78 Fun Facts About Insurance

Which Babylonian legal text of c.1750 BC had shipping-loan rules seen as early insurance?

Code of Hammurabi provisions reflect a system in which a merchant borrowing to fund a shipment paid the lender extra, and the loan was cancelled if the cargo was stolen or lost at sea.

A contract of 1347, long counted as the oldest known insurance policy, was drawn up in which Italian city?

Genoa is credited with inventing insurance contracts that stood apart from loans, and its merchants also set up insurance pools backed by pledges of landed estates.

The Great Fire of London, which spurred England's first fire insurers, began on which street?

Pudding Lane was where Thomas Farriner's bakery caught fire in September 1666; the blaze destroyed more than 13,000 houses, and rebuilding the city gave the new fire insurers their customers.

Which economist set up England's first fire insurance company, the "Insurance Office for Houses", in 1681?

Nicholas Barbon trained as a physician but became London's most prominent builder after the Great Fire, and with eleven associates he offered fire cover for up to 5,000 of the city's houses.

What were the metal plaques that 1700s British insurers fixed to buildings for their own brigades called?

Fire marks showed an insurer's own brigade which buildings it covered; on 1 January 1833 London's insurers pooled their separate brigades into a single force.

Which London insurer, founded in 1710, lived on in the RSA name until 2025?

Sun Fire Office became Sun Alliance in 1959 and Royal & Sun Alliance in 1996, shortened to RSA in 2008; its Canadian owner Intact retired the name in 2025.

Lloyd's of London takes its name from Edward Lloyd, who ran what kind of business?

A coffee house on Tower Street, run by Lloyd by 1688, drew sailors, merchants and shipowners; he kept them supplied with reliable shipping news, and insurers gathered there to do business.

What are the individual private backers of the Lloyd's of London market traditionally called?

Names are the individuals who backed Lloyd's syndicates with their entire personal wealth under unlimited liability; asbestos losses in the early 1990s ruined many of them.

At Lloyd's, backers traditionally accepted a share of a risk by signing beneath its details on which document?

A slip was the sheet on which a Lloyd's broker set out a risk; each backer signed beneath it with the share he would take, the literal writing-under that the trade's title describes.

In 1984, insurers led by Lloyd's helped pay for a Space Shuttle mission to do what?

Retrieve two stranded satellites: Westar 6 and Palapa B2 had been left in useless low orbits after their motors failed, so their insurers helped fund Discovery's astronauts to bring both home.

The Lloyd's Underwriting Room bell came from which former French frigate, wrecked off the Dutch coast in 1799?

HMS Lutine sank in a storm off Vlieland on 9 October 1799 with a cargo of gold insured at Lloyd's, which is why her bell, salvaged in 1858, hangs in the Underwriting Room.

One stroke of the Lloyd's Underwriting Room bell signalled what about an overdue ship?

One stroke of the bell carried a verdict on the overdue ship: It had been lost. Two strokes meant a safe arrival, so underwriters stopped trading reinsurance on the vessel the moment its fate was known.

Which shipping line insured Titanic's hull for £1 million at Lloyd's?

White Star Line's broker placed the cover three months before the sinking at a premium of just £7,500, and the insurers settled the £1 million loss within 30 days.

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Lloyd's underwriter Cuthbert Heath told his local agent to do what?

Heath's telegram said to Pay every claim in full, irrespective of policy terms, while other insurers disputed whether fire policies covered fires caused by the earthquake; the decision cemented Lloyd's reputation in the American market.

In 2010 a shampoo maker took out a $1 million Lloyd's policy on which NFL star's hair?

Troy Polamalu had not cut his hair since 2000, and in 2006 a Kansas City Chiefs player tackled him by it; Procter & Gamble, whose shampoo he advertised, bought the policy.

The Lloyd's building at 1 Lime Street, completed in 1986, was designed by which architect?

Richard Rogers put the lifts, ducts and stairs on the outside to leave an uncluttered space within, the inside-out idea he and Renzo Piano had first tried at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Which Founding Father organised the Philadelphia Contributionship fire insurer in 1752?

Benjamin Franklin had started Philadelphia's first volunteer fire brigade in 1736, and with fellow firefighters he set up the Contributionship as a mutual whose policyholders shared one another's losses.

In 1781 the Philadelphia Contributionship required customers to remove what from in front of their houses?

Trees in front of a house were banned because they could hinder firefighters and catch fire themselves; a rival insurer that accepted them became known as the Green Tree.

