Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (14 page)

The first year in which the U.S. national debt exceeded $1 billion was 1863.

There are about 1 billion red blood cells in two to three drops of blood.

Elvis was nearsighted; he owned $60,000 worth of prescription sunglasses when he died.

On an average day, four people call Graceland and ask to speak to Elvis.

According to
Billboard
magazine, the number one single of the 1950s was “Don’t Be Cruel,” by Elvis Presley.

Boris Yeltsin’s favorite Elvis song: “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

Elvis Presley got a C in his eighth-grade music class.

The lightest Elvis ever weighed as an adult was 170 pounds in 1960, following his discharge from the U.S. Army. The heaviest was at the time of his death: 260 pounds.

Elvis’s favorite amusement park ride was the bumper cars.

Elvis had a pet monkey named Scatter.

The U.S. Post Office sold a record 123 million Elvis Presley commemorative stamps when they were first issued in 1993.

The Elvis Presley hit “Hound Dog” was written in about 10 minutes.

One of Elvis’s favorite meals was a pound of bacon—and nothing else.

Elvis auditioned for a spot on the 1950s TV show
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts
but didn’t make the cut. Neither did Buddy Holly when he tried it.

Elvis is the top-earning dead celebrity in the world. His estate took in $45 million in 2004.

Graceland is the second-most-visited house in America. The first is the White House.

Seven percent of Americans believe Elvis is still alive.

The blood vessels of a blue whale are so wide that an adult trout could swim through them.

A whale’s heart beats about once every six and a half seconds.

Bottle-nosed whales can dive 3,000 feet in two minutes.

Whales can get lice.

A blue whale’s heart is as big as a compact car.

Whales are the fastest-growing animals in the world.

A humpback whale can eat 5,000 fish in a single sitting.

The right whale’s eyeball is about as big as an orange.

The sperm whale’s brain weighs 20 pounds, the largest in the animal kingdom.

At its peak, a growing blue whale gains between 200 and 300 pounds a day.

Dolphins can hear underwater sounds from as far as 15 miles away.

Dolphins sleep with one eye open.

Baby seals are called “weaners.”

Seals can dive as deep as 1,000 feet.

The northern fur seal averages 40 to 60 mates per season.

Male seals don’t eat during mating season.

If a walrus eats enough food, it can grow wider than its own length.

How can you tell when a porpoise is searching for a mate? It swims upside down.

The football huddle was invented at a university for the deaf . . . to keep the opposing team from seeing their hand signs.

It takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year’s supply of footballs.

John Heisman (of trophy fame) coined the word
hike
and split football games into four quarters.

Top ticket price to the first Super Bowl, in 1967: $12. Top price in 2005: $500.

Most successful high school football team in history: De La Salle Spartans of Concord, California. After more than 10 years and 151 wins, they lost to Washington’s Bellevue Wolverines in September 2004.

NFL great Vince Lombardi coined the phrase “game plan.”

Football has more rules than any other American sport.

In 1888 Yale football coach Walter Camp fell ill. His wife coached for the entire season.

Deion Sanders is the only man to play in the World Series and the Super Bowl.

There is a 100 percent injury rate among professional football players.

In the NFL, the host team must have 26 footballs inflated and ready.

The L.A. Rams were the first football team to have emblems on their helmets.

Nine of the 15 highest-rated television shows in history have been NFL championship games.

So few Heisman Trophy winners have made it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame—only 10 (including O. J. Simpson)—that the prize has been called “the kiss of death” for college players.

Norway consumes more Mexican food than any other European nation.

France gets 75 percent of its energy from nuclear power plants.

Belgium is about the same size as New Jersey.

Country with the lowest divorce rate on earth: Vatican City. Lowest birthrate in the world: Vatican City.

In 1952 as many as 12,000 people may have died from the four-day Great Coal-burning smog in London.

The city of Edinburgh, Scotland, is built on top of an extinct volcano.

Downtown London has sunk almost an inch since 1995. In Greenland there’s a place called Thank God Harbor.

During the summer months in Reykjavik, Iceland, the sun is visible 24 hours a day.

The Battle of Waterloo wasn’t fought in Waterloo. It was fought in Pancenoit, four miles away.

In Finland, saunas outnumber cars.

The Netherlands is the country with the tallest overall average adult height at 72.6 inches, followed by Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Germany. The average adult height in the United States is 70.8 inches.

The top five non-English languages spoken at home by kids are, in rank order, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Chinese.

There are more than 5,000 islands in the British Isles.

When Italy was founded in 1861, only 3 percent of Italians spoke Italian fluently.

Greenland, which is mostly snow and ice, was named by Erik the Red; he wanted to encourage immigration.

REFRIGERATOR MAGNETS

Mass-produced magnets designed for refrigerators didn’t appear until 1964. They were invented by John Arnasto (son of the guy who invented Eskimo Pies) and his wife, Arlene, who sold a line of decorative wall hooks. Arlene thought it would be cute to have a hook for refrigerator doors, so John made one with a magnet backing. The first one had a small bell and was shaped like a tea kettle; it sold well, so the Arnastos added dozens of other versions to their line. Believe it or not, some of the rare originals are now worth more than $100.

