In 1681, William Penn wrote that Pennsylvania—a colony he’d just obtained via royal charter—would one day become “the seed of a nation.” He couldn’t have possibly known how prophetic this statement was. Penn remains a beloved figure in the Keystone State and throughout the country. Here are a few things you might not have known about him.

1. HE HAD A FAMOUS FATHER.

William Penn was the son of English Admiral Sir William Penn (1621-1670). The seaman, a national hero, took a circuitous path to fame and knighthood. When King Charles I was beheaded for treason in 1649, Penn senior initially supported the anti-monarchical Commonwealth government that replaced the deposed ruler. However, when it became clear that this republican experiment would fail, he helped restore the dead king’s exiled son, Charles II, to the throne in 1660. Admiral Penn quickly won the royal family’s esteem and became a trusted advisor of Charles’s brother, James, who served as the Duke of York and ran the English navy.

2. HE WAS EXPELLED FROM OXFORD.

One day around 1655, a prominent Quaker named Thomas Loe was invited to the Penn residence in Ireland. The man preached his faith with incredible fervor, at one point moving the Admiral to tears. It was an experience that would change the course of the younger William Penn’s life. Although he didn’t adopt Quakerism right away, the boy instantly became sympathetic to the movement.

Those sentiments got him into trouble after he enrolled at Oxford’s Christ Church College in 1660. There, Penn met John Owen, a former dean who’d been dismissed by the school because of his radical calls for religious tolerance. Barred from teaching on campus, Owen started organizing private courses at his own home. Penn soon became a regular at the ex-Dean’s classes. These sessions convinced the teenager that many Oxford policies were horrendously unjust.

A particular bone of contention for Penn was the school’s insistence that all students—regardless of their personal beliefs—attend a mandatory Anglican service every Sunday. Penn defiantly sat out. He also violated Oxford’s dress code, which required pupils to wear surplices, a type of religious garment. Instead, Penn wore simple clothes, drawing the ire of school officials. Fed up with his rebellious behavior, Oxford expelled him in 1662. Admiral Penn didn’t react well to this development; according to some sources, he punished the teen with a beating.

3. PENN’S RELIGIOUS VIEWS LANDED HIM IN JAIL ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS.

After his dismissal from Oxford, Penn studied theology at the College of Saumur in France and then attended Lincoln’s Inn, a well-regarded London law school. In 1666, his father sent him to supervise the family estates, where he reconnected with Loe. The preacher’s sermons struck a familiar chord with the youth, and Penn began attending Quaker meetings. On September 3, 1667, Penn was present at a gathering in Cork, Ireland that was broken up by the police. Wrongly accused of plotting to incite a religious riot, the Quakers were imprisoned. By virtue of his social class, Penn alone was offered a pardon—which he refused on principle, demanding instead that he receive the same punishment as his peers. Penn was released shortly thereafter and formally converted to Quakerism later that year. He never looked back.

Penn again found himself incarcerated in 1668. Shortly before his second arrest, Penn had written and distributed a revolutionary pamphlet titled The Sandy Foundation Shaken. In it, he denied the widespread belief that the Holy Trinity consisted of “three separate persons.” Since this was a crime at the time, he was jailed inside the Tower of London, where the troublemaker remained for eight months. Behind bars, Penn clarified his theological views by writing two new treatises: Innocency With Her Open Face and No Cross, No Crown. Penn’s father is believed to have petitioned the Duke of York to bring an end to this prison term, and William Penn the younger was freed months later.

But his troubles with the law were only just beginning. In the early 1660s, the English Parliament enacted new measures that would become the bane of Penn’s existence. First came the “Quaker Act of 1662,” which prohibited Quakers and other religious minorities from worshiping in groups of five or more. Then, in 1664, the Conventicle Act took things a step further, outlawing all non-Anglican religious assemblies. A year later, the infamous Five Mile Act—which forbade traveling “nonconformist” preachers (such as those who backed Quakerism) from coming within five miles of where they had served as minister—was passed.

In 1670, Penn conducted an illegal Quaker meeting in London and was charged with violating the Conventicle Act. He and one of his associates were jailed for two weeks before a jury acquitted them. But the jury was heavily punished for refusing to hand down a conviction as the judge was demanding. They were held without food or water, fined, and several members of the jury were sent to Newgate Prison. (This case is credited with the modern concept of an independent jury.)

But nothing could dissuade Penn from attending these gatherings or preaching Quaker doctrines. He was arrested yet again in February 1671 and sent to Newgate Prison without a trial. He continued to produce political and theological essays right up until his release in August.