Which astronomer published a pioneering life table in 1693, built from Breslau's birth and death records?

Edmond Halley improved on John Graunt's cruder tables by working from Breslau's records, and he used them to work out what a life annuity should cost at each age.

Which job title did Edward Rowe Mores give the Equitable Society's chief official in 1762?

Actuary then meant a registrar or clerk, from the Latin for account-keeper; Mores gave the title to the Equitable's chief official, and William Morgan's 56 years in the post made it the profession's name.

What is the British English term for what US insurers call a deductible?

The excess is the British term for the first slice of a claim the policyholder bears; choosing a higher excess usually buys a cheaper premium because the insurer no longer handles many small claims.

What term describes a reinsurer passing part of a risk on to yet another reinsurer?

Retrocession is reinsurance of reinsurance; layers of it created the London market 'spiral' after the 1988 Piper Alpha explosion, when syndicates found they held the same loss several times over.

Which doctrine lets an insurer that paid a claim sue the party at fault?

Subrogation lets the insurer step into its customer's shoes to recover from the party at fault; its rights are wholly derivative, so it can never recover more than the customer could have.

What do economists call the tendency of people to take more risks once insurance covers the losses?

Moral hazard became a modern research field with Kenneth Arrow's work in the 1960s, and insurers counter it with deductibles and co-payments so that customers still bear part of each loss.

Which reinsurer was founded in 1863 after a fire destroyed much of the Alpine town of Glarus?

Swiss Re was founded in Zürich in 1863 because the 1861 fire, which destroyed two-thirds of Glarus, had cost far more than local fire insurance could cover.

Insurance contracts are governed by which Latin principle requiring full disclosure of material facts?

Uberrima fides, utmost good faith, obliges the insured to disclose all material facts before the contract is made, the opposite of the buyer-beware rule that governs most other sales.

What do the letters in the auto insurer GEICO stand for?

Government Employees Insurance Company was never a government body; Leo and Lillian Goodwin founded it in San Antonio in 1936 to sell low-cost car insurance to federal workers and military officers.

Warren Buffett first visited GEICO in 1951 after learning that which Columbia teacher of his sat on its board?

Benjamin Graham's link sent Buffett by train to Washington on a Saturday, where a janitor let him in and executive Lorimer Davidson spent four hours explaining the business to the student.

Which company, then a textile manufacturer, moved into insurance in 1967 by buying National Indemnity?

Berkshire Hathaway used cash from its textile mills to buy the Omaha insurer, the first business it acquired under Warren Buffett, and in 1985 it shut the mills for good.

State Farm, the insurer founded in 1922, has its headquarters in which Illinois city?

Retired farmer George J. Mecherle founded State Farm in Bloomington in 1922 as a mutual offering farmers cheaper rates than urban drivers paid, and the company kept its headquarters in Bloomington.

Which singer-songwriter wrote State Farm's famous 1971 jingle about being a good neighbor?

Barry Manilow wrote 'Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There' in 1971, years before his own hit records; Weezer recorded a cover of it in 2011.

Allstate was founded in 1931 as a subsidiary of which retailer?

Sears, Roebuck launched Allstate after insurance broker Carl Odell pitched his neighbour, Sears president Robert E. Wood, on selling car insurance by mail; the name came from a Sears tire brand.

Which actress and comedian first played Progressive's spokesperson Flo in 2008?

Stephanie Courtney, a Groundlings comedy troupe alumna, first appeared as Flo in 2008 and went on to play several of Flo's relatives in the same campaign.

What word does the F stand for in the original name behind the acronym Aflac?

Family is the F in American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus; its duck mascot came about when an ad agency art director, repeating 'Aflac' aloud, noticed the name sounded like a quack.

Which comedian voiced the Aflac Duck until he was dropped in 2011 over Japan tsunami jokes?

Gilbert Gottfried had voiced the duck for more than a decade; Aflac, which then did about three-quarters of its business in Japan, fired him in March 2011 over his tweets and picked Daniel McKeague from an open casting call.

Which cartoon character served as MetLife's corporate mascot from 1985 until 2016?

Snoopy was licensed in 1985 to make MetLife seem friendly when insurers were seen as cold and distant; he was retired in 2016, the year the company announced the spin-off of its US retail business.

Prudential Financial's long-running logo depicts which landmark?

Rock of Gibraltar imagery became Prudential's symbol in the 1890s, when an advertising man riding a train past Laurel Hill in Secaucus, New Jersey, is said to have seen the likeness.

Which president signed the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935?

Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Act as part of his Second New Deal; when account numbers followed in 1936, officials took a record from the top of the first stack and declared John Sweeney of New Rochelle the first holder.

Ida May Fuller, who drew the first monthly Social Security check, paid in $24.75 and collected roughly how much?

About $23,000 came back to her, $22,888.92 in all, because she retired in 1939 after less than three years of contributions and then lived to 100.

Who was handed the first Medicare card when Lyndon Johnson signed the program into law in 1965?

Harry Truman, who had proposed national health insurance in 1945, was handed Medicare card number one at his presidential library in Independence, Missouri, on 30 July 1965; the same law created Medicaid.

Medicare Part D, which took effect in 2006, covers what?

Prescription drugs are what Part D covers; the 2003 law that created it barred the government from negotiating prices with drug makers, a ban Congress began to lift in 2022.

Which law lets young adults stay on a parent's health plan until 26?

Affordable Care Act rules keep young adults on a parent's plan until 26 even if they marry, have a child, leave school or live away from home.

In the 2012 Sebelius case, the Supreme Court upheld the ACA's individual mandate by calling its penalty what?

A tax was what Chief Justice Roberts called the penalty, upholding it under Congress's taxing power while holding that the Commerce Clause could not compel a purchase; the 2017 tax law later set it to zero.

The McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945 largely exempts the insurance business from which kind of federal law?

Antitrust law had just been applied to insurers by the Supreme Court in 1944, so Congress limited its reach over the business and confirmed that the states would go on regulating it.

Which law created the FDIC, the agency that insures Americans' deposits?

Glass-Steagall Act is the common name for the Banking Act of 1933, which created the FDIC even though deposit insurance was its most disputed provision and drew veto threats from the president.

A great fire in December 1835 destroyed the financial district of which American city, ruining most of its fire insurers?

New York's own fire insurers were mostly put out of business by the 1835 fire, and companies from Hartford, Connecticut, came to dominate the city's fire market.

In insurance and contract law, what does the phrase "act of God" describe?

An event with no direct human cause, such as a lightning strike or earthquake, is an act of God; since nobody is to blame it can excuse a party from liability, yet a policy may still name it as an insured peril.

Which state adopted the first no-fault auto insurance law, in 1970?

Massachusetts passed the Keeton-O'Connell style no-fault law in 1970, taking effect on 1 January 1971, with state representative Michael Dukakis as its chief sponsor.

The world's first pet insurance policy was written in 1890 in which Nordic country?

Sweden's Claes Virgin wrote that first policy in 1890 to cover horses and livestock, and Britain's first pet policy did not follow until 1947.

Which country wrote about 45 percent of the world's insurance premiums in 2023?

The United States wrote $3.226 trillion of the $7.186 trillion global premium total in 2023, about 45 percent and more than four times the second-largest market.

Allianz, the insurance group founded in 1890, is headquartered in which city?

Allianz began trading in Berlin in 1890 and moved its head office to Munich in 1949 after Germany was divided; its asset-management arm includes PIMCO.

Lloyd's Register's top grade for a ship's hull and fittings gave English which expression for 'first-rate'?

A1 paired the letter A for the soundest hull with the number 1 for the best fittings, a grade the register first printed in 1775 so that underwriters could judge the condition of the ships they insured.

Britain's Life Assurance Act 1774 required anyone insuring another person's life to have what?

An insurable interest, a real stake in the person's survival, was required because policies on other people's lives were being bought as wagers, which is why the law is also called the Gambling Act.

The earliest known life policy, on William Gybbons in 1583, was made at which London institution?

The Royal Exchange was where alderman Richard Martin bought the cover, in effect a wager with the underwriters: they owed him the money only if Gybbons died within twelve months.

The Society for Equitable Assurances, founded in 1762, pioneered which life-insurance practice?

Premiums based on the buyer's age, calculated from mortality tables using James Dodson's work, were the Equitable's innovation; earlier offices had charged everyone the same rate regardless of age.

American life insurance began in 1759 with a relief fund for the widows and children of which denomination's clergy?

Presbyterian synods founded the fund in 1759 and Episcopalian priests copied it in 1769, but of more than two dozen American life insurers started by 1837, fewer than six survived.

Whole life policies, unlike term cover, build up what over the years?

A cash value grows inside a whole life policy because the early premiums exceed the cost of the cover, and the owner can borrow against it; term cover simply pays if the insured dies within its span.

Which life policy pays out on a fixed maturity date, or at death if sooner?

