- Until you visit the Great Pyramid, it's hard to conceptualize its size. It contains more than enough stone and mortar to build a fence five feet high and a foot wide from New York City to Los Angeles.
- Dr. Robert Liston of London once performed a hurried operation in which he cut the fingers of an assistant (who subsequently died of infection), slashed the coat of a colleague standing nearby (who panicked and died of a heart attack), and sewed up the patient, only to have him die shortly of gangrene.
- The five most stolen items in a drugstore are batteries, cosmetics, film, sunglasses, and Preparation H. Speculation is that people steal the Preparation H because they are too embarrassed to buy it.
- It's believed that King Louis XVI, who was beheaded on Jan. 21, 1792, is the only French king who was faithful to his wife.
- If your emerald has inclusions (bubbles, cloudy areas, internal fractures), it's probably genuine. A flawless emerald is almost certainly synthetic.
- Egyptian tombs from 3400 B.C. depict paint ("pinto") horses.
- The oldest known Egyptian brewery is almost 800 years older than the oldest known Egyptian pyramid.
- The Chinese started using hog-bristle toothbrushes in 1498, six years after Columbus' famous voyage. They continued to use them until nylon was invented in the mid-1900s.
- The Indian sari is the most enduring women's style in history. It dates back to 3000 B.C.
- Rome doesn't have a subway system because every attempt to dig one results in an archaeological discovery that stalls the project.
- It wasn't a writer of Old West tales that coined the phrase "bite the dust". Homer did, in The Iliad.
- Africans have often seen rhinos, which are shortsighted, amble off low cliffs. The rhinos fall 20 or 30 feet, get up, and trot off unharmed.
- Anna Joralemon, who eventually weighed 225 pounds, opened her store in New York City in 1673. She pioneered the business of cooking and selling doughnuts.
- Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded for treason in 1618. His head was embalmed and presented to his wife, who kept it with her until she died 29 years later.
- Sir Thomas Malory, who immortalized chivalry and honor with his Le Morte d'Arthur, wrote the book while he was imprisoned for extortion, looting a monastery, and two counts of rape.
- It wasn't just France and the United States. The Vietnamese also destroyed the Chinese army sent by Kublai Khan in 1284.
- A bridge built in Lima, Peru around 1610 was made of mortar that was mixed not with water but with the whites of 10,000 eggs. The bridge, appropriately called the Bridge of Eggs, is still standing today.
- On December 17, 1903, at 10:35 AM, Orville Wright made what is officially the first manned heavier-than-air flight. Orville reached an altitude of ten feet during his 12-second flight and covered about 122 feet. (A Boeing 747 is 63 feet high, with a wingspan of 165 feet.) Since then, of course, aviation has advanced rapidly, with flights that are further, higher, faster, but not everyone realizes just how soon that trend started. By noon that same day, Wilber Wright had managed a flight of 852 feet, staying in the air 59 seconds.
- California represented perhaps the most extreme example of the female shortage in the American west of the 1800s. The flood of miners who rushed there in 1849 drove the male:female ratio to 12:1, and many mining camps had no women in them at all. This had some amusing consequences, not the least of which was that a regular cargo item on ships sailing between California and China was laundry.
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