4. PENN WAS PUT IN CHARGE OF A NEW WORLD COLONY BECAUSE KING CHARLES II WAS INDEBTED TO HIS FATHER.

Throughout his life, Admiral Penn loaned a large sum of money to the crown. As the years went by, interest on this small fortune accumulated. By 1680—10 years after Admiral Penn’s death—King Charles II found himself £16,000 in debt to the Penn family. That’s when the younger Penn cooked up an inspired solution. In May 1680, he petitioned the King for a grant of land in America, specifically the wilds that lay between Maryland and present-day western New York. In exchange, he’d forgive the monarch’s debts. Charles II took him up on the offer, and on March 4, 1681, Penn was given the charter for what later became known as Pennsylvania.

5. HE DIDN’T COIN THE NAME “PENNSYLVANIA.”

Originally, Penn wanted to call it New Wales, due to the hilly terrain which reminded him of the Welsh countryside. However, a Welsh-born secretary in England’s Privy Council took issue with this, forcing Penn to reconsider. His next suggestion was Sylvania, after the Latin word for forest. The Council then chose to tweak this new name a bit by adding the prefix “Penn” in an attempt to honor the late Admiral, William Penn’s father. At first, William Penn disapproved of the moniker and even tried bribing two undersecretaries to change it. When this failed, he resignedly gave up the fight, lest his protests be misconstrued as an act of vanity.

6. HIS FAMOUS PEACE TREATY IS SHROUDED IN MYSTERY.

The Quaker first set sail for the colony that bore his family name on August 30, 1682. Of course, long before it meant anything to him, the area had been home to countless generations of Leni Lenape Native Americans. So before his departure, Penn was advised by the Bishop of London to contact these indigenous people and begin negotiating for some land on which to establish a city. Accordingly, in 1681, he dispatched an olive branch in the form of a letter which was read to Lenape leaders by a translator. “I desire to enjoy [Pennsylvania] with your love and consent, that we may always live together as neighbors and friends,” it read. Later on in this document, he denounces the “unkindness and injustice that hath been too much exercised towards you by the people of these parts of the world.”

Upon arriving in Pennsylvania, Penn apparently impressed the locals by acquiring some Lenape language skills so that, in his own words, he “might not want an interpreter on any occasion.” At some point in either 1682 or 1683, Penn visited Shackamaxon, a Lenape village on the Delaware River. There, he purchased much of the land upon which Philadelphia now sits. This exchange has gone down in history as the “Great Treaty.” Immortalized by the 1772 Benjamin West oil painting William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, the event remains a point of pride for the City of Brotherly Love. In 1764, the French philosopher Voltaire paid tribute to the deal, writing “This is the only treaty between [American Indians] and the Christians which has not been sworn to, and which has not been broken.”

Was Voltaire exaggerating? If so, to what extent did he embellish or oversimplify reality? Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure. No firsthand accounts of this meeting were written down, and the generally agreed-upon details about what actually happened all come from oral histories passed along from generation to generation. According to many of them, a huge elm tree that once stood in Philly’s Kensington neighborhood marked the original gathering site. Dubbed the Treaty Elm, it was knocked over by violent winds in March 1810. Close examination of the rings suggested that the plant would have been well over a century old by the time Penn allegedly met with the Lenape beneath it. Surrounding land was converted into historic Penn Treaty Park in 1894.

7. HE ENVISIONED PENNSYLVANIA AS A “HOLY EXPERIMENT.”

In his colony, Penn set out to create a safe haven for Quakers and other religious minorities, who would all—ideally—be granted freedom of worship. He often described the master plan as a “Holy Experiment.” To entice his fellow Europeans into buying up Pennsylvania real estate, Penn distributed pamphlets advertising the place’s merits in English, French, Dutch, and German. Privately, he hoped that the revenue obtained from settlers would help pull him out of financial debt. “Though I desire to extend religious freedom,” Penn once wrote, “… I want some recompense for my trouble.” His efforts paid off: By the year 1685, he’d sold 600 tracts of land that collectively represented 700,000 acres.

Under Penn, the future Keystone State became the only English colony to refrain from establishing an official church. This was in keeping with his personal belief that “Religion and policy … are two distinct things, have two different ends, and may be fully prosecuted without respect one to the other.” Pennsylvanians were thus afforded the right to freely practice whatever faith they chose—at least, ostensibly. It is worth noting, however, that the colony’s original constitution didn’t allow non-Christians (or Catholics) to vote or hold public office.

