ZMT: Daily Fact: A Belgian tried to sell his country on eBay

Daily Fact: A Belgian tried to sell his country on eBay

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A Belgian citizen put his country up for sale on eBay in 2007.

Most people use eBay to buy and sell everything from baseball cards to old jewelry. In 2007, a man by the name of Gerrit Six tried selling something a bit larger: the country of Belgium. In a listing titled "For Sale: Belgium, a kingdom in three parts," the Belgian citizen made light of a major political crisis involving disputes between the country's French- and Dutch-speaking political parties by jokingly attempting to sell the Western European nation to the highest bidder. Suffice to say that the listing was taken down before anyone could claim Belgium for themselves. Asked why he did it, Six responded simply, "I wanted to attract attention." Mission accomplished.

Belgium is hardly the only strange thing to be listed on eBay, let alone sold. A corn flake shaped like Illinois went for $1,350 in 2008, a suit of guinea pig armor fetched $24,300 in 2013, and one buyer bid $55,000 for a ghost in a jar before later backing out of the deal. "Buyer beware," indeed.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Population of Belgium

11.6 million

Sale price of the Gigayacht, the most expensive item ever sold on eBay

$168 million

Official languages in Belgium (French, Dutch, and German)

Listings on eBay as of 2021

1.7 billion

We have a Belgian to thank for the Big Bang theory.

Though sometimes attributed to Edwin Hubble, the Big Bang theory can more accurately be traced to priest, astronomer, and cosmologist Georges Lemaître. When Lemaître began working on his ideas in the late 1920s, most models of the universe showed it as static (non-expanding). Yet Lemaître was intrigued by data showing that other galaxies were speeding away from us — and the farther away from us they were, the faster they moved. In 1927, Lemaître posited that the universe's expansion could be the result of a single point exploding at a specific moment, an event he referred to as both "the primeval atom" and "the cosmic egg." His paper, which carried the rather lengthy title "Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques" (translated in 1931 as "A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius Accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extra-galactic Nebulæ") initially drew little notice but eventually helped shape our ever-evolving understanding of the universe.

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Daily Fact: A Belgian tried to sell his country on eBay