1. On July 4, three presidents, all Founding Fathers, died: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe. Presidents Adams and Jefferson died in the same year, 1826, as did President Monroe. Coincidence? It's all up to you. (constitutioncenter.org)
2. Barbara Millicent Roberts, from Willows, Wisconsin, is the
complete name of the Barbie doll. She was initially presented at the New York
Toy Fair on March 9, 1959, on her birthday. (barbiemedia.com)
3. There are no "57 kinds" of Heinz ketchup, and there
never have been. H.J. Heinz, the company's creator, decided his product needed
a number, and he preferred 57. To get the ketchup to flow, hit the glass bottle
on the "57," not the bottom. (heinz.com)
4. One of President John Tyler's grandkids, who was born in 1790,
is still alive today. What gives this is possible? When President Tyler's
son Lyon Tyler was born in 1853, he was 63 years old; Lyon's son was born when
he was 75 years old. Harrison Tyler, President Tyler's living grandson, is 92
years old. Lyon Jr., Lyon's other son, died in 2020 at the age of 95. The
President's residence, Sherwood Forest Plantation in Virginia, is currently
owned by the Tyler family. (sherwoodforest.org)
5. American giant Robert Wadlow (1918–1940), who was 8 feet 11
inches tall, was the tallest man ever documented. Wadlow's size was caused by a
pituitary gland that was unusually enlarged. (guinnessworldrecords.com)
6. Sultan Kosen, 37, of Turkey, is the world's tallest living man,
standing at 8 feet, 2.8 inches. He set the record in 2009. A pituitary problem
is also to blame for his rapid development. (guinnessworldrecords.com)
7. Jeanne Louise Calment, a 122-year-old Frenchwoman, was the
oldest person ever to live (whose age could be verified). She died in 1997.
(guinnessworldrecord.com)
8. The Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri was the first to
sell machine-sliced bread in the 1920s. It was the best thing since...unsliced
bread, perhaps? (chllicothenews.com)
9. In the 1700s, the Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, devised the
sandwich so he wouldn't have to leave his gambling table to dine. (pbs.org)
10. The first collegiate football game was played in New
Brunswick, New Jersey, on November 6, 1869, between Rutgers and Princeton (then
known as the College of New Jersey). Rutgers was victorious. (ncaa.com)
11. Experiments with the machine and human lickers have been conducted
in colleges to determine how many licks it takes to reach the center of a
Tootsie Pop (since this is vital scientific knowledge!). The total number of
responses varied from 252 to 411. (tootsie.com)
12. The Four Corners is the only place in the United States where
you may simultaneously stand in four states: Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New
Mexico.
13. Canada is located to the south of Detroit (just look at a
map).
14. Backrub was the initial name for Google's search engine. The
company was dubbed Google after the googol, which is followed by a hundred
zeros. (about. google)
15. Jonathan, a 187-year-old tortoise, is the oldest known living
land animal. He was born in 1832 and has resided in the Atlantic Ocean island
of St. Helena since 1882. (guinnessworldrecords.com)
16. Bats are the only mammals capable of flight.
17. Wombats are the only animals with cube-shaped feces. This is
because of the way its intestines produce excrement. The animals then use the
cubes to indicate their area by stacking them. (bbc.com)
18. The red-billed quelea, which lives in Africa and has an
estimated population of 1.5 billion, is the world's most common wild bird, not
the sparrow or the blue jay. (audubon.org)
19. The blue whale's heart, the world's biggest mammal, is five
feet long and weighs 400 pounds. The whale is 40,000 pounds in total.
(nationalgeographic.com)
20. an elephant's heart, by comparison, weighs roughly 30 pounds.
And what about a human heart? It's only 10 ounces.