8. HE PLAYED A MAJOR ROLE IN PENNSYLVANIA’S FIRST WITCH INVESTIGATION.

In 1684, two Swedish-born settlers living in present-day Delaware County were brought before a Philadelphia Superior Court for allegedly bewitching a neighbor’s cow, which was said to have given very little milk as a result. Penn perhaps wanted to prevent the kind of mass hysteria that would soon descend over Salem, Massachusetts—as well as preserve relations with the Swedish community—so he took full control of the proceedings. Because neither woman spoke English, Penn saw to it that a translator was provided. Also, in an attempt to secure the fairest possible sentence, he made sure that every single member of the jury hailed from their neighborhood. Finally, he converted the trial into an investigation, prohibited any lawyers from taking part, and appointed himself as the sole judge.

The official records imply that, when the proceedings began, only one of the so-called witches showed up. Her name was Margaret Mattson, and she pled not guilty. Numerous accusers testified against her, but their claims more or less consisted of hearsay. Afterward, Penn began questioning Mattson. Although the record may have been embellished in the succeeding centuries, one back and forth supposedly included Penn asking, “Art thou a witch?,” to which Mattson replied in the negative. “Hast thou ever ridden through the air on a broomstick?” he continued. Mattson didn’t seem to understand this inquiry. “Well,” Penn supposedly said, “I know of no law against it.” A truly bizarre ruling followed. Essentially, the jury found both women guilty of being regarded as witches by their neighbors, but not of actually practicing witchcraft. In 1862, historian George Smith described this as a “very righteous, but rather ridiculous verdict.”

9. HE GOT INTO A BORDER DISPUTE WITH MARYLAND.

Later on in 1684, Penn was compelled to return to England on behalf of his colony. Over half a century earlier, George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, was given control of a massive land tract, one that stretched from the 40th parallel to the Potomac River, and from the western source of the river to the Atlantic Ocean. After Calvert’s death in 1632, his descendants organized the new colony, which they dubbed Maryland. Then along came Penn, who unwittingly caused a boundary controversy with the founding of Philadelphia. As he laid the groundwork for the future City of Brotherly Love, he failed to realize that much of it was actually located beneath the 40th parallel. Naturally, this irritated Maryland’s supervising family. In 1682, Penn aggravated them further when he obtained a grant in modern-day Delaware. Charles Calvert—the third Lord Baltimore—disputed his northern neighbor’s right to this area, as well as everything that lay north of the 40th parallel. Seeking a compromise, the two men met up in 1683, but the session failed to bear any fruit, prompting both parties to sail for England, where they sought an audience with the Commission for Trade and Plantations.

Upon hearing each man’s case, the Commission chose to divvy up the Delaware peninsula. Everything south of Cape Henlopen was given to Maryland. Meanwhile, all that lay above the Cape was split vertically, with the eastern half going to William Penn and the western bit handed over to Maryland. (In case you were wondering, modern Delaware voted to break off from Pennsylvania on June 15, 1776. The event gave birth to an annual holiday called Separation Day, which falls on the second Saturday of June.) However, the question of where the Pennsylvania-Maryland border should lie went unresolved. This matter wouldn’t be settled until the 1760s, when surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon plotted out the most famous dividing line in America.

10. PENN SUPPORTED THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT.

Cumulatively, William Penn spent less than four years of his life in Pennsylvania. After returning to London in 1684, he wouldn’t set foot in the New World again until 1699. During that interim, the Quaker kept himself busy. In 1693, he added a new published work to his bibliography. Titled Essay Towards the Present and Future of Europe by the Establishment of a European Parliament, it was written as a response to the continent’s ongoing, seemingly never-ending wars. Some 300 years before the European Union was founded, Penn called for an international governing body that would consist of 90 voting members to represent all the major (and minor) European countries. But, to his dismay, the essay had no discernable effect on European affairs.

11. LATE IN LIFE, HE WAS ACCUSED OF TREASON.

In politics, the friendships you make can be a blessing one minute and a curse the next. Penn shared a close bond with King James II, a fact that probably helped him secure a favorable outcome in the Pennsylvania/Maryland border spat. But he soon discovered that being associated with James II had its downsides. Unlike his predecessor and most of England’s populace, the monarch was a Catholic. Although this inspired much unrest throughout his reign, James II managed to keep the peace by virtue of his Protestant daughter, Mary. Since it was assumed that she’d take the throne after his death, the King’s opponents grudgingly tolerated him.

An untimely birth changed all that. In 1688, James II was blessed with a son. Assuming this male heir would be raised Catholic, a group of Parliament dissidents reached out to Prince William of Orange, Mary’s husband. That November, William’s forces inadvertently overthrew James II, who panicked at the sight of them and fled to France with his infant son. The following year, William and Mary were crowned King and Queen. Penn would be arrested multiple times in the next few years, including once when James II sent him a letter, but with some help from his friends he managed to get of trouble.

