• Kemo Sabe means ‘soggy shrub’ in Navajo.
• Napoleon carried chocolate on all his military campaigns.
• In 1973, Swedish confectionery salesman Roland Ohisson was buried in a coffin made entirely of chocolate.
• Someone’s gender can be guessed with 95 per cent accuracy just by smelling his or her breath.
• On average, Elizabeth Taylor has remarried every four years and five months.
• Pontius Pilate was born in Scotland.
• When he was young, Leonardo da Vinci drew a picture of a horrible monster and placed it near a window in order to surprise his father. The drawing was so convincing that, upon seeing it, his father believed it to be real and set out to protect his family until the boy showed him it was just a picture. Da Vinci’s father then enrolled his son in an art class.
• Ten per cent of Star Trek fans replace the lenses on their glasses every five years, whether they need to or not.
• Ancient Romans at one time used human urine as an ingredient in their toothpaste.
• People who are lying to you tend to look up and to the left.
• The middle name of Jimmy Hoffa is Riddle. The legendary American union figure disappeared without trace on 30 July 1975.
• Boys who have unusual first names are more likely to have mental health problems than boys with conventional names.
• One in three consumers pays off his or her credit card bill every month.
• Pop star Justin Timberlake’s half-eaten French toast sold for over $3,000 on eBay.
• One in three snakebite victims is drunk. One in five is tattooed.
• Michelangelo was harshly criticized by a Vatican official for the nudity in his fresco The Last Judgement, which hangs on the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In retaliation, the artist made some changes to his work: he painted in the face of the complaining clergyman and added donkey’s ears and a snake’s tail.
• More than 50 per cent of lottery players go back to work after winning the jackpot.
• Children who are breast-fed tend to have an IQ seven points higher than children who are not.
• Male hospital patients fall out of bed twice as often as female hospital patients.
• Fewer than ten per cent of criminals commit about 67 per cent of all crime.
• We inhale about 700,000 of our own skin flakes each day.
• A pickled snake bit Li of Suzhou, China, when he opened a bottle of rice wine.
• As his body was never found, a German court officially declared Hitler dead as recently as 1956.
• More than 50 per cent of the world’s population have never made or received a telephone call.
• The average human eats eight spiders at night during their lifetime.
• All the chemicals in the human body have a combined value of approximately £4.
• Smokers eat more sugar than non-smokers.
• In ancient Sparta, Greece, married men were not allowed to live with their wives until they turned 30.
• Dorothy Parker wanted ‘This is on me’ inscribed on her tombstone.
• Half the world’s population is under 25 years of age.
• In 1994, Chicago artist Dwight Kalb sent US talk-show host David Letterman a statue of Madonna, made of 180lb (82kg) of ham.
• The people killed most often during bank robberies are the robbers.
• An exocannibal eats only enemies, while an indocannibal eats only friends.
• Howard Hughes, the American billionaire businessman, aviator and film producer, never once attended a board of directors meeting, or any sort of meeting, at any of the companies he owned.
• Although Howard Hughes had 15 personal attendants and three doctors on full-time duty, he died of neglect and malnutrition, caused by his intense desire to be left alone.
• King Louis XIV of France established in his court the position of ‘Royal Chocolate Maker to the King’.
• The Nestlés haven’t run Nestlé since 1875.
• Astronauts get taller when they are in space.
• When a person is wide awake, alert, and mentally active, they are still only 25 per cent aware of what various parts of their body are doing.
• It has been estimated that men have been riding horses for over 3,000 years.
• The make-up entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden’s real name was Florence Nightingale Graham, but she changed it once her company became successful at the beginning of the 1900s.
• Heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman has five sons named George; George Jnr, George III, George IV, George V and George VI.
• A five-and-a-half-year-old weighing 250lb (113kg) was exhibited at a meeting of the Physical Society of Vienna on 4 December 1894. She ate a normal diet and was otherwise in good health but she wasn’t able to sweat.
• People who have computers in their homes tend to watch 40 per cent less television than average.