GOLD RECORDS

In 1941 RCA Victor released Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” after he performed it in the movie
Sun Valley Serenade
. It was a huge hit: 1.2 million records were sold in less than three months. So RCA came up with a great publicity gimmick to promote it: They sprayed one of the “master records” with gold paint, and on February 10, 1942, presented it to Miller during a radio broadcast in honor of his selling a million copies. Eventually the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) copied the idea and started honoring million-selling records with an official Gold Record Award.

KITTY LITTER

In January 1948, in Cassopolis, Michigan, a woman named Kay Draper ran into trouble: The sandpile she used to fill her cat’s litter box was frozen solid. She tried ashes, but wound up with paw prints all over the house. Sawdust didn’t work, either. As it happened, her neighbors, the Lowes, sold a product called fuller’s earth, a kiln-dried clay that was used to soak up oil and grease spills in factories. Ed Lowe, their 27-year-old son, had been looking for a new market for the stuff—he’d tried unsuccessfully to sell it to local farmers as nesting material for chickens. On the spur of the moment, he convinced Draper that this stuff would make great cat litter. He really had no
idea if it would . . . but it did! He sensed the sales potential, put some fuller’s earth in paper bags and labeled it Kitty Litter with a grease pen. Then he drove around, trying to sell it. (Actually, he gave it away at first to get people to try it.) Once people tried it, they invariably came back for more.

SLOT MACHINES

Other types of gambling machines date back as far as the 1890s, but the first one to really catch on was a vending machine for chewing gum introduced by the Mills Novelty Company in 1910. Their machine dispensed three flavors of gum—cherry, orange, and plum—depending on which fruits appeared on three randomly spinning wheels. If three bars reading “1910 Fruit Gum” appeared in a row, the machine gave extra gum; if a lemon appeared, it gave no gum at all (which is why
lemon
came to mean something unsatisfactory or defective.) You can’t get gum in a slot machine anymore—the 1910 Fruit Gum machine was so popular that the company converted them to cash payouts—but the same fruit symbols are still used in slot machines today.

PLASTIC WRAP

Invented by accident in 1933, when Ralph Wiley, a researcher at Dow Chemical, was washing his lab equipment at the end of the day and found that a thin plastic film coating the inside of one vial wasn’t coming off. The stuff was polyvinylidene chloride, and after further experimentation, Wiley found that the stuff was clingy, resisted chemicals, and was impervious to air and water. It was so tough, in fact, that he wanted to call it eonite, after an imaginary indestructible substance in the
Little Orphan Annie
comic strip. Dow decided to call it Saran Wrap instead.

WATER BEDS

The direct ancestor of the modern water bed was invented in 1853 by Dr. William Hooper of Portsmouth, England, who saw the beds as a medical device that could be used to treat bedridden patients suffering from bedsores, as well as burn victims, and arthritis and rheumatism sufferers. His water bed wasn’t much more than a rubber hot water bottle big enough to sleep on. It wasn’t until 1967 that San Francisco design student Charles Hall made an improved model out of vinyl and added an electric heater to keep the bed warm all the time.

Thirty thousand Hawaiians signed a petition to change Maui’s name to Gilligan’s Island.

There was so little dialogue in the original
Mission Impossible
TV show that Peter Graves, the star, once fell asleep in the middle of a scene and no one noticed.

In a 1990 preschool poll, Mister Rogers was first choice for president of the United States.

Johnny Carson once sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Ed McMahon sold kitchen utensils.

Desi Arnaz’s mother was one of the heirs to the Bacardi Rum fortune.

Ted Danson once appeared in a TV commercial as a package of lemon chiffon pie mix.

Ads for Super Bowl 2006 hit a record high of $2.4 million for 30 seconds.

According to
Sesame Street
, Kermit the Frog is left-handed.

Cheers
has the most Emmy nominations—117—for a TV program.

Britain is the biggest market for illegally downloaded TV shows in the world, followed by Australia.

Oscar the Grouch has a pet—a worm named Slimey.

First TV show to win an Emmy for Outstanding Drama:
Pulitzer Prize Playhouse
, in 1950.

Only about a third of
Gilligan’s Island
episodes are about getting off the island.

In a typical year, 14,030 answers are questioned on
Jeopardy!

Five different dolphins “acted” in TV’s
Flipper
, but only one horse played Mr. Ed.

Johnny Carson once hosted a game show called
Earn Your Vacation
.

TV actor George Reeves needed three men to help him out of his Superman suit.

THE FIRST MOVIE THEATER

Date:
June 26, 1896

Background:
The first permanent movie theater was the 400-seat Vitascope Hall in New Orleans. Admission was 10¢. Patrons were allowed to look in the projection room and see the Edison Vitascope projector for another 10¢. Most of the films shown there were short scenic items, including the first English film to be released in America, Robert Paul’s
Waves off Dover
. A major attraction was the film
The Kiss
, which introduced sex to the American screen.

THE FIRST WOMAN DRIVER

Date:
1891

Background:
The first woman to drive a car was Madame Levassor, wife of one of the partners in the Paris motor manufacturing concern Panhard et Levassor, but better known by her former name of Madame Sarazin. After the death of her first husband, Madame Sarazin had acquired the French and Belgian rights of manufacture for the Daimler gas-powered engine. The following year she married Emile Levassor, and the patent rights passed to her new husband’s firm. They began manufacturing cars under their own name in 1891, the year Madame Levassor learned to drive. The earliest evidence of her becoming a chauffeuse is a photograph showing her at the tiller of a Panhard car, dated 1892.