12. HIS SECOND WIFE TOOK CHARGE OF PENNSYLVANIA FOR OVER A DECADE.

Penn wed his first wife, fellow Quaker Gulielma Springett, in 1672. After 32 years of marriage—during which she gave birth to eight children, three of whom reached adulthood—she passed away in 1694. Two years later, Penn again tied the knot, this time with Hannah Callowhill, a bride who, at 26, was less than half his age. While she was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Hannah joined her husband on a transatlantic voyage back to Pennsylvania in 1699. Their stay in the New World was destined to be short-lived; financial woes pulled William back to England in 1701. Although he suggested that she stay behind, Hannah insisted on joining him for the return journey.

Penn’s ability to govern his colony from abroad was compromised by three paralytic strokes he suffered in 1712. As her husband’s health deteriorated, Hannah stepped up. Over the next six years, she oversaw Pennsylvania’s affairs from an ocean away, mailing instructions off to governor Charles Gookin and collaborating extensively with James Logan, Penn’s colonial advisor. Penn died July 30, 1718, but Hannah continued to run Pennsylvania for another eight years after his passing.

13. WILLIAM AND HANNAH PENN BECAME HONORARY U.S. CITIZENS IN 1984.

Penn spent most of his days in England and died over 50 years before the colonies declared their independence. Nevertheless, he is sometimes ranked among America’s founding fathers. He has also received some high praise from legendary statesmen; Thomas Jefferson, for instance, once called him “the greatest law-giver the world has ever produced.” Hannah, too, has a legion of admirers (and deservedly so). On November 28, 1984, they were both posthumously named honorary citizens of the United States. Only six other people have ever received this honor.

14. HE’S LINKED TO A PHILLY SPORTS CURSE.

Philadelphia is world-famous for its rabid sports fans, who were denied any sort of championship for a quarter century. Between the 76ers’ NBA Finals victory in 1983 and the Phillies’ 2008 World Series win, no major professional team from the City of Brotherly Love managed to take home a title. What caused this drought? The standard answer is William Penn—or rather, his statue.

Perched atop Philadelphia’s city hall is a 37-foot, 27-ton bronze likeness of the Quaker visionary. Hoisted into place in 1894, the statue represented the highest point in Philly for more than 90 years. According to legend, a gentlemanly agreement stipulated that no building in town would ever stand taller than the cap on Penn’s head.

Evidently, no one told the architects behind One Liberty Place. Built in 1987, the 945-foot skyscraper absolutely towered over the statue. This is said to have enraged Penn’s ghost and/or the professional sports gods. In any event, all four of the major Philadelphia-based franchises promptly hit a decades-long dry spell. Then, in June 2007, an even taller building was completed: The 975-foot-tall Comcast Center. As a symbol of good faith, a tiny, 5.2-inch Penn figurine was affixed to the very top. One year later, the Philadelphia Phillies became MLB champions. Coincidence? Comcast didn’t think so. They’re currently building an even taller skyscraper, and have promised to move the statue.

15. NO, THE QUAKER OATS GUY WASN’T MODELED AFTER HIM.

Speculate all you like, but the company’s official website swears that its logo—which has been evolving since the 1870s—isn’t based on William Penn. “The ‘Quaker Man’ is not an actual person,” reads the FAQ page. “His image is that of a man dressed in Quaker garb, chosen because the Quaker faith projected the values of honesty, integrity, purity, and strength.”

All images courtesy of Getty Images unless noted otherwise

How do you photograph a snowflake? It’s an easy enough question, but one that throws up a host of problems. For one, how do you capture one single snowflake, without crushing or damaging it? Secondly, how do you keep it from melting long enough to get it in front of a camera lens? And even then, how on earth do you guarantee that you’ll be able to see it in any kind of detail?

Despite all those difficulties, one man not only managed to photograph a snowflake in astonishingly beautiful detail, but he did so more than 100 years ago—and went on to produce such an impressive library of snowflake images that his research is credited with establishing the theory that no two snowflakes are alike.

Wilson Alwyn “Willie” Bentley was born on a small farmstead in Jericho, Vermont, on February 9, 1865. His mother, a former schoolteacher, owned a microscope which she had used in her lessons and which Bentley—who had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge fueled by reading his mother’s entire set of encyclopedias as a child—soon became fascinated by. But alongside the fragments of stones and birds’ feathers that Bentley collected and observed through his microscope, from an early age his curiosity landed on one subject: snowflakes.