• A German soldier was riding in the back seat of a World War I plane when the engine suddenly stalled and he fell out of his seat while over two miles (3 km) above ground. As he was falling, the plane started falling too, and he was blown back into his own seat by the wind and was able to land the plane safely.
• Queen Elizabeth I named a man as the ‘Official Uncorker of Bottles’, and passed a law that stated all bottles found washed up on beaches had to be opened by him and no one else, in case they contained sensitive military messages. The penalty for anyone else opening a bottle was death.
• Afraid of growing old, Countess Bathory of Hungary became convinced that if she bathed in the blood of young girls, she could stay young for ever, and so for ten years she drained the blood of imprisoned girls so that she could take ‘blood baths’ in a huge iron vat. After one intended victim escaped, the King of Hungary ordered his soldiers to storm her castle. When they found many dead and some still-alive bodies, they locked the countess inside her room and bricked up the entrance, leaving only a small opening through which she was given food until she died.
• People overwhelmingly tend to marry partners who live near them.
• Charles Darwin cured his snuff habit by keeping his snuffbox in the basement and the key for the snuffbox in the attic.
• Voltaire drank between 50 and 65 cups of coffee every day.
• Manfredo Settala (1600–1680) is the only person in all recorded history to have been killed by a meteorite.
• Rembrandt died penniless with a friend coming up with the £2.85 it cost to bury him.
• Young children are poisoned by houseplants more often than by detergents and other chemicals.
• An Indian emperor was given four wives when he inherited the throne at the age of eight.
• Riverdance star Michael Flatley is also an accomplished concert flute player, a champion boxer and a chess master. He has been listed by the National Geographic Society as a ‘Living Treasure’.
• Pablo Picasso has sold more works of art individually costing over $1 million than any other artist, with 211 Picasso pieces topping the million dollar mark, well ahead of the 168 Pierre-Auguste Renoir works.
• When there is no one else waiting to use a public phone, callers average 90 seconds’ talking, but if someone is waiting, the callers average four minutes per call.
• Men more often dream about their male heroes, bosses, friends or role models than about women.
• Howard Hughes became so compulsive about germs that he used to spend hours swabbing his arms over and over again with rubbing alcohol.
• In 1949, Jack Wurm, an unemployed man, was aimlessly walking on a California beach when he came across a washed-up bottle containing this message: ‘To avoid confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle and to my attorney, Barry Cohen, share and share alike. Daisy Alexander, June 20, 1937.’ It was not a hoax and Mr Wurm received over $6 million from the Alexander estate.
• W C Fields used to open savings accounts everywhere he went. He put over £500,000 in 700 different banks but couldn’t remember where many of his accounts were.
• Railroad worker Phineas P Gage was working with some dynamite that exploded unexpectedly and a metre-long iron bar weighing 13lb (6kg) went clear through his brain. He remained conscious, but was unable to see out of his left eye. After a while, his sight returned and he fully recovered.
• In November 1972, student skydiver Bob Hail jumped from his plane then discovered that both his main parachute and his back-up parachute had failed. He dropped 3,300 ft (1,006 m) at a rate of 80 mph (129 kph), and smashed into the ground face first. A few moments after landing, however, he got up and walked away with only minor injuries.
• Comedy team Abbott and Costello had an insurance policy to cover themselves financially in the event they had an argument with each other.
• A Japanese priest set a kimono on fire in Tokyo in 1657 because it carried bad luck. The flames spread until over 10,000 buildings were destroyed and 100,000 people died.
• Taxi drivers in London are required to pass a training test based on The Blue Book, with preparation for this test taking between two and four years. Of ten drivers who start, eight or nine drop out before completion.
• The most children born from the same mother, at one time, were decaplets. Born in Brazil, in 1946, eight girls and two boys were delivered.
• The most popular topic of public speakers is motivation at 23 per cent, followed by leadership at 17 per cent.
• One lady had her husband’s ashes made into an egg timer so that, even in death, he can still ‘help’ in the kitchen.
• The most popular form of hair removal among women is shaving, with 70 per cent of women who remove hair doing so by this method.
