Robert Ripley shared P.T. Barnum’s sense of spectacle and ability for self-promotion, but took it to another domain. Where Barnum dazzled the people with exotic animals and acrobatic feats, Ripley decided to focus on the human oddities. Starting his career combining his two great passions, sports and art (he dreamed of playing baseball in the major leagues before an arm injury shattered those prospects), he drew cartoons for the New York Globe, where he got the idea of making a collection of strange but true facts. He called it “Champs and Chumps.”

On this day, December 19, in 1918, Robert Ripley first published “Champs and Chumps,” his cartoon of belief-defying sports facts. Over the next few months he would add non-sports items, changing the name to “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!”

Four years later, the Globe newspaper folded, Ripley took his popular cartoon to the New York Evening Post, who gave Ripley his own research team which included Norbert Pearlroth, an Austrian-born, Polish-educated polyglot, whose only job, from year 1923 until retirement, was to scour the books of the New York Public Library to uncover the facts used by “Believe it or Not!” Pearlroth worked ten hours a day, six days a week – and sometimes on Sundays – examining, by the library’s estimates, some 7,000 books a year – which means over the course of his 50+ year career he went through 350,000 books. Which sounds like just the sort of fact Pearlroth would collect.