Working during the winter from a freezing cold room at the back of the family farmhouse, Bentley would collect airborne ice crystals on the microscope’s slide, and quickly work to focus on them before they began to melt or lose their shape. In the early days of his work, he simply recorded the countless different shapes and forms he saw by drawing them as best he could in a notebook. But knowing full well that these rough sketches were no substitute for the astonishing complexity that he saw under his microscope, he soon sought other ways to record what he discovered.

Bentley asked his father for a bellows camera—an early type of still camera, with a pleated, accordion-like body that could be used to alter the distance between the lens and the photographic plate—and with no photographic training himself, attached a microscope lens. What followed was a long and immensely frustrating period of trial and error, with innumerable failed attempts along the way. But finally, during a snowstorm on January 15, 1885, Bentley succeeded in taking a single perfect image. He later wrote:

The day that I developed the first negative made by this method, and found it good, I felt almost like falling on my knees beside that apparatus and worshipping it! It was the greatest moment of my life.

Bentley is now credited with taking the earliest known photograph of a single snowflake in the history of photography. He was just shy of 20 years old at the time—and he wasn’t done yet.

For more than a decade, he continued to perfect not only his photographic skills, but his snowflake-collecting technique too. Working swiftly (and mainly outside) to avoid the risk of them melting or evaporating, Bentley would collect the snowflakes on a tray, covered with a swatch of black velvet, that he would leave outside during bad weather. Individual snowflakes could then be transferred onto a pre-chilled glass microscope slide using a small wooden peg, where they could be photographed in astonishing detail. Bentley eventually amassed a library of several hundred snowflake images—and as word spread of his work, it soon attracted the attention of scientists at the nearby University of Vermont.

George Henry Perkins, a professor of natural history and the official state geologist of Vermont [PDF], persuaded Bentley to write, with his assistance, an article outlining both his method of photographing snowflakes, and his groundbreaking findings. Although initially reluctant (Bentley was an introverted character, and reportedly believed his modest home-schooling could not possibly have led to him discovering anything that wasn’t already known to science), he eventually agreed, and in May 1898 published A Study of Snow Crystals. In it, Bentley’s writing shows just how passionate he was about his subject:

A careful study of this internal structure not only reveals new and far greater elegance of form than the simple outlines exhibit, but by means of these wonderfully delicate and exquisite figures much may be learned of the history of each crystal, and the changes through which it has passed in its journey through cloudland. Was ever life history written in more dainty hieroglyphics!

Several more articles in ever more weighty publications—including Harper’s Monthly, Popular Mechanics, and even National Geographic—followed, and soon Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley’s astonishing research became known nationwide. He began giving talks and lectures on his work all over the country, and slides of his astounding snowflake photographs were sold all across America to schools and colleges, museums, and even jewelers and fashion designers looking for inspiration for their latest creations. And throughout it all, Bentley continued to work.

But not without controversy. When, in 1892, a German scientist named Gustav Hellmann asked a colleague to photograph snowflakes, the resulting flake photos were nowhere near as gorgeous or symmetrical as Bentley’s. Eventually, Hellmann accused Bentley of manipulating his photographs. According to New Scientist [PDF]:

“What is clear is that Bentley gave his white-on-white images a black background by scraping the emulsion off the negatives around the outline of each snowflake. But did he sometimes scrape away asymmetries too? Hellmann claimed he had ‘mutilated the outlines,’ and Bentley’s defense of his methods is not entirely reassuring. ‘A true scientist wishes above all to have his photographs as true to nature as possible, and if retouching will help in this respect, then it is fully justified.'”

Though their feud raged on for decades, Bentley never changed his methods of photographing snowflakes. And though he expanded his studies during warmer weather to include investigations into the structure and formation of dew, mist, and rainfall—he even proposed radical meteorological theories linking raindrop size to different storm types [PDF] and devised a way to measure the size of raindrops that involved letting them hit a tray containing a layer of sifted flour, then weighing the ball of paste each raindrop produced as it hit—Bentley’s first love always remained the same. Having continued his painstaking research, by the 1920s he had amassed a gallery of more than 5000 snowflake images, some 2400 of which were selected for publication in a book, Snow Crystals, in 1931.

Later that year, however, his work finally got the better of him: After walking six miles home during a blinding blizzard, Bentley caught pneumonia and died at the family home in Jericho on December 23, 1931. He left his extraordinary library of photomicrographs to his brother Charlie, whose daughter donated them to the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York in 1947. The entire collection has now been digitized, and is available online here.

