 percent of close-door buttons he’s encountered were never wired up.

U.S. Access Board, Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines, on minimum elevator door-open time requirements at each landing.

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elevator close-door button FAQs

Does the elevator close-door button actually do anything?

It depends who you ask: the elevator trade group says the buttons are wired but effectively overridden by an ADA-mandated minimum door-open time, while an elevator museum curator says a large share were simply never wired up at all. Either way, pressing it usually accomplishes nothing.

Why was the close-door button disabled in the first place?

According to the National Elevator Industry trade group, it wasn’t deliberately disabled — the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 introduced minimum door-open times so people using mobility aids have enough time to board, which overrides the button’s original speed-up function. A separate account from an elevator museum curator says many buttons were simply never connected to the system, unrelated to the law.

Is it true that 80% of close-door buttons are fake?

That figure comes from a 2014 Radiolab interview with elevator museum curator Patrick Carr, who said about 80 percent of buttons he’s seen were never wired up. It’s a widely repeated estimate from one collector’s experience, not an industry-wide study, and elevator company employees have publicly disputed how universal it is.

Who can actually make elevator doors close faster?

Building staff, elevator technicians, and firefighters can use a key or access code to trigger a fire-service or maintenance mode that lets the close-door function override the standard hold time.

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The sweetness wasn’t in the bread. It was on his hands, left over from a day spent testing coal-tar compounds at Johns Hopkins University. Fahlberg spent the next several hours tasting his way through the dishes on his own lab bench until he found the source: a compound nobody had named yet, hundreds of times sweeter than sugar and with zero calories. He called it saccharin. But the full story of who really discovered it — and who got rich off it — is messier, and more interesting, than the tidy ‘eureka’ version most people know.

Quick answer

Saccharin was discovered in 1878 by chemist Constantin Fahlberg, who noticed an unexplained sweetness while eating dinner after a day of coal-tar research in Ira Remsen’s chemistry lab at Johns Hopkins University. He traced it to a compound he’d spilled on his hands, later named saccharin — though Remsen, whose lab and research made the find possible, never shared in the profits.

A late night in Ira Remsen’s lab

Fahlberg, born in Russia in 1850, was working as a research assistant to Ira Remsen, a chemistry professor at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University. Remsen’s lab wasn’t chasing candy — they were systematically studying the chemistry of coal-tar derivatives, standard organic chemistry work for the era. In one experiment, Fahlberg reacted a compound called o-sulfobenzoic acid with phosphorus chloride and ammonia, and the mixture boiled over on his bench.

He cleaned up as best he could, went home for dinner, and — without washing his hands first — picked up his bread. It tasted unmistakably sweet. So did his water glass. So, when he touched a finger to his tongue, did his own skin. Something from the lab was doing this, and it wasn’t spoiled food. It was chemistry.

One name on the paper, one name on the patent

Fahlberg hurried back to the lab and tasted the residue in dish after dish until he traced the sweetness to that overboiled beaker. The compound turned out to be benzoic sulfinide — later renamed saccharin, from the Latin saccharum, ‘sugar.’ In February 1879, Fahlberg and Remsen published their findings jointly in the American Chemical Journal, describing two methods for synthesizing the new compound. For a few years afterward, they kept working together as collaborators.

Then in 1884, without telling Remsen, Fahlberg filed patents in Germany and the United States on a cheaper way to manufacture saccharin — listing himself as the sole inventor. He built a factory, began selling ‘Fahlberg’s Saccharin’ commercially, and got rich. Remsen, who’d never cared about the commercial angle, was less upset about the money than about being erased: he’d supplied the lab, the research direction, and the training that made the discovery possible, and his name had vanished from the business entirely. In a letter to fellow chemist William Ramsay, Remsen didn’t hold back: ‘Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him.’

