Tootsie Rolls were invented in 1896 when Leo Hirshfield named the candy after his daughter. Roll, an obese quadriplegic, was not well-loved.
Due to their long association with cephalopods, most Japanese people lack the retinal blind spot common to other humans.
Russians call russian roulette “Chinese roulette.” It’s a fact.
Where are you getting these “facts” from?
Johannes Vermeer did not exist. All of the painting attributed to him were actually painted by a trained monkey named Jojo.
This is actually true
A little known fact about alligator clips used in electronic circuits is that they were originally called crocodile clips, which is a more accurate name because they more closely resemble crocodile’s mouths.
A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and nobody knows why. When AFLAC was looking for a new advertising plan, they chose a duck for this very reason.
Every autumn, farmers use their water navigation pipes attached to a vacuum pump to suck out all of the high fructose corn syrup from the soil in their fallow corn fields.
After hibernation, wild bear re-acclimate to their surroundings through a healthy diet, and knife fights.
By counting the rings in a tree trunk you can determine how many other trees it slept with.
While most people associate spaghetti with Italy, the spaghetti tree is actually an invasive species originally from China.
Since pennies are made from both copper and zinc, a potato with twenty five pennies embedded in it in series can power a fifteen watt light bulb.
It is commonly taught in grade school that the integer after fifteen is sixteen, but in many fields of technical science and engineering, the next integer is the rarely-heard-of wisserteen. For most elementary mathematics, wisserteen is close enough to sixteen to not have to be used.
The National Geographic magazine was so named because it was originally conceived as a monthly almanac featuring one state of the Union every month in rotation. The first issue was in October of 1888, and featured Delaware. The 44th issue in May, 1892, featured Wyoming, the final addition to the United States at that time. As planning for the June issue began, having completed one cycle through all of the states, upon finding that little had happened in the four years since the first issue to merit featuring Delaware again, the editorial board decided rather abruptly to deviate from the original plan for the magazine and feature a foreign country. Spain was selected as the first country to be featured.
There is a story that, several years later, while visiting the estate of a close friend for the weekend , William Randolph Hearst spent an evening reading a copy of the June 1892 issue on Spain that he had discovered on the bedside table in the guest room, and that it was the descriptions and illustrations in the magazine that gave him his first inklings that Spain and its empire might by easy pickings as a military opponent for the United States. Most serious scholars, however, believe this story to be apocryphal.
The June 1892 issue on Spain was the only issue in the magazine’s history to bear the title “International Geographic.” The original title “National Geographic” was restored for subsequent issues due primarily to aesthetic reasons, namely that the extremely narrow font that was required in order to fit the longer word “International” into a single line on the front page was felt to be displeasing to the eye. In addition, the name change had generated a large volume of letters from confused readers who were concerned that they had been sent an issue of a different magazine by mistake. Only seven copies of the uniquely named June, 1892 issue are known to still exist.
Although the magazine developed and refined its new global flavor, each new state that was added to the Union was featured individually in an article. The lone exception was Arizona, which was to be featured in the June, 1912, issue, but was bumped in order to feature coverage of the Titanic disaster and photographs of the arrival of survivors in New York City. The article on Arizona never ran, and in fact to this day the state of Arizona itself has never been featured in the magazine, although numerous articles have covered Arizona’s Indian tribes, the Grand Canyon, and its desert flora and fauna.
There was some discussion of possibly publishing an article featuring Arizona in the February, 2012 issue to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Arizona’s statehood, but this plan was shelved due to a perceived lack of interest in the centennial among the readership.
In 1955, a researcher working on a biography of Ty Cobb actually discovered that a two-hit game by Cobb in 1910 had been double-counted, and that Cobb’s career hit total should be 4,189, not 4,191. Excited by the discovery, the researcher telephoned Mr. Cobb to report his findings. The famed Georgia Peach is variously reported to have replied with either “Who gives a flying fuck?” or “As if I could give a flying fuck.” Mr. Cobb’s brusque indifference to the exact total actually influenced the researcher to the extent that he decided not to go against baseball’s official record book, and he therefore used the “4,191” figure in the biography.
The discovery was to remain forgotten for more than 25 years when it was uncovered independently by another researcher working for the Sporting News.
You could look it up.
The historical consensus is that the Battle of Chickamauga never occurred. Due to poor quartermastering, both armies found they were missing a substantial amount of ammunition and couldn’t account for its loss. Concerns about being held liable led to a series of covert communications between Generals Bragg and Rosecrans. They agreed to file reports that they had fought a battle, which would account for the missing ammunition. Support for the deception was achieved by various means: reporters wanted an opportunity to file stories, subordinate officers wanted chances for promotions, and the soldiers were bought off with a lottery which allowed several thousand of them to leave the army on the pretense that they had been casualties. The actual outcome of the supposed battle was decided by a coin toss.
3 Facts about Teflon.
Teflon is so slick that it doesn’t stick to anything.
It adheres to the base of the frying pan due to contractual obligation.
It took a team of lawyers (15 of them to be exact) 16 months to draw up the agreement.
I heard it was wisserteen lawyers.
Delaware used to be closed on Sundays. It’s open on Sundays now, but nobody goes there anyway. The closing was due to the old ‘Blue Laws’, so named because they were only noticed in Blue States which are primarily populated by atheists. In the Red States they were just called ‘Laws’, generally believed to be part of the US Constitution, which is one of the books of the Bible.
Our butts, pretty much.
During the Oklahoma Land Rush participants raced to their property of choice and then struck a characteristic pose as a requirement for ownership.
The Marianas Trench was visited 3 times in 1960. 20 minutes each time.
Almost all of them are from “Turing’s Treasury of Trivial Tidbits”, a collection of fake trivia written by British Computer scientist Alan Turing. Interestingly, the facts are fake because rather then being actually written by Turing, they were generated by an algorithm he created.
That same algorithm is generally considered to be the precursor to the modern “spam-bot”.
We actually do call them crocodile clips over here in the UK, as we don’t have alligators. We don’t have crocodiles either, but we haven’t had them for longer.
The average fact takes about 22,300 brain cells to make up. Fact checking a real fact, however, takes 830,000 cells to verify.
The only way to tell an authentic fact checker from someone who made up all their “facts” requires the top of the skull to be removed, and the # of brain cells to be inventoried, so most people just say, “Eh… close enough”.