Endowment policies were widely sold in Britain to repay mortgages, until falling returns in the 1990s left many heading for a shortfall and brought a wave of mis-selling complaints.

Most US life insurance policies refuse to pay out for which cause of death during their first two years?

Suicide is excluded for a set period, usually the first two years, though some states fix it by law at one; after that the policy pays as for any other death.

What single product did Prudential sell when it started in Newark, New Jersey, in 1875?

Burial insurance was within reach of working families because Prudential's agents called at their homes each week to collect premiums of as little as three cents.

Northwestern Mutual was founded in 1857 as the Mutual Life Insurance Company of which state?

Wisconsin's young mutual had only $2,000 in funds when a train wreck brought its first two death claims, for $3,500, so its president and treasurer personally lent the rest.

MetLife's 1863 predecessor, National Union Life and Limb, was set up to insure whom?

Civil War soldiers and sailors were covered against disability from wounds, accidents and sickness; renamed Metropolitan Life in 1868, the firm went on to sell millions of workers' policies for a few cents a week.

In which scheme do survivors' payouts grow as fellow investors die?

A tontine takes its name from Lorenzo de Tonti, a Neapolitan banker whose plan the Paris parlement turned down in the 1650s; Louis XIV adopted it in 1689 to pay for his wars.

Which 1905 New York inquiry into how life insurers sold deferred-payout policies led to their effective ban?

The Armstrong Investigation made the name of its counsel, Charles Evans Hughes, who was elected governor of New York in 1906; the state then curbed the deferred-payout policies the inquiry had exposed.

Which German chancellor introduced old-age pensions, accident insurance and medical care in the 1880s?

Otto von Bismarck's laws created health insurance in 1883, accident insurance in 1884 and old-age and disability pensions in 1889, partly to undercut the socialists.

What is a loss called when repairing a damaged ship would cost more than the repaired ship is worth?

Constructive total loss lets the owner abandon the ship to the insurer and claim in full; the insurer may then take over whatever is left of the wreck.

What is the name for the money an insurer holds after collecting premiums but before paying claims?

Float is, in Warren Buffett's words, money an insurer holds but doesn't own; it invests the cash for its own gain until the claims fall due.

The York-Antwerp Rules govern which maritime loss-sharing principle?

General average makes everyone with a stake in a voyage share a loss made on purpose to save the ship, so owners of cargo that arrived safely help pay for goods thrown overboard.

Which event prompted the US Terrorism Risk Insurance Act?

The September 11 attacks led reinsurers to pull out and insurers to exclude terrorism from their policies, so Congress made the government a backstop for such losses in 2002.

An insurer makes an underwriting profit when which measure falls below 100 percent?

Combined ratio adds losses and expenses and divides by premiums; an insurer above 100 percent can still make money by investing those premiums.

Insurance agents who write policies for only one company are described as what?

Captive agents can offer only their own insurer's policies, so a customer who wants prices compared needs an independent agent, who can place cover with several companies.

What cover protects an event organiser who offers a big reward for a half-court shot or hole-in-one?

Prize indemnity means the sponsor pays a premium and the insurer pays the prize if someone wins, so a small event can advertise a reward far bigger than its budget.

Which US law governs nuclear incident insurance for the nuclear industry?

The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 caps operators' liability and pools industry funds to compensate the public after a nuclear accident; ordinary home and business policies exclude nuclear risks entirely.

Which insurer was rescued by the US Federal Reserve with an $85 billion loan in September 2008?

AIG needed the rescue because its London unit had sold credit default swaps on mortgage-linked debt and could not cover them when that debt lost value.

A marble inscription found at Lanuvium, Italy, in 1816 sets out the rules and dues of what kind of Roman club?

A burial collegium at Lanuvium had its rules carved in marble in AD 136: members paid 100 sesterces and a jar of good wine to join, and anyone six months behind on dues lost his funeral.

Rome's law on cargo thrown overboard to save a ship, kept in Justinian's Digest, was named after which Greek island?

Rhodes gave its name to the Lex Rhodia de iactu, which made everyone whose goods were saved share the cost of cargo jettisoned to lighten a ship in danger.

What kind of insurance did England's 1601 Act 'Concerning Matters of Assurances' regulate?

Marine insurance was the subject: the 1601 Act created a special court of assurances in London to hear merchants' disputes over policies on ships and cargoes.

Which novelist held a day job assessing injury claims at an accident insurance institute in Prague?

Franz Kafka joined the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in 1908 because its shorter hours left him time to write; he stayed until illness forced him to retire in 1922.