• All pilots on international flights identify themselves in English, regardless of their country of origin.
• The disgraced Lord Jeffrey Archer once worked as a deckchair attendant during the holiday season in Weston-super-Mare in Somerset.
• Karl Marx rarely took a bath and suffered from boils most of his life.
• Early students of forensics hoped that by photographing the eyes of murder victims they would see a reflection of the murderer lingering in the victim’s eyes.
• Some odour technicians in the perfume trade have the olfactory skill to distinguish 20,000 odours at 20 levels of intensity.
• Each morning more than a third of all adults hit their alarm clock’s ‘snooze’ button an average of three times before they get up. Those most guilty of snatching some extra sleep are those in the 25–34 age bracket, at 57 per cent.
• Teenagers often have episodes of anger and negativity in which they slam doors and scream tirades, most of these lasting an average of 15 minutes.
• Adults spend an average of 16 times as many hours selecting clothes (145.6 hours a year) as they do on planning their retirement.
• Iraqi terrorist Khay Rahnajet, didn’t pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with ‘return to sender’ stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb; he opened it and was blown to bits.
• Peter the Great hated the Kremlin, where, as a child, he had witnessed the brutal torture and murder of his mother’s family.
• The shortest human on record was Pauline Musters of the Netherlands. She measured 12 inches (30cm) at her birth in 1876, and was 23 inches (58cm) tall with a weight of 9lb (4kg) at her death in 1885.
• Two German motorists each guiding their car at a snail’s pace near the centre of the road, due to heavy fog near the town of Guetersloh, had an all-too-literal head-on collision. At the moment of impact their heads were both out of the windows when they smacked together. Both men were hospitalized with severe head injuries, though their cars weren’t scratched.
• About 18 per cent of animal owners share their bed with their pets.
• Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs – all 2,000 of them – escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two helpless protesters to death.
• Couples who diet while on holiday argue three times more often than those who don’t; and those who don’t diet have three times as many romantic interludes.
• Two out of every three women in the world are illiterate.
• In Britain, two women were killed in 1999 by lightning conducted through their under-wired bras.
• Women who snore are at an increased risk of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
• Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ate roast turkey from foil packets for their first meal on the moon.
• About 24 per cent of alcoholics die in accidents, falls, fires or suicides.
• US Army doctor D W Bliss had the unique role of attending to two US presidents after they were shot. In 1865, he was one of 16 doctors who tried to save Abraham Lincoln; in 1881, Bliss supervised the care of James Garfield.
• King John did not sign the Magna Carta in 1215, as he could not write his name. Instead he placed his seal on it.
• Notorious bootlegger Al Capone made £34,000,000 during Prohibition.
• One in ten people admit that they would buy an outfit intending to wear it once and return it.
• Only 29 per cent of married couples agree on most political issues.
• It is estimated that 74 billion human beings have been born and died in the last 500,000 years.
• Thirty-nine per cent of people admit that, as guests, they have snooped in their host’s medicine cabinets.
• Trying to prevent ageing, Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill and Christian Dior all had injections of foetal lamb cells. The process failed.
• In a test of Russian psychic Djuna Davitashvili’s powers, a computer randomly selected a San Francisco landmark for her to predict. However, not only had she managed to predict it correctly six hours before it made the selection, Djuna also gave an incredibly detailed description of the site, though she was 6,000 miles away in Moscow at the time.
• A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her repeatedly with an axe, leaving her mentally retarded.
• The average person receives eight birthday cards annually.
• More than 50 per cent of adults say that children should not be paid money for getting good grades in school.
• Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was present at the assassinations of three presidents: his father’s, President Garfield’s, and President McKinley’s. After the last shooting, he refused ever to attend a state affair again.
• Leonardo da Vinci wrote notebook entries in backwards script, a trick that kept many of his observations from being widely known until decades after his death. It is believed that he was hiding his scientific ideas from the powerful Roman Catholic Church, whose teachings sometimes disagreed with what Da Vinci observed.
