Bar Bet - Famous Bar Bets

Famous Bar Bets

• The annual Midnight Sun baseball game played in Fairbanks, Alaska (the only game to be contested after midnight without the use of artificial lighting) was established in 1906 as the result of a bar bet.
• Two of Tony Hawks' books, Round Ireland With A Fridge (ISBN 0-09-186777-0) and Playing The Moldovans At Tennis (ISBN 0-09-187456-4), were written describing Hawks' attempts to win two bar bets.
• The film To Have and Have Not is supposedly the result of bar bet between Ernest Hemingway and Howard Hawks, with Hemingway betting Hawks that Hawks couldn't make a good film from Hemingway's worst novel.
• It is widely believed that the creation of Scientology was the result of a bar bet between L. Ron Hubbard and Robert A. Heinlein. The story says L. Ron Hubbard dared that he could create a religion all by himself. According to Scientology critic Lindsay this is "definitely not true", no such bet was ever made, it would have been "uncharacteristic of Heinlein" to make such a bet, and "there's no supporting evidence". However, several of Heinlein's autobiographical pieces, as well as biographical pieces written by his wife, claim repeatedly that the bet did indeed occur.
• A class of Feynman Diagram became known as a Penguin Diagram due to a bar bet between physicists John Ellis and Melissa Franklin.