Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (38 page)

Loretta Lynn became country music’s first millionairess in 1965.

The first female rock singer to be recognized by one name: Annette Funicello. Fans knew her as Annette from
The Mickey Mouse Club
(1955–1959).

The most recent U.S. Air Guitar Championships were held at the Key Club in Los Angeles. The winner: Fatima “Rockness Monster” Hoang.

Willie Nelson’s first gig: playing guitar in a polka band.

Most-performed rock song in history: “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”

What did all the passengers of the
Mayflower
have in common? None of them had middle names.

Total combined population of the North American colonies in 1610: 350.

Before the American Revolution, there wasn’t a single bank in America.

The founding fathers called the American Revolution “The War With Britain.”

Twenty-five percent of U.S. territory originally belonged to Mexico.

The city of New Amsterdam changed hands three times between the Dutch and British until finally becoming New York.

Nathan Hale was only 21 when the British hanged him as a spy in 1776.

While America was fighting for its independence, King Kamehameha the Great was conquering and uniting the Hawaiian Islands.

Legend has it that on July 4, 1776, King George III of England noted in his diary: “Nothing of importance happened today.” News of America’s independence took a few weeks to reach him.

At Valley Forge, Washington’s army didn’t starve because there was no food. Local farmers preferred to sell it to the British because they had the cash to pay for it.

Human lips don’t sweat.

A human jaw can open 30 degrees. A snake jaw can open 130 degrees.

Hardest substance in your body: the enamel in your teeth.

The tongue is the only muscle attached at just one end.

Orthodontic braces were invented in 1728.

The most sensitive part of the tongue is in the back.

Your tongue has 9,000 taste buds.

The enamel on a human tooth is only 1/1,000 of an inch thick.

It takes around 200,000 frowns to create a permanent brow line.

Right-handed people tend to chew their food on the right side; lefties tend to chew on the left.

The two lines that connect the bottom of your nose to your lip are called the philtrum.

Children have more taste buds than adults do.

Seventy-three percent of Americans would rather go grocery shopping than floss.

The Tooth Fairy is paying around $2 per tooth these days.

Forty percent of Americans have never visited the dentist.

In the United States, 5 million teeth are knocked out annually.

Your mouth produces a quart of saliva every day.

Twenty-two percent of U.S. teenagers can’t name the country the United States declared its independence from.

The average U.S. teenage girl owns seven pairs of jeans.

The typical U.S. 18-year-old has spent 11,000 hours in school and 18,000 hours watching TV.

A 2005 survey found that the average American receives his or her first romantic kiss at age 14.

Thirty-eight percent of teenage girls in the United States say they “think about their weight constantly.”

American mothers spend an average of 93 minutes with their teens per day. Fathers: 78 minutes.

Ninety-five percent of parents can’t identify common chat room lingo that teens use to signify that their parents are watching. BTW, those phrases are POS (Parent Over Shoulder) and P911 (Parent Alert).

About 30 percent of teenage males consistently apply sun protection lotion when sunbathing, compared to 46 percent of female teens.

Teens who eat dinner with their families six or seven nights a week are about half as likely to abuse drugs and alcohol as those dining together twice or less.

Sixty-eight percent of teenage girls said if they could change one body part, it would be their stomach.

In virtually every language on earth, the word for
mother
begins with the letter
m
.

The five least frequently used letters in order:
k, j, x, z
,and
q
.

The five most frequently used letters of the alphabet, in order:
e, t, o, a
, and
n
.

The Phoenicians invented the world’s first phonetic alphabet in 2000 B.C.

Chances are that 13 percent of the letters in this book are the letter
e
.

There are 12 letters in the Hawaiian alphabet.

Quotation marks have only been around for 300 years. They’re the youngest punctuation marks in the English language.

So far, there’s no official name for the @.

The oldest letter in the alphabet is
o
. It’s more than 3,000 years old.

More words start with the letter
s
than any other letter.

The Cambodian language has 72 letters in its alphabet, the most of any language.

J
, the youngest letter in the English alphabet, was not added until the 1600s.

There are more than 40,000 characters in Chinese script.

Q
is the only letter of the alphabet that doesn’t occur in the name of any state.

What five-letter word is pronounced the same when the last four letters are removed? Queue.

Quartzy
is the highest-scoring Scrabble word.

Every second there are 100 to 125 flashes of lightning somewhere on earth.

A lightning bolt can be anywhere between 200 feet and 20 miles long, but the average length, cloud-to-ground, is 2 to 10 miles.

Estimated diameter of a lightning channel: 1/2–1 inch.

The chances of being hit by lightning in your lifetime are about 1 in 600,000. Still, anywhere from 500 to 1,000 people are struck by lightning every year in the United States.

The temperature of a lightning strike can reach 50,000°F—hotter than the sun’s surface.

Lightning bolts flicker. A flash is a series of strokes that follow the exact same path as the first one. The record number of strokes ever recorded in a single flash is 47.

When you see a lightning flash, count the seconds until you hear the bang of thunder. Divide by five—sound travels about one mile every five seconds—and this will give you an approximation of the storm’s distance from you, in miles.

About a quarter of all lightning strikes occur in open fields. Thirty percent happen in July; 22 percent in August.