• Peter the Great of Russia was almost 7 ft (2 m) tall.
• On his way home to visit his parents, a Harvard student fell between two rail-road cars at the station in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was rescued by an actor on his way to visit a sister in Philadelphia. The student was Robert Lincoln, heading for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The actor was Edwin Booth, the brother of the man who, a few weeks later, would murder the student’s father.
• When a thief was surprised while burgling a house in Antwerp, Belgium, he fled out of the back door, clambered over a 9-ft (3 m) wall, dropped down and found himself in the city prison.
• A flower shop entrepreneur named O’Banion held the greatest ever funeral for a gangster in Chicago. The shop, at the corner of State and Superior Streets, was a front for O’Banion’s bootlegging and hijacking operations. Ten thousand mourners were in attendance, and the most expensive wreath, costing $1,000, came from Al Capone, who had ordered that O’Banion be killed.
• When a thief was surprised while burgling a house in Antwerp, Belgium, he fled out of the back door, clambered over a 9-ft (3 m) wall, dropped down and found himself in the city prison.
• About 25 per cent of alcoholics are women.
• Levi Strauss was paid £3.35 in gold dust for his first pair of jeans.
• Adolf Hitler’s third-grade school report remarked that he was ‘bad tempered’ and fancied himself as a leader.
• Robert Peary, discoverer of the North Pole, included a photograph of his nude mistress in a book about his travels.
• The first women flight attendants in 1930 were required to be unmarried, trained nurses, and weigh no more than 115lb (52kg).
• One of Napoleon’s drinking cups was made from the skull of the famous Italian adventurer Cagliostro.
• When King Edward II was deposed from the throne in the 14th century, there were strict instructions that no one should harm him. To avoid leaving marks on his body when he was murdered, a deer horn was inserted into his rectum then a red-hot poker was placed inside it.
• Pamela Anderson is Canada’s Centennial Baby, being the first baby born on the centennial anniversary of Canada’s independence.
• A woman weighing less than 100lb (45kg) ran a fever of 114°F (45.5°C) and survived without brain damage or physiological after-effects.
• Seventy-five per cent of people who play the car radio while driving also sing along with it.
• While 1950s Hollywood actor Jack Palance was serving in the US Air Corps, during World War II, he was shot down in flames. Although Palance survived the crash, he received severe facial burns that required major plastic surgery.
• Three per cent of adults use toilet paper to clean a child’s hands and/or face.
• Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a famous actor who belonged to one of the most distinguished theatrical families of the 19th century. He received 100 fan letters a week.
• Orson Welles’ ghost is said to haunt Sweet Lady Jane’s restaurant in Los Angeles, where customers and employees have reported seeing Welles’ caped apparition sitting at his favourite table, often accompanied by the scent of his favourite brandy and cigars.
• French chemist Louis Pasteur had an obsessive fear of dirt and infection. He would never shake hands, always carefully wipe his plate and glass before dining, and sneak a microscope into friends’ houses under his coat and then examine the food they served to make sure it was safe from germs.
• Pope Innocent VIII drank the blood of three young donors thinking it would prevent ageing, and died shortly after.
• Three per cent of adults use toilet paper to clean a child’s hands and/or face.
• Tsar Nicholas II considered the construction of an electric fence around Russia and expressed interest in building a bridge across the Bering Straits.
• Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest Americans ever, never carried cash. He was once sent off a London train because he did not have the fare.
• Purple is by far the favourite ink colour in pens used by bingo players.
• The average person spends 30 years being angry with a family member.
• Thirty per cent of all marriages occur because of friendship.
• Seventy per cent of women would rather have chocolate than sex.
• Before going into the music business, Frank Zappa was a greetings-card designer.
• University graduates live longer than people who did not complete school.
• Richard Wagner was known to dress in historical costumes while composing his operas.
• In 1981, near Pisa, 42-year-old Romolo Ribolla was so depressed about not being able to find a job, he sat in his kitchen with a gun in his hand threatening to kill himself. His wife pleaded for him not to do it, and after about an hour he burst into tears and threw the gun to the floor. It went off and killed his wife.