The part most people miss

The ‘forgot to wash his hands’ detail makes a great punchline, but it undersells how normal what Fahlberg did actually was. Nineteenth-century chemists routinely tasted and smelled unknown compounds as a basic diagnostic tool — reckless by modern lab-safety standards, but standard practice before instrumental analysis existed. Fahlberg wasn’t sloppy; he was working the way he’d been trained, and it happened to make his dinner roll suspiciously delicious. The bigger twist came decades later: saccharin’s popularity spiked during the sugar shortages of both World Wars, when companies like Monsanto marketed it as a patriotic sugar substitute, and it became a staple for diabetics who had no other sweet option. Then in 1977, the FDA moved to ban it after a study linked it to bladder cancer in rats, triggering a backlash so intense that Congress passed a law blocking the ban and requiring warning labels instead. It took until 2000 for U.S. health authorities to formally clear saccharin, concluding the rat studies didn’t apply to humans and pulling the warning label for good — more than 120 years after one chemist’s dirty hands started the whole thing.

Sources

This account draws on the Science History Institute’s history of artificial sweeteners, the Wikipedia entry on Constantin Fahlberg, and Mental Floss’s history of saccharin’s rise, fall, and eventual rehabilitation by U.S. health regulators.

Explore more: more accidental inventions.

saccharin FAQs

Who actually discovered saccharin?

Constantin Fahlberg gets the popular credit for noticing saccharin’s sweetness in 1878, but the discovery happened inside Ira Remsen’s chemistry lab at Johns Hopkins, using Remsen’s research program. The two published the finding jointly in 1879, though only Fahlberg later patented and profited from it.

Is it true Fahlberg discovered saccharin because he forgot to wash his hands?

Yes, by most historical accounts — residue from a spilled lab compound stayed on his hands, and he noticed his bread tasted sweet at dinner that night. He then traced the sweetness back to a specific beaker in his lab.

Is saccharin still considered safe today?

Yes. After decades of warning labels stemming from a 1977 rat study, U.S. health agencies concluded in 2000 that saccharin poses no meaningful human cancer risk, and it’s sold today in products like Sweet’N Low without a cancer warning.

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The trick of painting parking levels different colors traces back further than most shopping-center garages, to a 1955 amusement park parking lot that started out marked with nothing but plain letters, and to an academic field that didn’t even have a name yet when Walt Disney’s crews eventually swapped those letters for cartoon characters.

Quick answer

Garages paint each level (or wing) a distinct color, often paired with a matching name or icon, so drivers can store their location as one simple, memorable category — ‘I’m on the green level’ — instead of a number that’s easy to lose the moment they stop thinking about it. It’s a cheap, durable application of ‘wayfinding,’ the design discipline built around helping people navigate unfamiliar buildings using their own senses rather than reading every sign.

A parking lot that traded letters for cartoon characters

When Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, Walt Disney’s team faced a logistics problem nobody had really solved before: funnel thousands of cars into one lot outside Anaheim, then get every visitor back to the right one after a full day of walking, riding, and losing track of time. At first, the fix was ordinary and a little dull — the lot’s sections were marked off with plain letters, the same A-B-C system used by shopping centers and airports everywhere.

Letters didn’t stick in anyone’s memory, and at some point in the years that followed — the exact date isn’t nailed down in surviving records, but photographic evidence shows the system fully in place well before the lot’s final decades — Disneyland swapped the letters for a cast of characters instead. The lot was eventually divided into sections named for figures like Alice, Bambi, Donald, Eeyore, Goofy, Mickey, Minnie, Tinker Bell, and Pinocchio, marked with character-shaped signage, trams running attendants between rows, and enough lighting to keep it all legible after dark. Guests didn’t have to remember ‘row 14’ or even ‘section J.’ They had to remember they’d parked near Pinocchio, and it turns out that’s a much easier thing to carry around in your head for eight hours at a theme park.

The $90 million upgrade that added color

By 2000, Disney needed that lot’s land for Disney California Adventure, so the character-per-zone trick got a serious upgrade. The replacement, designed by architect Harry Wolf with Walt Disney Imagineering and built for roughly $90 million, opened as the Mickey and Friends Parking Structure — a multi-level garage that briefly held the title of the largest parking structure in the United States, with room for more than 10,000 cars. Each level combined a Disney-character theme with its own color scheme, repeated on columns, elevator lobbies, and stairwells, so the system worked whether a visitor’s brain latched onto the color, the character, or both. Fisher Marantz Stone, the lighting-design firm behind the structure’s glow, later won industry awards for making that colorful signage read clearly at night without spilling light into the neighboring residential streets — proof this was engineered, not incidental.

