A best-seller was written by a nine-year-old

In 1890, nine-year-old Daisy Ashford wrote a novel and forgot all about it. She gave up writing fiction for good at the age of 13. Some 28 years later, upon going through her mother's house after she had died, Daisy and her sisters found the pencilled manuscript in a drawer. They showed it to a friend, who passed it on to an acquaintance who worked in publishing, and so the book – The Young Visiters – came out in 1919 with a preface by Peter Pan author JM Barrie, who many people wrongly believed was the book’s author.

The novel was praised for its clever plotting and keen observation of Victorian manners, and went into several editions. The author, by now Mrs James Devlin, bought a farm with her earnings, commenting, “I like fresh air and royalty cheques”.

The Duke of Montague placed a bet on the gullibility of the public

At 6.30pm on 16 January 1749, according to an advertisement in London newspaper the General Advertiser, the most amazing magician would appear at the Theatre Royal. The conjuror would perform such feats as giving the name of any masked member of the audience; he would play music on an ordinary walking stick; he would turn himself into any person, dead or alive and finally, he would climb into an ordinary-sized wine bottle.

By 7pm the theatre was packed out, with crowds still trying to get in. At this point, they were told that the magician hadn't turned up and that they could get their money back. A riot ensued when it dawned on them that they'd been made fools of.

In the shadows, the Duke of Montague looked on with a certain amount of pleasure; he'd just won a bet with Lord Chesterfield that he could fill a theatre by promising the public the impossible.

Horoscopes were once linked to a serial killer

“Absolutely free!” said the advertisement, “your personal horoscope. A ten-page document,” it went on. It was 16 April 1968, and the advert, published in a French newspaper, invited readers to take part in a special experiment. All you had to do was send in your name, address, date and place of birth, and you'd receive your 10-page personalised horoscope and personality profile.

Many of the takers were so impressed by the uncanny accuracy of the personality profile that they wrote back to say so. In all, 94 per cent of the respondents pronounced themselves satisfied with it – even though everyone had received the same document.

The man behind it all, psychologist Michel Gauquelin, had commissioned a professional astrologer to do a chart and interpretation for a real person who had been born in Auxerre at 3am on 17 January 1897. That very special person grew up to become Dr Marcel Petiot. Petiot is chiefly remembered as a serial killer in wartime France who murdered more than 60 people.

A Parisian was given a small fine for ‘getting medieval’ on his wife

In the 1930s, Paris baker Henri Littière had a major marital problem: his wife was desperate to be faithful, but just couldn’t help herself. She had three affairs in as many months before he decided that something must be done. He visited a museum and came out with sketches of medieval chastity belts (like that pictured above). These he gave to a man who made false arms and legs for veterans of the First World War, asking him to knock him up a secure means of keeping Mme Littière from consummating her infidelities.

He brought his wife to the final fitting, and she pronounced herself satisfied with the comfort of the velvet-covered steel contraption and joked with her husband that he mustn’t lose the key. Some time later, however, one of her former lovers came to visit. One thing led to another and he saw the apparatus she was wearing. He went straight to the police, and Mr Littière appeared in court on 21 January 1934 on charges of cruelty. Although Mrs Littière testified that she found it impossible to be faithful, the judge gave the hapless baker a three-month suspended sentence and a 50-franc fine.

A woman’s right to smoke in public was a hard-won freedom

On 22 January 1908 a New Yorker named Katie Mulcahey was arrested for striking a match against a wall in the Bowery district and lighting up a cigarette.

Katie's crime was violating The Sullivan Act, a city law sponsored by one Alderman Sullivan banning women – only women – from smoking in public. Sullivan was responding to pressure from a Christian anti-smoking lobby that identified tobacco with immorality. The Women's Christian Temperance Union (whose main business was trying to get booze banned) campaigned against women smoking and thought they'd scored a big success with the Sullivan Act. Katie Mulcahey was arrested the day after it was passed.

Hauled before the district court, the feisty Miss Mulcahey told the (male) judge: “I've got as much right to smoke as you have. I never heard of this new law, and I don't want to hear about it. No man shall dictate to me.” Mulcahey was fined five dollars.

The Sullivan Act was vetoed by the city's mayor two weeks later. The case was seen as a cause celebre for women's rights; just as they should be allowed to vote, reasoned feminists, women should also be allowed to smoke.

Mary did have a little lamb

Mary did indeed have a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and yes it did follow her to school one day. Mary was Mary Sawyer, an 11-year-old Bostonian whose lamb followed her to school one day in 1817. But who wrote the poem?

There's some dispute here. A manuscript of the poem signed by Sarah Josepha Hale of Philadelphia and dated 23 January 1823 is still in existence, though it was written much earlier. It was first published in 1830 in an American children's magazine.

In the late 1860s, Mary Tyler (née Sawyer) was trying to raise money to save an old church in Boston and took a pair of woollen stockings that had been made from the famous lamb, unravelled the wool and sold small pieces of it attached to commemorative cards at 10 cents a time.

Mary claimed that it was not Mrs Hale who had written the poem, but a man named John Roulstone. When Henry Ford bought Mary's school in 1926 he had researchers look into the whole business, and on the commemorative plaque they attribute the first three verses to Roulstone and the last one to Hale.

A mathematician’s life work was reduced to 40 seconds

Schoolmaster and amateur mathematician William Shanks (1812–82) spent the greater part of his life working out the value of pi (the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter) to 707 decimal places. More than 60 years after his death, mathematician DF Ferguson, using a mechanical calculator, pointed out that he had got the last 180 of these decimal places wrong.

In the late 1940s an ENIAC computer took 70 hours to calculate 2,037 digits of Pi. In 1958 an IBM computer did in 40 seconds what Shanks had done in a lifetime. The millionth digit of pi was found in 1973 and the billionth by 1995.

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