• Humphrey Bogart’s ashes are in an urn that also contains a small gold whistle. Lauren Bacall had the whistle inscribed, ‘If you need anything, just whistle’ – the words she spoke to him in their first film together, To Have and Have Not (1944).
• Of devout coffee drinkers, about 62 per cent of those who are 35 to 49 years of age say they become upset if they don’t have a cup of coffee at their regular time. Only 50 per cent of those under age 35 become upset.
• Leonardo da Vinci was the first person to suggest using contact lenses for vision, in 1508.
• Napoleon’s haemorrhoids contributed to his defeat at Waterloo, as they prevented him from surveying the battlefield on horseback.
• The lightest human adult ever was Lucia Xarate, from Mexico. At the age of 17, in 1889, she weighed 4lb 11oz (2.13kg).
• Isaac Newton’s only recorded utterance while he was a Member of Parliament was a request to open the window.
• Sixty per cent of men spit in public.
• Men who are exposed to a lot of toxic chemicals, high heat and unusual pressures, such as jet pilots and deep-sea divers, are more prone to father girls than boys.
• Cleopatra tested the efficacy of her poisons by giving them to slaves.
• Only about 30 per cent of teenage males consistently apply sun-protection lotion compared with 46 per cent of female teens.
• American showman P T Barnum had his obituary published before his death.
• Lawrence of Arabia’s ghost is said to be heard riding his motorbike near his house in Dorset, England, where he died in a motorbike accident.
• With 382,650 babies being born and 144,902 people dying, the world population increases by about 237,748 people a day.
• The spirit of silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino is said to haunt Paramount Studios in Hollywood, with the Sheik’s shimmering spectre seen floating among old garments in the costume department.
• Gioacchino Antonio Rossini covered himself with blankets when he composed, and could only find inspiration by getting profoundly drunk.
• Alcoholics are twice as likely to confess a drinking problem to a computer than to a doctor.
• Henry Ford was obsessed with soy-beans. He once wore a suit and tie made from soy-based material, served a 16-course meal made entirely from soy-beans, and ordered many Ford auto parts to be made from soy-derived plastic.
• Albert Einstein reportedly had a huge crush on film star Marilyn Monroe.
• People who eat fresh fruit daily have 24 per cent fewer heart attacks and 32 per cent fewer strokes than those that don’t.
• Marcel Proust worked in bed, and only in a soundproof room.
• King Charles VIII of France was obsessed with the idea of being poisoned. As his phobia grew, the monarch ate so little that he died of malnutrition.
• After the death of Alexander the Great, his remains were preserved in a huge crock of honey.
• In 1979, David Booth had a series of recurring nightmares about a plane crashing, and on 25 May 1979 his premonitions came true. Departing from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, a DC-10 flew half a mile then turned on its side and slammed into the ground, exploding on impact. All 272 people on board died. Booth’s dreams began on 16 May, and continued for seven nights. Having seen the name of the airline in his dreams, Booth went and told the airport authorities. They took note of what he’d said, but claimed they couldn’t just ground a whole airline, so flights went on as usual – and Booth’s nightmares came true.
• Albert Einstein was reluctant to sign autographs, and charged people a dollar before signing anything. He gave the dollars to charity.
• It’s been estimated that an opera singer burns an average of more than two calories per minute during a performance.
• Lady Diana Spencer was the first Englishwoman commoner in 300 years to marry an heir to the British throne.
• Elderly women are more likely to live alone than elderly men; 17 per cent of men 65 years or older are living alone, compared with 42 per cent of women the same age.
• As a boy, Charles Darwin was so enamoured with chemistry that his young friends nicknamed him ‘Gas’.
• Paul Cézanne was 56 years old when he had his first one-man exhibition.
• Julius Caesar and Dostoyevsky were epileptics.
• Napoleon suffered from ailurophobia, the fear of cats.
• Viscount Horatio Nelson chose to be buried in St Paul’s Cathedral in London rather than in the national shrine of Westminster Abbey because he had heard that Westminster was sinking into the Thames River.
