ON THE ROAD AGAIN…
One hundred sixty cars can drive side by side on the Monumental Axis in Brazil, the world’s widest road.
The highest motorway in England is the M62 Liverpool to Hull. At its peak, it reaches 1,221 feet above sea level over the Saddleworth Moor, the burial ground of the victims of the infamous Myra Hindley, Moors Murderer.
Built in 1697, the Frankford Avenue Bridge, which crosses Pennypack Creek in Philadelphia, is the oldest U.S. bridge in continuous use.
The Golden Gate Bridge was first opened in 1937.
According to the Texas Department of Transportation, one person is killed annually painting stripes on the state’s highways and roads.
IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME
Construction on the Leaning Tower of Pisa began on August 9, 1173. There are 296 steps to the top.
The Hoover Dam was built to last two thousand years. The concrete in it will not even be fully cured for another five hundred years.
In Washington, D.C., no building can be built taller than the Washington Monument.
The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, has five sides, five stories, and five acres in the middle.
At one point, the Circus Maximus in Rome could hold up to 250,000 people.
Buckingham Palace has more than six hundred rooms.
The foundations of many great European cathedrals are as deep as forty to fifty feet.
At one point, the Panama Canal was going to be built in Nicaragua.
In Calcutta, 79 percent of the population lives in one-room houses.
EI-FFEL AWFUL
The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 World’s Fair. The blueprints covered more than fourteen thousand square feet of drafting paper. The Eiffel Tower has 2.5 million rivets, and its height varies as much as six inches, depending on the temperature.
NAME GAME
Los Angeles’s full name is El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula and can be abbreviated to 6.3 percent of its size: L.A.
There is a place in Norway called Hell.
There is a resort town in New Mexico called Truth or Consequences.
There is a town in Texas called Ding Dong.
There is an airport in Calcutta named Dum Dum Airport.
There was once a town named 6 in West Virginia.
There’s a cemetery town in California called Colma; its ratio of dead to living people is 750 to 1.
If you come from Manchester, you are a Manchurian.
Nova Scotia is Latin for “New Scotland.”
The abbreviation ORD for Chicago’s O’Hare Airport comes from the old name Orchard Field.
…OR MAYBE NOT
The slogan on New Hampshire license plates is “Live Free or Die.” These license plates are manufactured by prisoners in the state prison in Concord.
SOME STIFF FIGURES
If a statue of a person on a horse depicts the horse with both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
The Sphinx at Giza in Egypt is 240 feet long and carved out of limestone. Built by Pharaoh Khafre to guard the way to his pyramid, it has a lion’s body and the ruler’s head.
The name of the Statue of Liberty is Mother of Exiles. Printed on the book the statue is holding is “July IV, MDCCLXXVI.” The statue’s mouth is three feet wide.
The names of the two stone lions in front of the New York Public Library are Patience and Fortitude. They were named by the then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
Worldwide, there are more statues of Joan of Arc than of anyone else. France alone has about forty thousand of them.
SCHOOL DAYS
The University of Alaska stretches across four time zones.
The main library at Indiana University sinks more than an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
Harvard uses Yale brand locks on their buildings; Yale uses Best brand.
Harvard is the oldest university in the United States.
DO YOU HAVE THE TIME?
There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.
The shopping mall in Abbotsford, British Columbia, has the largest water clock in North America.
The clock at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., will gain or lose only one second in three hundred years because it uses cesium atoms.
ON DISPLAY
The Liberace Museum has a mirror-plated Rolls Royce; jewel-encrusted capes; and the largest rhinestone in the world, weighing fifty-nine pounds and measuring almost a foot in diameter.
The Future’s Museum in Sweden contains a scale model of the solar system. The sun is 105 meters in diameter, and the planets range from 5 millimeters to 6 kilometers from the sun. This particular model also contains the nearest star Proxima Centauri, still to scale, situated in the Museum of Victoria…in Australia.
WORLD OF WONDERS
No white man saw the Grand Canyon until after the Civil War. It was first entered on May 29, 1869, by the geologist John Wesley Powell.
The Taj Mahal was actually built for use as a tomb. It was scheduled to be torn down in the 1830s.
It is forbidden to fly aircraft over the Taj Mahal.
Due to precipitation, for a few weeks each year K2 is taller than Mt. Everest.
If you divide the Great Pyramid’s perimeter by two times its height, you get pi to the fifteenth digit.
The Great Wall stretches for 4,160 miles across North China.
The Angel Falls in Venezuela are nearly twenty times taller than Niagara Falls.
PERHAPS YOU WERE MISTAKEN
The many sights that represent the Chinese city of Beijing were built by foreigners: the Forbidden City was built by the Mongols, the Temple of Heaven by the Manchurians.
Three Mile Island is only 2.5 miles long.
I WANT TO BE A PART OF IT…
All the dirt from the foundation to build the World Trade Center in New York City was dumped into the Hudson River to form the community now known as Battery City Park.
The amusement park Coney Island has had three of its rides designated as New York City historical landmarks.
Central Park opened in 1876. It is nearly twice the size of the entire country of Monaco.
The 102-story Empire State Building, completed in 1931, is made up of more than 10 million bricks and has 6,500 windows. It was built at a cost of $40,948,900.
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’
Since the 1930s, the town of Corona, California, has lost all seventeen of the time capsules they originally buried.
The San Diego Zoo has the largest collection of animals in the world.
The San Francisco cable cars are the only mobile national monuments.
The largest object ever found in the Los Angeles sewer system was a motorcycle.
LOCAL CUSTOMS
If you bring a raccoon’s head to the Henniker, New Hampshire, town hall, you are entitled to receive ten dollars from the town.
In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when patients would die.
There’s a bathroom in Egypt where it is free to use the toilet, but you have to bring or buy your own toilet paper.
Some hotels in Las Vegas have gambling tables floating in their swimming pools.
WELL, AT LEAST WE’RE NUMBER ONE IN SOMETHING…
As of April 2000, Hong Kong had 392,000 fax lines—one of the highest rates of business fax use in the world.
Maine is the toothpick capital of the world.
ADD IT UP
Forty-seven czars are buried within the Kremlin.
Fifty-seven countries were involved in World War II.
There are 3,900 islands in Japan, the country of islands.