Assorted Facts 16
The first practical dish washer was invented to clean dishes more safely, speed and efficiency never came into the design concept.
The first ever vacuum cleaner was horse drawn.
Dry cleaning involves solvents, so it is not really dry at all and dry cleaning is a term used by spies to see if they are being followed or not.
George Washington did not cut down cherry trees. It was a myth invented by Parson Weems.
No-one milks a yak, because yaks are the male of the species and did you also know that yak hair is the longest of any animal.
John Dillinger stole a raw potato, carved it into the shape of a gun, painted it black with boot polish and held up a warden with it.
Five prisoners from Pakistan threw spice powder into the eyes of a warden and ran out of the prison.
Vincenzo Curcio used floss to file down the bars.
Steven Russell coloured his shirt green, the same colour shirts as those of the prison doctors, and walked out of the prison.
Thomas Midgley, Jr., inventor of CFCs and leaded petrol has done more damage to the environment that any other person in history.
An underground fluffer cleans hair off the tracks in the London Underground.
Ferns are poisonous, the second oldest plant after moss and pollinate by flinging their seeds.
The most listened tune in the world is the Gran Vals, the Nokia ringtone, by Francisco T?rrega.
The Oompa-Loompas were originally black and not orange as they appeared in the movie versions.
Super Heroes, A radio episode of Superman in which he fights the Ku Klux Klan caused the KKK recruitment rate to fall to zero within a few weeks of it being aired. A Spider-Man comic was the inspiration for electronic tagging. Wonder Woman was the inspiration for the lie detector.
Barbie could have been US President, is a trained scientist and has larger breasts than you might imagine. Her maiden name is Roberts, has over a billion pairs of shoes and is only 11 inches tall.
The paradoxical frog grunts like a pig and has offspring three times its own size.
The main difference between men and women is the chromosomes. Alcohol has a greater effect on men. Women get colder quicker, in order to keep the vital organs warm.
A vomitorium is a passage situated below or behind a tier of seats in an amphitheatre, through which the crowds could spew out at the end of a show.
The single largest man-made structure on the planet is the Fresh Kills Landfill and not the Great Wall of China as many believe.
The defense of the realm act, known as DORA, banned invisible ink and binoculars. It also brought in the Licensing laws and British Summer Time.
The Great Stink occurred in 1858 when Parliament was trying to be held, but the smell of faeces was so bad they had to stop.
The Great Binge (1870-1914) is a period in history given by social historians, due to Absinthe in Europe and other dangerous drugs such as heroin being commercially available. Heroin is a brand name.
The connection between Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Picasso, Van Gogh, Toulouse- Lautrec, Degas, Manet, Strindberg, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Kylie Minogue is Absinthe. Absinthe was banned in France in 1915 due to Wormwood being poisonous. It was relegalised in 1926 after they removed the wormwood. It has never been banned in Britain because it was never popular.
British doctors treat depression more than any other illness.
The saddest song ever is Gloomy Sunday sung by Billie Holiday, also known as the Hungarian suicide song.
There were more Scots fighting against Bonnie Prince Charlie than were fighting for him.
The biggest thing in the solar system that can theoretically float in water is Saturn.
A raindrop is spherical and not as many people believe, pear-shaped.
People with lower IQ are at greater risk of being concussed. A Danish study looked at 520 men who had sustained concussion after having their IQs tested by the national draft board. 30.4 percent of the concussed men had had dysfunctional scores. Experts decided lower IQ is a risk factor.
When you are born, your brain weighs about a pound. But by age 6, it weighs three pounds. What happens? Learning to stand, talk, and walk creates a web of connections in your head?two pounds worth.
An analysis of 1 million students in a New York school district showed that school cafeteria food affected IQ scores to an astonishing degree. When preservatives, coloring, dyes and artificial flavors were removed from the cafeteria menu researchers found that 70,000 students performed two or more IQ grade levels higher than before.
Queen Elizabeth I of England was completely bald. She lost her hair after suffering smallpox at the age of 29. To disguise her loss she always wore a wig.
The U.S. government did not issue paper money per se until 1861. Instead, it chartered 1,600 private banks to print and circulate their own bills. There were eventually 7,000 varieties of state bank notes in circulation, each with a different design.
When the grey exterior of the Presidential Mansion was painted white to cover the fire damage caused by British forces in the War of 1812, the change in color brought about the change in name of the building to the White House.
Three of the first five U.S. Presidents - John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe - died on July 4th.
George Washingtons wooden dentures were actually made of walrus ivory and were mounted on pure hammered gold.
Modern archaeologists have not yet agreed on how large a crowd the Colosseum in Rome could hold. However, the generally accepted number is estimated to have been 45,000.
In one of the central intersections of the resort town of Pompeii - destroyed in A.D. 79 by Mt. Vesuvius - is a replica of the male genitalia, imbedded in and made of cobblestones. The image is approximately three feet wide by three feet long, and points the way to a house of prostitution. The walls of the house are still decorated with picture of the various specialties of the ladies employed there.
The Charlotte Dundas, a paddle-wheel steamboat, was the worlds first steam-powered vessel, not Robert Fultons Clermont. In 1802, five years before Fultons famous ship took sail, The Dundas was a steam-powered tugboat in Great Britain.
In 1920, Eugene Debs, a Socialist, received 920,000 votes for president of the United States even though he ran his entire campaign from prison.
Sometime around 1325, the Aztecs were looking for a place to build their capital. A priest had interpreted an omen to mean the site should be where the found an eagle, perched on a cactus, devouring a snake. And thats why they chose what is now Mexico City; they found the eagle eating a snake while resting on a cactus. The scene is depicted on the Mexican flag.
The designer of the Statue of Liberty, French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, used his wife as the model for the body and his mother as the model for the face.
On July 4, 1776, King George III of England noted in his diary: Nothing of importance happened today.
Before the 984 foot high Eiffel Tower was built in 1889, the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. was the tallest building in the world at 555 feet. The height of the Eiffel Tower in France varies , depending on the temperature, by as much as 6 inches.
According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the most common job in the United States in the 1890s was a farmer. Today, its a salesman.
Louis XVI of France was captured at Varennes in June 1791 while trying to flee his country. He was stopped at an inn when he tried to pay with a coin that carried his likeness.
The first telephone book ever issued contained only fifty names. It was published in New Haven, Connecticut, by the New Haven District Telephone Company in February, 1878.
Many Roman statues were made with detachable heads, so that one head could be removed and replaced by another.
King Henry III of France, Louis XIV of France, and Napoleon all suffered from ailurophobia - the fear of cats.
Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew marijuana on their plantations.
Aztecs believed that the sun died every night and needed human blood to give it strength to rise the next day. So they sacrificed 15,000 men a year to appease their sun god, Huitzilopochtli. Most of the victims were prisoners taken in wars, which were sometimes started solely to round up sacrificial victims.
The military salute originated during the medieval times. Knights in armor used to raise their visors to reveal their identity, and the motion later evolved into the modern-day salute.
The Mesopotamians were the first people to keep records of lunar eclipses. The earliest records show that they started sometime around 2200 B.C.