Oh, how they grow up so fast! EBay—or “the world’s biggest garage sale” as most regard it today—celebrated its big 2-1 this year. In 1995, the company founded by Pierre Omidyar went by a different name, though: AuctionWeb. The domain ebay.com would have directed you to an informational landing page for the ebola virus.

EBay wasn’t the only notable thing (or even technological thing, for that matter) to turn 21 in 2016. Check out the video above from the mental_floss List Show to hear John Green walk you through all 21 of ’em.

Fire water, water of life, juice—whatever you call it, whiskey (also spelled “whisky”) is having a moment. But with so many different whiskeys available, learning the particulars of even one type can be challenging. To help out, we’ve put together a list of answers to your most frequently asked questions about the brown spirit. Consider this your Whiskey 101 cheat sheet.

1. WHAT IS WHISKEY?

The answer is trickier than you might expect: What can be labeled “whiskey” varies from country to country. Many of the moonshines and white whiskeys available in the U.S. can’t legally be labeled as whiskey elsewhere, for example, because they haven’t been aged. Exactly how long the spirit must age to be called whiskey varies by country, but all whiskeys do have one thing in common: They’re made from grain.

2. WHY IS WHISKEY SOMETIMES SPELLED WITHOUT AN E?

You’ve probably noticed that some whiskey labels read “whiskey” while others are spelled “whisky.” The current convention is that Irish and American whiskeys are spelled with the e, and that Scottish, Canadian, and Japanese whiskys are spelled without. But some bourbons and Tennessee whiskies—including Maker’s Mark and George Dickel—are spelled without the e. Go figure.

3. WHAT IS BOURBON?

To be considered whiskey in the U.S., the spirit must be distilled from grain and be between 40 and 95 percent alcohol by volume (ABV) [PDF]. Usually it is distilled twice. Unlike other countries, there is no minimum aging requirement for most types of American whiskeys.

In the States, bourbon is king. To be called bourbon, the product must not only meet the baseline definition of whiskey, but must also be distilled from at least 51 percent corn. It must be under 62.5 percent ABV once it goes into a barrel, and it must be aged in charred new oak containers. To be called “straight bourbon” (or “straight” whiskey of any kind), it has to aged for at least two years. As far as taste goes, bourbon is typically thought to be sweeter than other whiskeys (such as rye or Scotch), and has a slight smoky flavor.

And last but not least, bourbon has to be made in the United States. It is so ingrained (no pun intended) in our culture, even NAFTA restricts the word “bourbon” to whiskey made in the States.

4. IS BOURBON THE SAME AS TENNESSEE WHISKEY?

Tennessee whiskey is not to be confused with bourbon, although legally, there are only a couple variances between the two. In addition to meeting all the federal requirements for bourbon, Tennessee whiskey must also be produced within the state’s limits. Since 2013, it has been required that all Tennessee whiskey is “filtered through maple charcoal prior to aging,” which is known as the Lincoln County Process [PDF] (although one distiller received an exemption from the law).

Aside from these two huge categories, the U.S. also produces rye whiskey (which must be distilled from at least 51 percent rye), wheat whiskey (which must be distilled from 51 percent wheat), unaged white whiskeys, and grain whiskeys made from everything ranging from corn to quinoa, which isn’t a grain at all.

5. SO, WHAT IS SCOTCH?

Like American whiskey, Scotch varies greatly in terms of its taste—although it’s generally thought to be smokier and peatier than its cousins. By law, it must be made in Scotland and aged for no fewer than three years in oak containers.  Perhaps surprisingly, many of these containers are former bourbon barrels. As American law requires bourbon to be aged in “new oak,” used bourbon barrels are frequently shipped to Scotland for use in making Scotch. Traditionally, all Scotch whisky was made using malted barley.

6. WHAT IS MALT WHISKY?

Malt whisky must be made from a mash of malted grain (usually barley), which means the grain has been soaked, allowed to start sprouting, and then roasted to halt the process. The whisky’s level of smoky, savory peat flavor comes from how long the barley is dried over a peat-fueled fire: The longer it’s over the fire, the smokier the whisky is.

A single malt means the whisky was made at only one distillery. So, a single malt Scotch is whisky made in Scotland using malted barley in a single distillery.

