6
The number of Americans who, in 1911, each paid $300,000 for the Mona Lisa. All the paintings had been painted by the Frenchman, Yves Chaudron.
10
The percentage of gift cards or vouchers that are not redeemed.
15
In 1849, Walter Hunt owed a friend $15. The friend offered to cancel the debt if Hunt could fashion a working item from a piece of wire. After a while, Walter had created the safety pin – and made his friend into a millionaire.
29
The number of cash registers in the world’s largest McDonald’s (in Beijing, China).
30
The number of days it takes for one penny doubled daily to become over £5 million.
The number of dollars Caroline Davidson was paid in 1971 to create the Nike swoosh logo.
51
The number of razor sets sold by Gillette in the first year of production.
130
The number of dollars Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel received in 1938 when they sold all rights to the comic-strip character Superman to their publishers.
172
The number some say can be found in the bushes at the base of the Lincoln Memorial pictured on the back of the US $5 bill.
250
The average American bank teller loses about $250 every year.
378.79
The amount in dollars per person Bob Fosse, the choreographer and film director, left to each of 66 people to ‘go out and have dinner on me’. They included Liza Minnelli, Janet Leigh, Elia Kazan, Dustin Hoffman, Melanie Griffith, Neil Simon, Ben Gazzara, Jessica Lange and Roy Scheider.
500
The amount in pounds per person Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, left to each of four friends with the instruction that they should ‘spend the same within twelve months of receipt on some extravagance’.
The number of dollars a 200-year-old piece of Tibetan cheese fetched at auction.
2,300
The number of dollars received by Dr John Pemberton, the man who invented Coca-Cola in 1896, when he sold his formula for the drink in 1897.
6,600
The number of dollars fetched by Lee Harvey Oswald’s cadaver tag at auction.
100,000
The number of dollars spent by American researchers on making the discovery that three out of four people hang their toilet rolls so that the paper is pulled down to be torn off rather than up.
445,500
The number of dollars John Lennon’s handwritten lyric to the Beatles’ song Nowhere Man fetched at auction.
497,500
The number of dollars Eric Clapton’s 1956 Fender Stratocaster (as used on Layla) fetched at auction.
1,300,000
The most money in US dollars ever paid for a cow in an auction.
6,666,666
The phone number 666 6666 fetched $2.75 million at an auction in Qatar (the number six is considered lucky in Qatar).
The world spends more than $2 billion a day on weaponry.
41,900,000,000,000,000
The percentage inflation in Hungary in July 1946.
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
The largest banknote ever issued was the 1946 Hungarian 100 quintillion pengo note. That’s a one with twenty-one zeros.