- The luxury liner Titanic struck an iceberg in the north Atlantic at 11:40 PM on April 14, 1912. She immediately began firing distress flares - large rockets that produced a loud report as well as a bright light. The captain and officers of the cargo ship Californian, nineteen miles away, saw eight of the rockets. Was the Californian close enough to have rescued some or all of the 1,517 passengers and crew that went down with the Titanic? Perhaps; perhaps not. We'll never know, because Captain Stanley Lord, commanding the Californian, didn't go to the rescue; he went to bed.
- Two of history's greatest generals, Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) and Hannibal Barca (best known for invading Italy with elephants), enjoyed their greatest military successes after losing an eye.
- In many a Western movie, Indians get state-of-the-art weapons to use against the Army from a corrupt Indian agent or an unscrupulous trader or an outlaw Comanchero. That isn't entirely Hollywood fiction. Archeological evidence suggests that the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne at Little Bighorn had almost as many Henry lever-action repeating rifles as Custer's cavalry had standard-issue 1873 Springfield single-shot carbines.
- A mature oak tree can draw more than 50 gallons of water from the ground per day. Incidentally, some oaks are 50 years old before they produce their first acorn.
- Not everyone knows who Barbara Millicent Roberts is. That's the full name of the ever-popular doll known as Barbie®.
- The milk from a young coconut can be used as an emergency blood transfusion.
- A mosquito can detect the CO2 in your breath from a third the length of a football field away.
- Wolves were domesticated three thousand years before wheat.
- You may have bought a pottle of milk recently without realizing it. A pottle is a half-gallon container.
- Humans discovered both leavening and fermentation - both effects of yeast - before they developed writing. Thus, early man had "a loaf of bread, a jug of wine" before he could write poems about them.
- Nobel prizes are given in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace, and economics. But the endowment set up by Alfred Nobel only pays for five of those. The Swedish National Bank funds the prize for economics.
- One of the more unusual civilians ever employed by the U. S. Army died in Arizona in 1902. He was a Syrian, hired in 1856 to assist with the experimental use of camels in the southwest deserts of the U.S. No one knows the name he was born with. The son of a Syrian father and a Greek mother, he converted to Islam around 1847 and took the name Hadji Ali. That was too much for American tongues, so during his 46 years in the U.S., he was known by the name that appears on his tombstone: Hi Jolly.
- Mary Katherine Haroney was the daughter of Dr. Michael Haroney, an aristocratic Hungarian physician who served as personal surgeon to Emperor Maximilian. When Maximilian's reign in Mexico ended, so did Mary's privileged life, and she wound up in a small Arizona boomtown named Tombstone, working as a dancehall girl and prostitute under the nickname "Big Nose Kate" - and living as the girlfriend of famous dentist-turned-gunman John "Doc" Holliday.
- Fugu (fugu rubripes, the Japanese pufferfish) is one of the foremost delicacies in Japan, but only specially trained chefs can legally prepare it. Even so, it kills hundreds of Japanese diners each year, because the pufferfish contains tetrodoxin, a poison that is 1,250 times as powerful as potassium cyanide and has no known antidote.
- Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as third president of the United States, and doubled the size of the nation via the Louisiana Purchase. Less well known, however, are two of his other achievements: a mathematically perfect plow and a macaroni-making machine.
- In 1969, the world medical community abandoned the idea of totally eradicating malaria. They decided that the task was undoable.
- Leonardo da Vinci was a left-handed vegetarian.
- The "Copper Scroll" is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran in 1952. What has been deciphered describes several locations of buried treasure, perhaps the treasure of the Jerusalem Temple, scattered and buried for safekeeping. However, many of the sites mentioned in the scroll have already been excavated - by the Knights Templar, more than 900 years ago.
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