.jpg/960px-Balloons_on_a_string_(Unsplash).jpg)
The first rubber balloons were made in London in 1824 by the scientist Michael Faraday, who pressed two sheets of raw rubber together to hold hydrogen for his experiments. A year later Thomas Hancock was selling them as do-it-yourself toy kits.
📍 Nepal
In bagh-chal, "moving tigers" in Nepali, one player has four tigers and the other twenty goats. The tigers win by jumping over and capturing five goats; the goats win by hemming the tigers in so they cannot move.
.jpg/330px-Opening_day-_Inaugural_softball_game_played_at_379th_AEW%E2%80%99s_new_field_(8933987).jpg)
📍 Chicago, USA
Softball began on Thanksgiving Day 1887 at Chicago's Farragut Boat Club, when a rolled-up boxing glove became the ball and a broom handle the bat.
📍 Senegal & neighbouring West Africa
Yoté is a fast West African strategy game: players keep their pieces in hand, drop them onto the board and capture by jumping. A 1955 survey of West African games found it so popular in Senegal that French speakers there had coined a verb for playing it: "yoter".
📍 Iberia & southwestern France
Rabbits are Iberian natives: the oldest fossils of the species, 600,000 years old, come from southern Spain. Australia's rabbit plague began with just 24 rabbits released in Victoria in 1859.
📍 Great Hungarian Plain, Hungary
Goulash is named after the cowboys who cooked it: gulyás is Hungarian for 'cattle herder'. It began as a herdsmen's stew on the Great Hungarian Plain; the paprika that colours it only reached Europe in the 1500s. In Hungary, it's a soup.
.jpg/330px-Art-broken-explosion-glass_(24300206666).jpg)
📍 Ireland
Smithereens comes from Irish smidirín, 'a tiny fragment', from smiodar, 'fragment', plus the Irish diminutive -ín, the same ending as in colleen. It turns up in English in the early 1800s.