• A fierce gust of wind blew 45-year-old Vittorio Luise’s car into a river near Naples, Italy, in 1983. He managed to break a window, climb out and swim to shore, where a tree blew over and killed him.
• Six per cent of motorists said they sometimes leave their keys in the ignition of their unattended car.
• Napoleon Bonaparte was always depicted with his hand inside his jacket because he suffered from ‘chronic nervous itching’ and often scratched his stomach sores until they bled.
• The younger of Albert Einstein’s two sons was a schizophrenic.
• More than 20 per cent of men and ten per cent of women say they’ve forgotten their wedding anniversary at least once.
• Catherine II of Russia kept her wigmaker in an iron cage in her bedroom for more than three years.
• One in three male motorists picks his nose while driving.
• The average housewife walks 10 miles (16km) a day around the house doing her chores. In addition, she walks nearly 4 miles (6km) and spends 25 hours a year making beds.
• Over 80 per cent of professional boxers have suffered brain damage.
• Emerson Moser, Crayola’s senior crayon maker, revealed upon his retirement that he was blue-green colour-blind and couldn’t see all the colours.
• Nearly half of all psychiatrists have been attacked by one of their patients.
• Xerxes, King of Persia, became so angry at the sea when it destroyed his two bridges of boats during a storm, he had his army beat it with sticks.
• The Marquis de Sade was only 5 ft 3 in (about 1.6m) tall.
• Using a fine pen and a microscope, James Zaharee printed Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on a human hair less than 3 inches (8 cm) long.
• Men change their minds two to three times more than women. Women tend to take longer to make a decision, but once they do, they are more likely to stick to it.
• Believing that he could end his wife’s incessant nagging by giving her a good scare, Hungarian Jake Fen built an elaborate harness to make it look as if he had hanged himself. When his wife came home and saw him, she fainted. Hearing a disturbance, a neighbour came over and, finding what she thought were two corpses, seized the opportunity to loot the place. As she was leaving the room, her arms laden, the outraged and suspended Mr Fen kicked her stoutly on the backside. This so surprised the lady that she dropped dead of a heart attack. Happily, Mr Fen was acquitted of manslaughter and he and his wife were reconciled.
• About 25 per cent of all adolescent and adult males never use deodorant.
• Only one person walked from the church to the cemetery with Mozart’s coffin.
• Some publishers claim that science-fiction readers are better educated than the average book buyer.
• Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. com, takes at least one snapshot a day to chronicle his life.
• Women comprise less than 2 per cent of the total death row population in America’s prisons.
• Martha Jane Burke, better known as Calamity Jane, was married 12 times.
• Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell had an odd habit of drinking his soup through a glass straw.
• Victoria Woodhall, the radical feminist who ran for the US presidency in 1872, feared that she would die if she went to bed in her old age. She spent the last four years of her life sitting in a chair.
• Jesse James would run back home to his mother following a crime. His obsessive love for his mother extended to him marrying a woman called Zerelda, the same name as his mother and one that was uncommon in the 1800s.
• In 1983, a woman was laid out in her coffin, presumed dead of heart disease. As mourners watched, she suddenly sat up. Her daughter dropped dead of fright.
• When he was a boy, Thomas Edison suffered a permanent hearing loss following a head injury. One of his ears was pulled roughly as he was being lifted aboard a moving train.
• While sleeping, one man in eight snores, and one in ten grinds his teeth.
• The most celebrated levitator in history was St Joseph of Copertino, a dim-witted monk who would allegedly soar into the air whenever he felt religious ecstasy. He had no control over his ‘flights’, which could last for minutes and were attested to by scores of witnesses, including the Pope.
• Mozart once composed a piano piece that required a player to use two hands and a nose in order to hit all the correct notes.
• When Napoleon wore black silk handkerchiefs around his neck during a battle, he always won. At Waterloo, he wore a white cravat and lost.
• The Roman emperor Nero married his male slave Scorus in a public ceremony.