7. WHAT OTHER COUNTRIES PRODUCE WHISKEY—AND WHAT SHOULD I KNOW ABOUT THEIR PRODUCTS?

The other biggies in terms of whisk(e)y production are Canada, Ireland, and Japan. Here are the basics:

Canada: Of all the whiskey-producing countries in the world, Canada (arguably) is the most misunderstood, and it’s not hard to see how it got a bad rap: 75 percent of all Canadian whisky that’s produced is shipped to the U.S., but only about 10 percent of the premium products leave Canada (which means Americans are usually tasting the less-than-stellar stuff). One of the most common misconceptions about Canadian whisky is that it was popularized within the U.S. during Prohibition. Not so, says Canadian whisky historian Davin de Kergommeaux in Canadian Whisky: The Portable Expert. According to his research, whisky’s generally anesthetic properties made it useful during the Civil War, and since many American distilleries were burned down during the fighting, we needed to turn to our neighbors to the north for our supply.

Legally, the regulations surrounding Canadian whisky provide distillers and blenders a lot of leeway in creating new products. Here, whisky must be distilled from grain to no less than 40 percent ABV, and be aged in wood for at least three years. Canada was the first country in the world to require a minimum age for whisky, which it did in 1887; Britain would follow suit about 25 years later.

Ireland: Ten years ago, there were only three whiskey-producing distilleries in all of Ireland. Thanks to the craft spirits movement, 13 others have opened up since 2006. Irish whiskey must be aged for three years, most is distilled three times, and it must be distilled to at least 40 percent ABV (as in the U.S.).

Japan: Although it’s been produced since the early 1920s, Japanese whisky has only recently become available in the U.S. And as it’s become more available, its celebrity has also grown: The 2015 edition of Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible (Murray has ranked the world’s best whiskeys since 2003) named a whisky from Yamazaki Distillery as the best in the world.

All images courtesy of iStock.

From the discoverer of titanium to a prehistoric plant expert, these Christmas kids helped us better understand the natural world and our place within it.

1. JOHN PHILLIPS (1800-1874)

John Phillips was born on December 25, 1800. In 1808, when he was just 7, he lost both of his parents in quick succession and was taken in by his uncle William Smith, a surveyor and fossil-hunter now known as the “Father of English Geology.” Later in life, Phillips also became a great geologist, and in the 1840s, he drew upon his uncle’s work to identify and name three significant eras in Earth’s history: the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. He also authored several papers on the subject of astronomy.

2. WILLIAM GREGOR (1761-1817)

A British chemist, mineralogist, painter, clergyman, and Christmas kid, Gregor is primarily remembered as the man who discovered titanium. He first came across a sample of this element on the sandy banks of a stream that ran near the Cornish village of Manaccan (also spelled Menaccan) in 1790. The following year, Gregor wrote a paper about the newfound metal, and in honor of its place of origin, he proposed calling the element either menacanite or menachine. Ultimately, though, the German chemist Martin Klaproth independently discovered titanium in 1796, and this was the name that stuck [PDF].

3. RICHARD E. SHOPE (1901-1966)

In 1918 and 1919, an influenza pandemic killed between 20 and 50 million people worldwide; in the United States, 28 percent of all citizens came down with the disease, which claimed 10 times as many American lives as World War I. Meanwhile, pigs in the Midwestern U.S. were dying of a similar illness.

Richard E. Shope, a pathologist employed by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, suspected the two outbreaks were related. So in 1928, Shope visited Iowa—where he had been born on Christmas Day in 1901—to investigate a possible link between the two illnesses.

At the time, scientists believed that influenza was caused by a bacteria of some kind—so when he arrived in Iowa, Shope began searching infected swine for microscopic suspects. He managed to identify a bacteria species that was present in most of the runny-nosed pigs he examined. However, when he injected this one-celled organism into healthy pigs, they failed to contract the disease.

Starting again, Shope looked for other potential disease-carriers within the sick pigs’ mucus. In 1931, he filtered the samples to remove any bacteria and introduced this new filtrate to some non-infected swine. Soon, the control pigs came down with a mild case of porcine influenza, proving that the flu was caused by a “filter-passing agent”—in this case, a virus. When Shope combined the virus with the bacteria, the test animals came down with more severe symptoms. Encouraged by his results, American and British scientists conducted a series of tests, which showed that human and pig influenza were indeed close relatives. Building off of Shope’s research, a British team went on to isolate the human influenza virus for the very first time in 1933. If it hadn’t been for this breakthrough, flu vaccines might not exist today.

4. GERHARD HERZBERG (1904-1999)

Spectroscopy is a technique that allows scientists to study the interactions between matter and electromagnetic radiation. By most accounts, Gerhard Herzberg literally wrote the book on this subject: His classic three-volume textbook titled Molecular Spectra and Molecular Structure has been nicknamed “the spectroscopist’s bible” [PDF].

