15 Surprising Facts About Connecticut

1. The first telephone directory did not contain a single telephone number

On February 21, 1878, New Haven's District Telephone Company issued a one-page list of 50 subscribers. It is recognized by the University of Connecticut's archives as the world's first telephone directory. Numbers were unnecessary in this tiny network: an operator connected callers to the person or business they requested. George Coy's exchange had opened only weeks earlier with 21 subscribers. The ancestor of the phone book was therefore a short customer list, rather than a collection of numbers to dial.

2. A Connecticut-built submarine attacked the British using muscle power

David Bushnell's Turtle, built at Saybrook in 1775, placed a single operator inside a small wooden submersible. The occupant had to propel and steer it, control its depth and attempt to attach an explosive to an enemy ship. Ezra Lee tried the attack in New York Harbor in September 1776, but it failed. Naval records preserve the extraordinary workload demanded of one person: submarine navigation, engineering and weapon delivery, all while fighting currents with human-powered machinery.

3. Groton built the submarine that traveled beneath the North Pole

USS Nautilus was launched at Groton's Electric Boat yard in 1954 as the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. Four years later it made a journey that transformed the possibilities of undersea travel. During the secret Operation Sunshine, Nautilus passed beneath the geographic North Pole on August 3, 1958. The achievement linked Connecticut shipbuilding with an Arctic crossing under the ice, rather than a surface expedition struggling across it. Launching, commissioning and the first voyage under nuclear power were separate milestones, not one event.

4. Yale keeps a manuscript whose writing still resists identification

The Voynich Manuscript at Yale's Beinecke Library contains elaborate plants, astronomical-looking diagrams, bathing scenes and pages of unidentified writing. Its author and meaning remain uncertain; even calling the text a cipher assumes something that has not been established. Bookseller H. P. Kraus donated the volume to Yale in 1969. The original is closely protected, but high-resolution scans are available for study, allowing anyone to inspect a famous manuscript that scholars can describe far more confidently than they can read.

5. Perfume packaging helped create Wiffle Ball

In Fairfield in 1953, David N. Mullany watched his son play an improvised backyard baseball game and began experimenting with hollow plastic spheres intended for perfume packaging. Father and son tested different cutouts until they settled on eight oblong slots in one half of the ball. The lightweight design let players produce dramatic movement without throwing a regulation baseball. Its name came from a whiff, or strikeout, with the h dropped. A Connecticut backyard experiment became a familiar game of its own.

6. A disappointing rubber substitute became an egg-shaped toy business

During World War II, General Electric chemist James Wright produced an odd bouncing putty while researchers sought a substitute for rubber. It did not solve the intended wartime problem. Toy marketer Peter Hodgson later saw commercial potential, and Yale students helped pack portions into plastic eggs for its 1950 introduction as Silly Putty. The material could stretch slowly, bounce or break under a sudden force. The useful idea was not the original industrial application, but recognizing that its peculiar behavior was entertaining.

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7. Sherlock Holmes's stage star built a castle with 47 different doors

Actor William Gillette, celebrated for playing Sherlock Holmes, designed an eccentric home above the Connecticut River. Built between 1914 and 1919, Gillette Castle has 47 doors, no two exactly alike, along with carved wooden mechanisms and a table that moves on tracks. Outside, Gillette ran a miniature narrow-gauge railroad around the grounds. The rough stone exterior suggests a medieval stronghold, but the interior and estate reveal the personal workshop of an actor who delighted in ingenious theatrical effects.

8. Mark Twain's Hartford museum preserves a machine behind his financial troubles

The Mark Twain House displays the surviving Paige Compositor, a complex machine intended to automate typesetting. Twain invested heavily in the project while his publishing business also struggled. Only two complete machines were built, and neither progressed beyond testing. His family's worsening finances helped drive them from their Hartford home and eventually sent him on a world lecture tour to repay debts. The author whose books filled so many printed pages suffered badly from backing a new way to produce them.

9. A bulldozer operator uncovered a dinosaur highway beneath a planned laboratory

On August 23, 1966, Ed McCarthy noticed fossil tracks during excavation for a state transportation laboratory in Rocky Hill. Researchers ultimately documented thousands of footprints, and the discovery became Dinosaur State Park. Some tracks were reburied to protect them, while another trackway is displayed beneath a geodesic dome. Most belong to the track category Eubrontes; that name identifies the footprints, not a proven dinosaur species. The animals left evidence of their passage roughly 200 million years before the construction crew arrived.

10. A ferry founded in 1655 once used a horse walking on a treadmill

The Rocky Hill–Glastonbury crossing began as a raft propelled with poles. During a later stage of its long history, a horse walking on a treadmill supplied the power; steam followed in 1876. The Connecticut River service continues today with a barge and a diesel towboat, operating seasonally rather than every day of the year. Its changing machinery makes an ordinary river crossing a compact history of transport, from human effort and animal power to modern engines.

11. A Waterbury can opener came with a replaceable curved blade

Ezra J. Warner's 1858 patent for opening sealed tin cans described an intimidating-looking combination of a pointed piercer, a curved cutter and a rocking bar. The cutting piece could be removed and replaced if damaged, saving the rest of the tool. Warner even claimed that a child could operate it easily—a revealing piece of the inventor's salesmanship, not modern safety advice. His patent shows how much mechanical ingenuity once went into a kitchen task now performed with little thought.

12. Orange's colorful PEZ business began with an Austrian peppermint

PEZ's American manufacturing story is rooted in Orange, where the company broke ground on a warehouse and production facility in 1973. The candy itself began in Austria in 1927 as a peppermint sold in tins. Its short name takes letters from the German word Pfefferminz. Character heads and fruity flavors came later; the early dispenser was a compact mechanical box, introduced in 1949. Connecticut became an industrial home for a product whose familiar playful identity developed over decades.

13. The Charter Oak became a mayoral chair that Hartford did not pay for

After Hartford's famous Charter Oak fell in 1856, its wood became commemorative objects. The city council commissioned a chair for the mayor from craftsmen John H. Most and Charles Burger, but did not pay the $375 bill. Samuel Colt subsequently bought it for $500. The surviving chair, now in the Wadsworth Atheneum's collection, turns a patriotic symbol into a wonderfully tangible story of craft and unpaid municipal expense. The celebrated tale of hiding the colonial charter in the tree belongs to its surrounding legend.

14. A Yale player helped give American football its defining rules

Walter Camp, a Yale graduate and later coach, was a central figure in separating American football from its rugby roots. Through rulemaking, he helped establish the line of scrimmage, the system of downs and the quarterback's role. These were changes to how the game worked, not simply new tactics within an unchanged sport. Yale's earliest intercollegiate game in 1872 had twenty players on each side—a reminder that the familiar eleven-player contest emerged through a long process of revision.

15. Connecticut passed a law aimed at stopping a school for Black students

After admitting Sarah Harris in 1832, Prudence Crandall faced opposition to integrating her Canterbury school. She reopened it in 1833 for Black students, including young women from other states. Connecticut responded with a law requiring local permission for those out-of-state students to study there. Crandall was arrested but persisted; a violent mob attack forced the school's closure in 1834. Connecticut later made her its official state heroine, recognizing a teacher once prosecuted for offering the education her students sought.