By the time that garage opened, the underlying instinct already had an academic name. Urban planner Kevin Lynch coined the term ‘way-finding’ in his 1960 book The Image of the City, describing how people build mental maps from environmental cues rather than memorizing addresses. Design researcher Romedi Passini expanded it into a formal architectural framework in 1984, and Paul Arthur and Passini’s 1992 book on the subject became a standard reference. Color-coded garage levels are one of the plainest, cheapest real-world applications of that research — no signage literacy required, no language barrier, just a color you either recognize or you don’t.

The part most people miss

Most color-coded garages run on inherited habit more than hard proof. There’s no large body of research measuring whether painting a level orange actually cuts down on lost cars — the practice mostly borrows from adjacent psychology, and even that research complicates the tidy story. A widely cited 2002 study, publicized by the American Psychological Association, found people remembered naturally colored scenes better than black-and-white ones — but scenes recolored in fake, unnatural hues weren’t remembered any better than black-and-white at all. Color alone isn’t a memory trick; it seems to matter only when it means something real. Which is probably why the garages that actually work aren’t relying on paint by itself — they repeat the same color on the floor, the columns, the elevator button, and sometimes the ticket stub, giving you several separate chances to jog your memory instead of just one. The color isn’t the whole system. It’s just the part you notice.

Sources

Yesterland’s history of the Disneyland parking lot, by Werner Weiss, documented that the original 1955 lot used lettered sections before switching to Disney character names.

Sam Gennawey’s history of the Mickey and Friends Parking Structure, published in MiceChat’s Samland column, supplied the design and construction details of Disneyland’s 2000 garage.

Wikipedia’s entry on wayfinding was used to confirm the 1960 origin of the term with Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City and its later development by Romedi Passini.

The American Psychological Association’s 2002 press release on color and scene memory, covering research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, grounded the claims about color and recall. Fisher Marantz Stone’s project record for the Disneyland structure confirmed the lighting design and its industry awards.

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parking garage floor colors FAQs

Is there an official color standard for parking garage levels?

No. There’s no enforced code — some wayfinding designers pitch using the rainbow in order (red for level 2, orange for level 3, and so on), but it’s a proposed convention from individual designers, not an industry rule, so colors vary garage to garage.

Why not just use numbers on every level?

Numbers work fine while you’re paying attention, but they’re abstract and easy to drop under stress or distraction. A color, especially paired with an icon or name, gives your brain a second, stickier way to store the same information.

Which garage used color-coded levels first?

No one has documented a definitive first. Disneyland’s original Anaheim lot swapped its plain lettered sections for Disney character names at some point after opening in 1955, which is one of the earliest well-recorded examples of the underlying idea — but the color-coding itself didn’t arrive until the year-2000 Mickey and Friends garage replaced that lot.

Does the floor color affect the concrete or coating underneath?

Not usually. Wayfinding colors are typically paint or signage applied on or near the structural coatings that protect a garage’s concrete from water and de-icing salt — the protective coating and the wayfinding color scheme are separate design decisions.

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Then someone put on the Backstreet Boys, and Snowball started bopping his head, kicking up a foot, and throwing his crest around in time with the beat. A shaky home video of that moment ended up on YouTube — and, improbably, in a peer-reviewed neuroscience journal. Snowball didn’t just go viral. He became evidence.

Quick answer

Snowball is a sulphur-crested cockatoo who spontaneously danced to music at a South Carolina bird rescue in 2007; his viral video led neuroscientists Aniruddh Patel and John Iversen to publish a 2009 study in Current Biology showing he could genuinely synchronize movement to a musical beat — making him the first non-human animal scientifically confirmed to do so.

A rescue bird and a Backstreet Boys CD

Snowball, hatched around 1996, had already passed through at least a couple of owners by the time he landed at Bird Lovers Only, a bird shelter run by Irena and Chuck Schulz. His previous owner had noticed him bobbing his head to music and mentioned it when dropping him off, essentially saying: try playing him a CD and see what happens.

Schulz did. Snowball’s reaction — full-body headbanging, foot lifts, and swaying set to the Backstreet Boys’ ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’ — was captured on video and posted online. Within a week it had racked up hundreds of thousands of views and landed Snowball on television shows like Inside Edition.