Herzberg came into the world on December 25, 1904 in Hamburg, Germany. His passion for science blossomed at an early age: As a boy, he could often be found reading up on chemistry and astronomy in his spare time. By the time Herzberg turned 25, he’d earned a Ph.D. in engineering physics and gotten 12 scientific papers published. In the mid-1930s, the rise of Nazism drove Herzberg and his Jewish wife—fellow spectroscopist Lusie Oettinger—out of their native Germany. They relocated to Canada, which Herzberg would call home for the better part of seven decades. Over time, several different fields—including astronomy and chemistry—would benefit from his command of spectroscopy. Using the process, Herzberg was able to detect hydrogen gas molecules in Uranus and Neptune’s atmospheres in 1952. Spectroscopy also helped the scientist shed some new light on free radicals (atoms or groups of atoms with an odd number of electrons). Herzberg’s incredible body of work earned him the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1971.

5. INNA A. DOBRUSKINA (1933-2014)

Paleobotanist Inna Dobruskina was arguably the world’s leading authority on plant life during the Triassic period, which occurred between 252 and 201 million years ago. She was born in one of Moscow’s “communal apartments” on December 25, 1933. As an adult, she taught at the Geological Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences—and risked incarceration by secretly distributing anti-Communist pamphlets for several years. In 1989, she emigrated to Israel, where she became a faculty member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her life’s work took her around the world; by the time Drobuskina passed away in 2014, she’d prospected Triassic deposits in such countries as China, France, Austria, South Africa, Russia, and the United States [PDF].

During her days in the U.S.S.R., Dobruskina was often confronted with workplace sexism. On one Sino-Soviet expedition along the Amur River, her male subordinates dared her to imbibe a shot of undiluted alcohol. Determined to put them all in their place, Dobruskina gulped down enough to fill an entire 250-milliliter glass (a shot is just 44 milliliters). Afterwards, the men on that team never tried to challenge her again.

6. ADOLF WINDAUS (1876-1959)

Another Nobel laureate who happened to have been born on Christmas Day, this Berlin native took home the 1928 Nobel Prize for chemistry. The award was granted to Windaus in recognition of the lifetime’s worth of research he’d conducted on sterols, a class of organic compounds that includes cholesterol. Windaus’s interest in this topic began shortly after he earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Freiburg. At the time, little was known about sterols, and the scientist dedicated his career to plugging the gaps in our understanding of them. Through careful research, Windaus would discover that these compounds are closely akin to bile acids. He also learned that a fungal sterol called ergosterol can be utilized to cure rickets. Furthermore, it was Windaus who first determined the chemical composition of Vitamin D.

BONUS: ISAAC NEWTON (1642/43-1726/27)

If you could somehow resurrect Isaac Newton for an interview, he’d tell you that he was born on December 25, 1642—but modern historians cite January 4, 1643 as his actual birthday.

Confused? Take it up with Julius Caesar. In 45 BCE, the Roman dictator implemented a standardized, 365-day calendar (with leap years every four years, eventually) we now call the “Julian calendar.” Unfortunately, it relied on astronomical calculations that overestimated the time it takes the Earth to complete one full rotation around the sun by 11 minutes and 14 seconds. As the centuries passed, those extra minutes and seconds added up; by the mid-1500s, the Julian calendar had fallen about 10 days out of sync with the planet’s rotation. Clearly, something had to be done. So in 1582 CE, Pope Gregory XIII mandated a new calendar. Dubbed the “Gregorian calendar,” it was designed to facilitate some much-needed leap year reform (among other things). The Pope also erased the synchronization problem that the Julian Calendar had created by eliminating 10 full days from 1582. So Thursday, October 4 of that year was immediately followed by Friday, October 15.

But while Roman Catholic countries like France and Spain adopted the Gregorian calendar right away, Great Britain—Newton’s birthplace—didn’t follow suit until 1752. When the UK and its colonies finally implemented this calendar, they did so by striking 11 days from existence, doing away with September 3 through September 13. At the time, Ben Franklin is said to have remarked, “It is pleasant for an old man to go to sleep on September 2 and not have to wake up until September 14.”

By then, Isaac Newton had been dead for years. According to the Julian Calendar, he was born in 1642 and died in 1726. However, for consistency’s sake, historians have retroactively adjusted all pre-1752 years to conform to the Gregorian calendar—so today’s scholars cite January 4, 1643 as Newton’s birthday and March 31, 1727 as his death day (another part of the reform was to move when the New Year was celebrated, meaning Newton died before the new year under the Julian Calendar, but after under Gregorian). So there you have it: Arguably the greatest scientist in history both is and isn’t a Christmas baby.