1973 Pop Culture Facts & History
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album was on the Billboard charts for 741 consecutive weeks from 1973 to 1988, and in total, has charted for 917 weeks.
Led Zeppelin bought their private jet, “The Starship,” for part of their 1973 US tour for $30,000. Drummer John Bonham once flew the band from New York to LA even though he didn’t have a pilot’s license.
KISS played their first show in 1973 in Queens, New York, for an audience of fewer than ten people and was paid $50 for that evening.
The Hampster Dance song (1998) is just a sped-up version of the song Whistle Stop from the animated Disney movie Robin Hood (1973).
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was invented.
The public first used Air Bags in the Oldsmobile Toronado.
In 1973, Johnny Carson made a joke about a toilet paper shortage, causing people to hoard enough to cause an actual nationwide shortage.
Following Bruce Lee’s death in 1973, a series of “Brucesploitation” movies was released starring look-alike actors to capitalize on the late star’s fame. The actors had names such as Bruce Le, Bruce Lai, Brute Lee, and Bruce Lie.
Only one man in history has ever turned down the Nobel Peace Prize: Vietnamese revolutionary, diplomat, and politician Le Duc Tho. For his role as Vietnam’s chief negotiator in the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, he was jointly awarded the prize alongside his American counterpart, Henry Kissinger.
Floyd J. Thompson, a Colonel in the U.S. Army, was the longest-held American prisoner of war in U.S. history, spending nearly nine years in captivity in the jungle camps and mountains of South Vietnam and Laos and North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He was held from 1964 till 1973.
Burger Chef (opened in 1958 by Donald & Frank Thomas, who used McDonald’s as their inspiration) was the fast-food chain that pioneered the kids’ meal concept. First sold in 1973, their “Fun Meal” bundled burgers with a dessert and toy.
Germany was excluded from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) upon its founding in 1919 due to its involvement in WW1. It was admitted in 1929 but kicked again during WW2. After the war, East and West Germany were readmitted to the IUPAC in 1973.
Jimmy Carter claimed he saw a UFO in 1969. After he became the governor of Georgia, he was asked to file an official report of the sighting in 1973 by the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City. Carter described the object as bright white, changing to blue, red, and white again.
Richard Nixon presented Leonid Brezhnev with a brand-new Lincoln Continental at Camp David as a gift. Brezhnev unexpectedly took Nixon on a joyride outside Camp David on public roads alone for half an hour without Secret Service detail or the nuclear briefcase.
The White House forbade female staffers and employees from wearing pants instead of skirts until the Energy Crisis of 1973, when building temperatures were lowered, and pants were finally allowed.
Until 1973, the full title for the King of Sweden was “King of the Swedes, the Goths, and the Vends.”
On August 11th, 1973, in the Bronx, NYC, a bloc party was held called the “Back to School Jam” by Clive Campbell. Going by the stage name DJ Kool Herc, Campbell stretched and scratched popular disco break beats and funky drum solos into the genre of music we now know today as Hip Hop.
Stanley Kubrick personally pulled A Clockwork Orange in 1973 due to a run of copycat crimes. It was re-released a year after his death, in 2000.
Bob Fosse is the only person to have ever won an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony all in the same year (1973).
A man tried to rob a bank in Kenora, Ontario, with dynamite strapped to his chest. A police sniper shot him, detonating the explosives and blowing him up. He has never been identified.
Debra McKenna forgot a class ring gifted by her then-fiancé in a department store in Maine in 1973. A worker found it in 2020, with a metal detector, buried in a forest in Finland.
An MIT computer in 1973 predicted society would collapse in 2040.
NASA sent two spiders known as Arabella and Anita into space to see if they could spin a web without gravity. It took the spiders a couple of days to figure out, but they eventually made finer and more complex webs than their Earth counterparts.
When 16-year-old John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in 1973, his billionaire grandfather refused to pay a $17 million ransom. After the kidnappers mailed Getty’s ear to a newspaper, his grandfather only agreed to pay $2.2 million because that was the maximum amount that was tax deductible.
The word “factoid” was invented by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marylin Monroe. He defined it as things that are not necessarily true but are repeated so often people think they are.
In addition to being blind, Stevie Wonder temporarily lost his sense of smell and taste after a car crash in 1973. He was also in a coma for ten days, waking when a friend sang his song, Higher Ground, to him.
In 1973, a volcano erupted on the Icelandic island of Heimaey. Rather than fleeing to safety, the island’s residents sprayed the advancing lava flow with seawater to form a wall and direct the lava into the sea.
On June 9th, 1973, Secretariat won the Triple Crown. In the Kentucky Derby, Secretariat broke from near the back of the pack to win the one and-1/4-mile race in a record 1 minute and 59 2/5th seconds. He was the first to run the Derby in less than two minutes, and his record still stands. When Secretariat died in 1989, his body was sent to the University of Kentucky for an autopsy. They found his heart weighed an astounding 22 pounds! The average weight of a mature Thoroughbred’s heart is a mere eight pounds.
Two New York Yankees pitchers, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, swapped wives and children; they announced the “change-up” at separate press conferences in 1973.
Dave Winfield, a former baseball player and Hall of Famer, was not only drafted by the MLB’s San Diego Padres in 1973 but also by an NBA team and an NFL team.
Basketball Hall of Famer Spencer Haywood was approached by Nike early in his career with an enticing offer: 100K or 10 % of Nike. He took the 100K. Today, the 10% is worth over 12.4 billion.
As of 2022, the NFL’s New York Jets have never beaten the Philadelphia Eagles. The first time they played was in 1973.
Cost of a Super Bowl ad in 1973: $88,000
The 1973 Soap Box Derby winner, 14-year-old Jimmy Gronen, was stripped of his title after his car was found to have an electromagnet in the nose, which, when activated, pulled the car forward by attracting it to the steel paddle used to start the race.
