The sandwich is named after an earl.
A French traveller claimed the Earl of Sandwich would not leave the gaming table and asked for meat between slices of bread; his biographers think he ate that way at his desk.
More amazing facts
- 1756 · 1785 A former prisoner of war made potatoes popular in France.
- 1756 · 1763 Winston Churchill called the Seven Years' War the first world war. Between 1756 and 1763 it was fought in Europe, North America, India, Africa and at sea.
- 1761 Lomonosov discovered the atmosphere of Venus.
- 1765 · 1782 · 1789 Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said 'Let them eat cake'. Rousseau attributed the line to 'a great princess' around 1765, when the future queen was nine and living in Vienna.
- 1766 Catherine II bought the hard-up Diderot's library, let him keep the books, made him their salaried librarian — and paid his salary 50 years in advance.
- 1768 · 1796 Catherine the Great was inoculated against smallpox 28 years before Jenner's vaccine.