The neuroscientist who couldn’t stop watching

The video reached Aniruddh Patel, a neuroscientist then at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, who studies how humans process rhythm and music. Along with colleague John Iversen, Patel wondered whether Snowball was really keeping time — or just flailing around in a way that happened to look rhythmic on camera.

So they tested it properly. Between January and May 2008, they recorded Snowball dancing to versions of a song sped up and slowed down across a range of tempos, then measured whether his movements tracked the changes. They did. The results, published in Current Biology in 2009 under the title ‘Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal,’ showed Snowball adjusting his bobs and steps to match the shifting beat — real beat induction, not coincidence.

The part most people miss

The 2009 study made Snowball famous in labs, not just living rooms, but it wasn’t the end of the research. A 2019 follow-up by Patel’s team catalogued at least 14 distinct dance moves in Snowball’s repertoire — headbangs, body rolls, foot lifts, and combinations of them — performed with no training, no treats, and no obvious reward beyond, it seemed, social engagement with the people watching him. And in 2025, researchers at Charles Sturt University, led by Natasha Lubke, widened the lens further: after analyzing dozens of videos of pet cockatoos plus six birds at Wagga Wagga Zoo in Australia, they documented 30 distinct dance moves across cockatoo species, 17 of them never described before. Some birds danced even without music playing. The upshot is bigger than one clever bird: dancing to a beat may be a real cognitive capacity built into cockatoos generally, not a Snowball-only party trick — and researchers now think music could be used as enrichment to improve the welfare of captive parrots. It’s also worth remembering how Snowball got his start: as a surrendered pet nobody quite knew what to do with. His fame ended up funding the very rescue that took him in, and gave a lot of people their first real look at what happens to parrots — long-lived, complicated, easily outmatched by their owners’ expectations — once the novelty of owning one wears off.

Sources

Aniruddh D. Patel and John R. Iversen, ‘Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal,’ Current Biology (2009).

Tufts Now, ‘Meet Snowball, the Cockatoo with the Dance Moves’ (2019), covering the follow-up study cataloguing Snowball’s 14 dance moves.

Natasha Lubke et al., ‘Dance behaviour in cockatoos: Implications for cognitive processes and welfare,’ PLOS ONE (2025), and Wikipedia’s entry on Snowball (cockatoo) for background on his history at Bird Lovers Only.

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Snowball the cockatoo FAQs

What species is Snowball the cockatoo?

Snowball is a sulphur-crested cockatoo (Eleonora subspecies), hatched around 1996.

Did anyone train Snowball to dance?

No. Researchers and his caretaker, Irena Schulz, agree his dancing was spontaneous — he wasn’t taught the moves or rewarded with treats for doing them.

Why was Snowball’s dancing scientifically important?

Before Snowball, no non-human animal had been rigorously shown to synchronize movement to a varying musical tempo — a skill called beat induction. His 2009 test, led by Aniruddh Patel and John Iversen, provided the first solid evidence it exists outside humans.

Can other cockatoos dance too?

Yes. A 2025 study from Charles Sturt University found cockatoos broadly — not just Snowball — perform an array of dance moves, identifying 30 distinct movements across the species studied.

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One man had a story with named witnesses, a specific bottle of rum, and a Tahitian phrase for a name. The other had an earlier drink, a fiercely guarded secret recipe, and no paper trail at all. One of them won a private legal settlement over the commercial use of the name — which is not quite the same thing as history crowning him the inventor, and tiki historians still argue over which one it should have been.

Quick answer

Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron said he invented the Mai Tai in 1944 at his Oakland restaurant. Ernest “Donn Beach” Gantt, owner of the older Don the Beachcomber chain, claimed he’d built a similar drink years earlier. A 1970 out-of-court settlement resolved a trademark dispute in Bergeron’s favor and forced Beach’s licensees to stop using the name commercially — but that private deal didn’t legally crown Bergeron the drink’s inventor for all time, and it didn’t give anyone lasting exclusive rights to what is now just a generic cocktail name poured at bars everywhere.

A rum, a guest from Tahiti, and a phrase

Bergeron’s version of events, which he told for the rest of his life, goes like this: one night in 1944 he pulled a bottle of 17-year-old J. Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum from behind the bar, built a drink around it with lime, orange curaçao, orgeat, and rock candy syrup, and served it to friends visiting from Tahiti. One of them took a sip and reportedly said “Mai Tai — Roa Ae,” Tahitian for “out of this world — the best.” The name stuck, and so did the drink: it became one of the best-known cocktails of the twentieth century.