You can get struck by lightning while you’re on the phone. It happens to about 2.5 percent of all lightning-strike victims. You’re safer using a cell phone.

Trees are lightning bolts’ favorite targets. Proof? Lightning is the largest cause of forest fires in the western United States.

Lightning speeds toward the earth at an average of 200,000 miles per hour.

BUBBLE GUM

The first bubble gum was invented by Frank Fleer in 1906, but it never made it to market. It was so sticky that the only way to remove it from skin was with vigorous scrubbing and turpentine. It took Fleer more than 20 years to fix the recipe. In 1928 the “new, improved” gum was introduced as Dubble Bubble gum. Fleer made it pink because pink happened to be the only food coloring on the shelf the day the first commercial batch of Dubble Bubble was made. When his gum became the largest selling penny candy on the market, other manufacturers copied it, including the color. Now pink is the standard color for bubble gum.

POPSICLES

Eleven-year-old Frank Epperson accidentally left a mixture of powdered soda mix and water on his back porch one winter night in 1905. The next morning he found the stuff frozen, with the stirring stick standing straight up in the jar. He pulled it out, and had the first Epperson icicle—or Epsicle. He later renamed it Popsicle, since he’d made it with soda pop. It was patented 18 years later, in 1923.

LIFESAVERS

In 1912 Cleveland candy maker Clarence Crane decided to make a mint to sell in the summer. Until then most mints were imported from Europe; Crane figured he could cut the price by making them in the United States. He had the candy manufactured by a pill-maker—who discovered that his machinery would only work if it punched a hole in the middle of each candy. Crane called the mints Lifesavers.

PEZ

Invented in 1927 by Eduard Haas, an Austrian antismoking fanatic who marketed peppermint-flavored PEZ as a cigarette substitute. The candy gets its name from the German word for peppermint,
Pfefferminze
. Haas brought the candy to the United States in 1952.
It bombed, so he reintroduced it as a children’s toy, complete with cartoon heads and fruity flavors. (One of the most secretive companies in the United States, PEZ won’t even disclose who currently owns the company.)

M&Ms

In 1930 Chicago candy maker Frank Mars told his son Forrest to get out of the country and not come back. Forrest went to England with a few thousand dollars and the recipe for his father’s Milky Ways. He set up shop and began selling his own versions of the candy bars. While in Spain, Forrest discovered Smarties, a candy-coated chocolate treat that was popular with the Brits. He bought the rights to market Smarties in America, where he went into partnership with a business associate named Bruce Murrie. The candies were called M&M’s, short for Mars and Murrie. In 1964, after much family bickering, the American and British Mars companies merged.

HERSHEY’S

Milton Hershey, the inventor of the Hershey Bar, was an unusual man. As a child he was brought up in a strict Mennonite family. Unlike most entrepreneurs, he never sought the usual material wealth that accompanies success. In 1909 he took a large sum of the money he had earned making candy bars and opened the Milton Hershey School for orphaned boys. Nine years later he donated the candy company to a trust for the school. Today the Milton Hershey School and School Trust still own 56 percent of the Hershey Company.

KRAFT CARAMELS

During the Depression Joseph Kraft started making caramels. He didn’t particularly like candy; he just needed another dairy product for cheese sales reps to carry on their routes. The product succeeded because grocers needed a summer substitute for chocolate, which melted in the heat.

THREE MUSKETEERS

Advertising in the 1950s and 1960s suggested that the Three Musketeers got its name because it was big enough for three people to share. The truth is, it was originally made of three separate nougat sections: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Eventually the strawberry and vanilla nougat sections were eliminated, leaving only the chocolate nougat.

The Pacific Ocean covers more of the earth’s surface than all the continents combined.

The level of the world’s oceans is 500 feet higher than it was 25,000 years ago.

The Atlantic Ocean is saltier than the Pacific Ocean.

For every gallon of seawater, you get more than a quarter of a pound of salt.

There are freshwater springs in the ocean.

At its deepest point, the Pacific Ocean is 36,198 feet deep (about 6.85 miles).

There are as many molecules in one teaspoon of water as there are teaspoons of water in the Atlantic.

Ice covers about 15 percent of the earth’s landmass.

Eleven percent of the earth—5.8 million square miles—is covered by glaciers.

Niagara Falls was created by a glacier.

Technically there’s only one ocean in the world, since they’re all connected.

Mount Irazú in Costa Rica is the only point in the Americas where you can see both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

There are more than 30,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean.

All the lakes in the world, fresh- and saltwater combined, equal only .01 percent of the earth’s water resources.

Fill your bathtub with water 20,000 times. That much water falls over Niagara Falls every second.

U.S. military spending, about $276 billion, is the highest in the world—five times higher than China at number 2.

The United States has never lost a war in which mules were used.

Only 16 percent of able-bodied males in the American colonies participated in the Revolutionary War.

Cost per day of fighting the Revolutionary War: $20,411. World War II: $409.4 million.

There were 840 soldiers in the regular army when the U.S. War Department was established in 1789.

The Confederate flag had 13 stars, but there were only 11 Confederate states. The extra stars represent Kentucky and Missouri, whose efforts to secede were unsuccessful.