People Share Which Strange Facts Must Have Been Difficult To Prove

How in the world did that happen? That is a loaded question. Behind every fact, myth or experiment there is a person or two who proved the story. Before Wikipedia we never knew how to learn the truth behind the smallest of things or all things, heck before Wiki we just went along until something sparked the thought... "who discovered that?" or "How did that idea come about?" often we are left dumbfounded wondering... how did somebody prove that theory? And why would they?

Redditor _Justoneaccount1234 wondered _What fact makes you think 'what the f**k were they doing to discover that?'

GO STICK YOURSELF!

I'm not sure if this is a perfect fit, and it's not new to Reddit, but I love how scientists conducted a study on penguins sleeping patterns during the day. They poked them with sticks to see how many pokes it would take for them to wake up.

https://www.nature.com/news/2002/020925/full/news020923-3.html

Fugu, a pufferfish that is poisonous unless you prepare the right part in exactly the right way.

The road to current standardized fugu preparation procedure must be littered with dead people. One wonders what they were thinking, exactly.

The element phosphorus was discovered because someone decided to boil pee cos he thought since pee is gold in color there's probably some gold in it.

Someone figured out that castoreum taste like raspberry and so it became used occasionally as an artificial raspberry flavoring in food as well as an ingredient in perfume due to it's vanilla smell.

Castoreum is juice from a beaver's Castor sac which is located in their anus.

Lutefisk.

Let's take this fish, soak it in lye for a few days, then soak it in water to get the lye out (because, you know, it's lye), and then eat it!

My mum was diagnosed with glaucoma a while back. She had to use eye drops which she said were derived from bull semen.

She wasn't too disgusted, she was a nurse, she was just endlessly baffled with HOW anyone ever came up with that idea. Like, you'd have to know a fair bit about semen to even think of its uses beyond the obvious one. How do these people describe themselves on LinkedIn?

I feel like a lot of the food related ones can be summed up by either "desperation" or "boredom."

Hákarl. You know, that shark that is usually poisonous unless you leave it to rot for months.

How people invented the procedure to make coffee. I will never understand.