That bottle detail isn’t decoration — Wray & Nephew’s 17-year rum was rare even then, and the Mai Tai’s popularity is often credited with helping drink the world’s remaining stock dry within a couple of decades. Bergeron later had to rebuild the recipe around blended aged Jamaican rum once the original ran out.

The other tiki king says ‘not so fast’

Here’s the wrinkle: Bergeron wasn’t the first person running a fake-tropical bar stocked with rum drinks. Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt — who legally changed his name to Donn Beach — opened Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood in 1933, more than a decade before Bergeron’s Oakland night. Beach built the entire tiki bar concept, and he claimed a drink he called the Q.B. Cooler predated and inspired what Bergeron later sold as the Mai Tai.

The dispute stayed a bar-stool argument for years until it became a business problem. Around 1968–1970, a company licensing the Don the Beachcomber name put a Mai Tai mix on the market, directly threatening Trader Vic’s trademark on the name he’d built a restaurant empire around. Bergeron sued, and the case was settled out of court in 1970: he retained commercial trademark rights to the name in the U.S., and the licensee agreed to stop using it in marketing. Carrie Guild, one of the Tahitian guests from that 1944 night, signed an affidavit backing Bergeron’s account, which is a big part of why his origin story became the standard one told in bars ever since. But it was a private settlement between two businesses, not a court ruling on cocktail history — and it didn’t stop ‘Mai Tai’ from becoming exactly the kind of generic drink name any bartender can use today without asking Trader Vic’s permission.

The part most people miss

Donn Beach never lost the fight because his drink didn’t exist — he lost it because nobody could prove what his drink actually was. Beach ran his bar like a vault: bottles behind the counter carried no labels, only numbers, and his recipes were written entirely in that numeric code so a bartender couldn’t quit, memorize the formulas, and open a rival tiki bar down the street with his exact drinks. It worked brilliantly as a trade-secret strategy for thirty years — and then it backfired completely. When it came time to argue that the Q.B. Cooler predated the Mai Tai, there was no readable recipe to point to. Decades later, tiki historian Jeff “Beachbum” Berry spent years tracking down surviving fragments of Beach’s coded recipes and cross-referencing old bartenders just to reconstruct what Beach had actually been pouring in the 1930s. Even that painstaking reconstruction didn’t produce a smoking-gun original Mai Tai — just a related, more complicated ancestor drink. Bergeron won the 1970 settlement in part because he was the one who left a paper trail. Beach’s secrecy protected his business for a generation and then cost him the credit in the history books, even though it never touched anyone’s right to serve a Mai Tai today.

Sources

Wikipedia’s entry on the Mai Tai, which documents both Bergeron’s and Beach’s competing invention claims and the 1944-versus-1933 dating dispute.

The Castle Museum’s history of the Castle Cocktail Lounge, which covers the 1970 trademark lawsuit, the confidential out-of-court settlement, and the Guild family affidavits.

Prohibition Denver’s account of the Trader Vic vs. Don the Beachcomber dispute, which details the settlement terms and notes that many historians still credit Beach with the moral, if not legal, claim.

Explore more: More true food origin stories.

Mai Tai FAQs

Did Don the Beachcomber really invent the Mai Tai first?

He claimed an earlier, similar drink called the Q.B. Cooler predated it, but no verifiable written recipe from that era has ever surfaced to prove it, so historians treat it as an unresolved rival claim rather than settled fact.

What does the name ‘Mai Tai’ actually mean?

According to Trader Vic’s own account, it comes from a Tahitian exclamation, ‘Mai Tai — Roa Ae,’ meaning roughly ‘out of this world — the best.’

Does Trader Vic’s own the Mai Tai name today?

Not in any way that stops anyone from making one. A 1970 out-of-court settlement resolved a specific commercial trademark dispute in Bergeron’s favor at the time, but it was a private deal, not a lasting legal monopoly — ‘Mai Tai’ functions as a generic cocktail name today, served at bars worldwide with no license from Trader Vic’s required.

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