Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (24 page)

Children need twice as much oxygen as people over 80.

John Locke help mold the modern world's view of human rights, but his essay “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” published in 1690, suggested bathing kids in cold water, dressing them in thin-soled shoes (so that healthy water can leak in), and quenching their thirst with beer.

Reflect on This

The Mesopotamians figured out how to make glass in about 3500 BC.

Specialized workers who add layers of color to clear glass are called “flashers.”

Most car safety-glass windshields block up to 97 percent of UV rays.

In the 1880s, doctors made the first glass contact lens. It was designed for somebody who'd had an eyelid removed, and it covered the whole eye.

Ben Franklin invented bifocals by cutting his two sets of glasses in half and gluing the mismatched pieces together.

The energy saved from recycling a glass bottle could power a lightbulb for four hours. Otherwise, a glass bottle can take as long as 4,000 years to decompose.

The New York Botanical Garden has the world's largest Victorian greenhouse.

Window glass slows the speed of light by about 66,000 miles per second.

The oldest surviving stained-glass windows are in Germany's Augsburg Cathedral, built in the 12th century.

Going Postal

The first permanent airmail routes began on May 15, 1918, when U.S. Army pilots started shuttling mail between New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

Sending packages through the mail—known as Parcel Post—was new in 1913, and it was fast and cheap. People sent produce, eggs, tobacco, and even live animals. Then, in 1914, the parents of five-year-old May Pierstorff mailed her 75 miles across Idaho to her grandparents' house. (Her postage totaled 53¢.) Other parents started doing the same thing, so in 1920 the postal service forbade mailing kids.

In 1916 Will Coltharp of Vernal, Utah, sent an entire bank building's worth of bricks (80,000) through the mail in 50-pound increments (the heaviest package the postal service would accept). At the time, freight charges for the bricks cost four times
more
than Parcel Post.

William Faulkner once worked as the postmaster of Oxford, Mississippi.

Q. What is the busiest mailing day in the United States? A. December 14—mail volume nearly doubles.

The only U.S. town where mail arrives by mule: Supai, Arizona, on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

Theodore Hook of London sent the first postcard in 1840. It was a picture he drew himself…and sent to himself.

The U.S. Postal Service processes about 39.7 million address changes a year.

When the postal service came up with ZIP codes in 1963, people thought it had to do with zipping mail along. Actually, though, ZIP is an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan, which divided up regions to help mail be sorted efficiently.

Kid Lit

About 10 percent of all books published each year are aimed at children.

In 1999
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
became the first children's book to top the
New York Times
best-seller list in more than 40 years.

Advice from the first etiquette book written for children,
On Civility in Children
by Desiderius Erasmus, 1530: “Do not move back and forth on your chair. Whoever does that gives the impression of constantly breaking or trying to break wind.”

Not all the Winnie-the-Pooh characters were based on Christopher Robin Milne's stuffed animals. Owl and Rabbit were based on live animals often seen in the woods behind the Milne family home.

The word “nerd” first appeared in
If I Ran the Zoo
by Dr. Seuss.

Hugh Lofting's
Story of Doctor Doolittle
inspired a very young Stephen King to become a writer.

Dr. Seuss got this rejection note about his book,
To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street
: “It's too different from other juvenile [books] on the market to warrant selling.”

In 2001, 84 percent of American children were read to frequently by a family member.

The Eiffel Tower

The tower was controversial from the start. Three hundred artists and architects publicly objected to its design and the fact that it looked “like a gigantic black smokestack.”

The Eiffel Tower was originally designed as a temporary entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair.

Postcard historians credit the Eiffel Tower (and the tourists amazed by it at the fair) with making picture postcards popular in France.

After the Germans captured Paris during World War II, French rebels sabotaged the Eiffel Tower's elevators before a visit by Adolf Hitler, forcing him to climb the stairs. The elevators remained “broken” for the rest of the war.

For 41 years, the Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world. It was surpassed by New York City's Chrysler Building in 1930…and by lots of other buildings since.

In 1925 a con man named Victor Lustig created an apparently convincing story and “sold” the Eiffel Tower to two different scrap metal dealers. Needless to say, when the men arrived with heavy machinery to dismantle their prize, they discovered that they'd been had.

Author Guy de Maupassant hated the tower so much that he ate lunch in its restaurant every day because, he said, it was the one place in Paris where he didn't have to look at the structure.

General and detailed drawings for the tower's 18,038 parts required a third of an acre of drafting paper.

More than 7 million people a year pay about $11 to go up the tower.

Just Plane Tragic

THE RED BARON

When:
1918

Where:
Vaux-sur-Somme, France

The bane of Allied aircraft, Manfred “the Red Baron” von Richthofen was a flying ace credited with at least 80 air-combat victories during World War I. But he who lives by the warplane will likely die by the warplane. Richthofen's luck ran out with a single bullet fired from the ground. It pierced his heart and lungs, but he was still able to land his plane. According to the Australian soldiers who arrived on the scene, his last word before he died was “Kaputt!”