• The shortest place names in the USA are ‘L’, a lake in Nebraska, ‘T’, a gulch in Colorado, ‘D’, a river in Oregon flowing from Devil’s Lake to the Ocean, and ‘Y’, a city in Arkansas, each named after its shape.
• In Europe, ‘E’ is a river in Perthshire, Scotland; there are villages called ‘Å’ in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and a ‘Y’ in France.
• The Pacific Caroline Islands has a place named ‘U’ and a peak in Hong Kong is called ‘A’.
• Benjamin Franklin was first to suggest daylight saving.
• The most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust is aluminium.
• It snowed in the Sahara Desert on 18 February 1979.
• Captain Cook was the first man to set foot on all continents except Antarctica.
• 200 million years ago, the Earth contained one land mass called Pangaea.
• It is illegal to swim in Central Park, New York.
• At the deepest point (11.034km), an iron ball would take more than an hour to sink to the ocean floor.
• The largest wave ever recorded was 85m high near the Japanese Island of Ishigaki in 1971.
• Antarctic means ‘opposite the Arctic’.
• The largest iceberg recorded, in 1956, was 200 miles long and 60 miles wide, larger than the country of Belgium.
• The surface of the Dead Sea is 400m below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, which is only 75km away.
• The country of Benin changed its name from Dahomey in 1975.
• The Nova Zemlya Glacier in the former USSR is over 400km long.
• Canada (9,970,610 sq km) is larger than China (9,596,961 sq km) which is larger than the USA (9,363,130 sq km).
• The coldest temperature ever recorded was -70°C in Siberia.
• The second largest US state in the 1950s was California.
• Maryland was named after Queen Henrietta Maria.
• The only country to register zero births in 1983 was the Vatican City.
• Florida first saw the cultivation of oranges in 1539.
• The world’s largest National Park is Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada.
• The world’s largest exporter of sugar is Cuba.
• There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.
• England’s Stonehenge is 1,500 years older than Rome’s Colosseum.
• In 1896, Britain and Zanzibar were at war for 38 minutes.
• The Eskimo language has over 20 words to describe different kinds of snow.
• Numbering houses in London streets only began in 1764.
• More than 75 per cent of all the countries in the world are north of the equator.
• Less than one per cent of the Caribbean Islands are inhabited.
• Fulgurite is formed when lightning strikes sand.
• Mountains are formed by a process called orogeny.
• Obsidian, used by American Indians for tools, weapons and ornaments, is dark volcanic glass.
• Eighty-two per cent of the workers on the Panama Canal suffered from malaria.
• In May 1948, New Zealand’s Mount Ruapehu and Mount Ngauruhoe both erupted simultaneously.
• The Incas and the Aztecs were able to function without the wheel.
• The tree on the Lebanese flag is a Cedar.
• Tokyo was once called Edo.
• The Atlantic Ocean covers the world’s longest mountain range.
• In 1825, Upper Peru became Bolivia.
• New York City contains 920km of shoreline.
• There are three Great pyramids at Giza.
• The southwestern tip of the Isle of Man is called ‘The Calf of Man’.
• The world’s largest Delta was created by the River Ganges.
• The Scottish city Edinburgh is nicknamed ‘Auld Reekie’ meaning ‘Old Smoky’.
• The inhabitants of Papua New Guinea speak about 700 languages (including localized dialects, which are known to change from village to village), approximately 15 per cent of the world’s total.
• The world’s first National Park was Yellowstone National Park.
• Sixty per cent of all US potato products originate in Idaho.
• The northernmost country claiming part of Antarctica is Norway.
• The ‘DC’ in Washington DC stands for District of Columbia.
• New York’s Central Park opened in 1876.
• The inhabitants of Monaco are known as Monegasques.
• The East Alligator River in Australia’s Northern Territory was misnamed. It contains crocodiles, not alligators.
• France contains the greatest length of paved roads.
• The city of Istanbul straddles two separate continents, Europe and Asia.
• Rio de Janeiro translates to ‘River of January’.
• The furthest point from any ocean is in China.