21. Elephants are unable to leap. (smithsonianmag.com)
23. Cows have one stomach with four chambers, rather than four stomachs. (fda.gov)
24. The platypus has no stomach; its esophagus connects directly to its intestines. (nationalgeographic.com)
25. Here's a true animal myth: Eating pieces of a pufferfish can kill you because it carries a poisonous substance called tetrodotoxin as a defense mechanism against predators. One pufferfish contains enough poison to kill 30 people, and there is no antidote. Still, pufferfish, known as fugu in Japan, is a treasured delicacy that can only be cooked by skilled chefs. (nationalgeographic.com)
26. The skin of polar bears is black. Their fur isn't white—see-through, it's so it appears white when light bounces off of it.
27. Tigers have striped skin, much like their fur. Furthermore, no two fur patterns are the same.
28. Flamingos are only pink due to compounds called carotenoids found in the algae and fish that consume the algae they eat; when they're hatched, their feathers are greyish white.
29. Mosquitoes are the world's deadliest animal, killing more people than any other species owing to the illnesses they transmit. (cdc.gov)
30. What do Yoda and Miss Piggy have in common? Frank Oz, a puppeteer, provided both of their voices.
31. The first movie to depict a toilet flushing was Psycho. (npr.com)
32. One of Hollywood's most famous movie lines was never spoken. "Play it again, Sam," is a popular quotation from Casablanca, however, the true dialogue is "Play it, Sam." "Place 'As Time Goes By' on the stereo."
33. In The Matrix, the green code was built using symbols from the code designer's wife's sushi cookbook. (cnet.com)
34. In 1981, 750 million people watched Princess Diana's wedding to Prince Charles; regrettably, 2.5 billion saw her funeral in 1997. (bbc.com)
35. Half of the world's population watched the 2018 FIFA World Cup of soccer (or football, as many foreign supporters refer to it), which is held every four years, with 3.572 billion viewers. This figure is similar to that of the 2016 Summer Olympics, although only a quarter of the globe watched the less popular Winter Olympics in 2018. (fifa.com)
36. Your fingers have no muscles; their function is governed by the muscles in your palms and arms. (assh.org)
37. Your heart is the hardest-working muscle in your body, pumping more than 2,000 liters of blood every day and beating more than 2.5 billion times throughout a 70-year life. (heart.org)
38. Trying to hum while holding your nose is difficult (try it!).
The biggest organ in the body is the skin.
40. The circumference of the world is 24,900 miles. (nasa.gov)
41. An adult human's blood arteries would span 100,000 miles if put end to end, enough to round the globe four times. (fi.edu)
42. New study claims that the human nose can detect at least a trillion distinct scents. (nature.com)
43. The combined length of the world's longest fingernails was nearly 28 feet. Lee Redmond, an American, began cultivating them in 1979 and set the record in 2008. She tragically lost her nails in a vehicle accident in 2009. (guinnessworldrecords.com)
44. The origin of the term "sinister" recalls a historical prejudice towards those who are left-handed. It is derived from the Latin term for "left," which was seen as unfortunate or wicked. (merriam-webster.com)
45. The letter "q" is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in any US state name. In New Jersey and Arizona, the letters "J" and "z" are only displayed once each.
46. The word "strengths" is the English language's longest word with only one vowel. (guinnessworldrecords.com)
47. Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey, came up with names for things we see in comics and cartoons all the time: "bright" is the dust cloud a character makes when fleeing quickly; "pleads" are the beads of sweat when a character is under duress, and "grawlix" are symbols such as "#@* percent " that stand in for curse words. (merriam-webster.com)
48. A portmanteau is a term created by combining two words to form a new one (for example, brunch combines breakfast and lunch, or motel combines motor and hotel). In case you're wondering, the word "portmanteau" is a compound word that refers to a dual-sided suitcase, not a portmanteau. (merriam-webster.com)
49. John Steinbeck's schoolwork was physically eaten by his dog. An early draught of Of Mice and Men was eaten up by the author's dog. "I was fairly engaged," he wrote, "but the poor man may have been behaving critically."
50. Among the lost works, this tale may be the worst: Hadley Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife, abandoned luggage containing the author's work on a train. When she returned to grab it, it had vanished. Hemingway stated in A Moveable Feast, "I had never seen somebody touched by anything other than death or awful misery until Hadley when she told me about the items being gone."
Comments