WILL ROGERS

When:
1935

Where:
Near Point Barrow, Alaska

“I ain't got anything funny to say. All I know is what I read in the papers,” was how humorist Will Rogers usually began his comedy routines. In the early 1900s, Rogers was the Jon Stewart of his day, making people laugh with off-the-cuff topical humor about the news, world leaders, politicians, gangsters, and masters of industry. He appeared in 71 movies, wrote more than 4,000 newspaper columns, and was a beloved performer on stage and radio. He even wrote his own epitaph—“I never met a man I didn't like”—and on August 15, 1935, got the chance to use it. While flying through Alaska on a plane piloted by Wiley Post (the first aviator to fly around the world solo), an engine failed. The plane plowed into a shallow lagoon. Both men died.

AMELIA EARHART

When:
1937

Where:
Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean

Amelia Earhart was a rebel from the start. Growing up in the early 1900s, she climbed trees, hunted rats, and made a point to defy the gender restrictions of her time. She flew her first plane in 1921, and when she was recruited in 1928 to join a team flying across the Atlantic Ocean, making her the first woman to complete that flight, she jumped at the chance.

Nine years later, she took on another challenge: being the first woman to fly around the world. It was a huge undertaking, 29,000 miles in all, but she set off from Miami on June 1, 1937. Twenty-eight days later, she and her navigator Fred Noonan landed in New Guinea with just 7,000 miles left to go. They never made it to their next stop: Howland Island, a tiny bit of land in the giant Pacific Ocean. Amid bad weather and low fuel, Earhart's plane disappeared over the ocean. A rescue effort launched by the U.S. Coast Guard was the largest in history, but after more than two weeks of scouring the open ocean, the government called off the search, declaring that Earhart, Noonan, and their plane had been lost.

Amelia Earhart's disappearance became one of the biggest mysteries in history, and professional and amateur archaeologists spent the next 70 years searching for her plane. Finally, in May 2013, an aircraft preservation group announced that it had sonar images of the ocean floor showing what it believed to be the remains of Earhart's plane. The location: About 1,800 miles south of Hawaii, near Nikumaroro, a small island in the western Pacific that's nearly 350 miles from Howland Island.

YURI GAGARIN

When:
1968

Where:
Near Kirzhach, Russia

In 1961, Soviet fighter pilot Yuri Gagarin was selected for a trip to outer space, mainly because at 5'1", he could fit into the cramped cockpit of the tiny
Vostolk 1
spacecraft. (Also, he was already an accomplished flyer and military man.) On April 12, he made the trip, becoming the first human to orbit Earth. That successful flight made him famous, and as a Soviet space hero, his country banned him from participating in future space flights because they feared a plunge in public morale if he died. So Gagarin went back to the Soviet air force. That proved to be a fatal mistake. In 1968, during refresher training in a MiG, he and his flight instructor entered a spin and crashed. Both men died.

THE OLD CHRISTIANS RUGBY TEAM

When:
1972

Where:
The border of Chile and Argentina

In October 1972, the plane carrying the Old Christians rugby team from Uruguay crashed in the Andes Mountains en route to a match
in Chile. Twenty-five of the 45 people on board survived the crash…and then were stranded in the freezing mountain wilderness for 10 weeks before help arrived. Another eight people died from starvation and cold.

While on the mountain, after exploring all other alternatives and nearing starving, the survivors reluctantly succumbed to cannibalism, eating the frozen bodies of the people who had died. Their story was immortalized in the 1993 movie,
Alive
.

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DID YOU KNOW?

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The Hells Angels motorcycle club took its name from the crew of a World War II bomber squadron, the
Flying Fortress
Hell's Angels. (The crew got its name from 1930 movie.)

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Unlike most mammals, camels don't have a constant body temperature. Their bodies fluctuate from 94.1°F to 104°F, depending on the temperature outside. A camel doesn't even start perspiring until its body temperature reaches about 107°F.

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Since 1889, Cornell University has had a tradition of asking professors to donate their brains after death. Not many of the professors do it anymore, but in the late 19th century, the program's heyday, the school had 1,200 brains in its collection.

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About two of every three U.S. dollars have circulated outside of U.S. borders.

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The Moon's gravity affects everything from the tides to temperatures and storms all over the world. Without it, Earth's climate would be so volatile that the planet would be uninhabitable.

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Despite legends, nobody knocked the nose off of Egypt's Great Sphinx of Giza. Carved out of sandstone, the statue has eroded from water and wind-borne sand over the years. Its nose, being the thinnest part, disappeared first.

Birds Do It…Bees Do It

Beavers, some penguin species, and geese mate for life.

The only mammals that lay eggs are the platypus and the echidna.

Ant queens never leave the ground except to mate once. They fly in the air and mate with males. When they come back, they're grounded for good: queens even pull off their own wings.

Lobsters can mate only when females molt and shed their shells, which they do every two years, leaving them naked and defenseless. Males protect the females in their lairs for one week until the new shells come in.

Mating mosquitoes synchronize their wing beats.

Walruses mate in the water—males float patiently near ice floes, waiting for a female to dive in.

Female kangaroos don't get pregnant during droughts.

When the female hornbill is nesting, she and her mate seal her up in a hollow tree trunk with mud, chewed food, and their own droppings, leaving a small hole to feed her through. That's to protect her from snakes and monkeys. When the eggs hatch, she breaks out and reseals her chicks inside the tree trunk, allowing both parents to hunt food for their young.

Male porcupines get into fierce battles over females—the winner chooses his prospective mate by urinating on her.

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The guillotine got its name
from French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who promoted it as being a more humane way of beheading than the traditional axe method.