• The percentage of the population that walks to work is higher in the state of Alaska that the rest of the United States.
• The busiest stretch of highway in the US is New York’s George Washington Bridge.
• Ropesville, Lariat and Loop are all towns in Texas.
• Venetian blinds were invented in Japan.
• In Venice, Venetian blinds are known as ‘Persian blinds’.
• If you head directly south from Detroit, the first foreign country you will enter is Canada.
• One in every three people in Israel uses a mobile phone.
• Sixty per cent of the country of Liechtenstein’s GDP is generated from the sale of false teeth.
• In the US, 166,875,000,000 pieces of mail are delivered each year.
• Oklahoma is the US state with the highest population of Native Americans. It has no Indian Reservations.
• The Statue of Liberty’s fingernails weigh about 100lb apiece.
• In Kenya, they don’t drive on the right or left side of the street in particular, just on whichever side is smoother.
• The state of Maryland has no natural lakes.
• JELL-O [jelly] was declared the ‘official state snack’ of Utah in January 2001.
• Scandinavian folklore records that trolls only come out at night because sunlight would turn them to stone.
• 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire are strung across the Unites States.
• Wyoming Valley is so difficult to find because it is in Pennsylvania.
• After Canada and Mexico, Russia is the nearest neighbour to the United States. Siberia’s easternmost point is just 56 miles from Alaska. In fact, in the middle of the Bering Strait, Russia’s Big Diomede Island and the US’s Little Diomede Island are only two miles apart.
• The parents of the groom pay for the weddings in Thailand.
• One US state no longer exists. In 1784, the US had a state called Franklin, named after Benjamin Franklin. But four years later, it was incorporated into Tennessee.
• In Tibet, there is actually a practice called ‘polyandry’ where many men, usually brothers, marry a single woman.
• The coastline around Lake Sakawea in North Dakota is longer than the California coastline along the Pacific Ocean.
• Brooklyn is the Dutch name for ‘broken valley’.
• Danishes are called Vienna cakes in Denmark, and Spanish rice is unknown in Spain.
• Birkenhead Park was the inspiration for New York’s Central Park as it was the world’s first urban park.
• The city of Nottingham was the first city to have Braille signs in the UK.
• Minnesota has 99 lakes named Mud Lake.
• At the turn of the century, the New Brighton Tower (located atop the tower ballroom) was higher than the Blackpool Tower. The steel tower was taken down between 1919 and 1921.
• Fort Worth Texas was never a fort.
• Legend has it that, when Burmese women are making beer, they need to avoid having sex or the beer will be bitter.
• Kitsap County, Washington, was originally called Slaughter County, and the first hotel there was called the Slaughter House.
• Bagpipes, although identified with Scotland, are actually a very ancient instrument, introduced into the British Isles by the Romans.
• Saunas outnumber cars in Finland.
• Although Argentina’s name means ‘Land of Silver’, there is actually very little silver there. It was misnamed by explorers who thought they saw veins of the metal there.
• The state of California raises the most turkeys in the US.
• America’s first stock exchange was the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, established in 1791.
• Antarctica is visited by over 10,000 tourists a year.
• The Pony Express, one of the most famous chapters in US history, only lasted one year, from 1860 to 1861.
• There are four states where the first letter of the capital city is the same letter as the first letter of the state: Dover, Delaware; Honolulu, Hawaii; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
• Andorra, a tiny country on the border between France and Spain, has the longest average lifespan: 83.49 years.
• Oregon has the most ghost towns of any state.
• Construction of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg started in 1015, but it was not until 1439 that the spire was completed.
• There are more Rolls-Royces in Hong Kong than anywhere else in the world.
• Japan has 130 times more people per square mile than the state of Montana.
• The most expensive commercial real estate in the world is in Tokyo. The second most expensive is 57th Street in New York City.
• Mt. Everest grows about 4mm a year: the two tectonic plates of Asia and India, which collided millions of years ago to form the Himalayas, continue to press against each other, causing the Himalayan peaks to grow slightly each year.