Steve Jobs asked historian Walter Isaacson to be his biographer after reading Isaacson’s critically-acclaimed biography of Benjamin Franklin - another famous innovator of his era.
The first two initials of tire company founder B.F. Goodrich’s name stand for Benjamin Franklin.
Dr. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich’s company originated in New York state, in Hastings-on-Hudson, in 1869 when he bought the Hudson River Rubber Company. Goodrich moved the company to Akron, OH, when that city paid him $13,600 in 1870 to relocate there.
In Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, young Japanese girl Cio-Cio San falls in love with, and marries, US Navy Lt. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, despite the cautions given to Pinkerton by the US Consul at Nagasaki, Sharpless.
During tourist season, the water flowing over Niagara Falls flows at a rate of 100,000 ft.³ per second. During non-tourist season it is only 50,000 ft.³ per second.
Off-game: Hey, how does the water know that it’s tourist season? 
On-game: The Niagara Falls Curling Club was established in 1891.
In 1998, the Sandra Schmirler rink from Saskatchewan won the Curling Gold Medal at the Nagano Olympics, the first time curling was an Olympic sport.
To qualify for the Olympics in the Canadian finals, Schmirler made one of the most impressive, difficult shots of her career. Her opponent, Kleibrink of Alberta, was sitting shot rock on the button, buried by two rocks, potentially 7 for Kleibrink, 6 for Schmirler.
Schmirler had the hammer coming home. She scored an in-off, taking out Kleibrink’s shot rock for three. Final score: Schmirler 9, Kleibrink 6, and on to Nagano!
Schmirler died 2 years later of cancer, at the age of 36. The Province of Saskatchewan stopped to watch her funeral on tv.
The “Regina Cyclone” of June 1912 remains the deadliest tornado in Canada’s history when 28 of the roughly 30,000 citizens of the Saskatchewan capital city died.
ETA:
Amazing shot, by the way!
nm
[off-game: here’s the video: 1997 Canadian Olympic Curling Trials]
Before it was named “Regina” in tribute to the then-reigning Queen Victoria (Victoria Regina, in Latin), the site of the Saskatchewan capital was known as “Pile-of-Bones”. The bones thus honored were of bison.
I didn’t know they let entire rinks compete.
Emily Blunt (The Young Victoria), Imelda Staunton (The Pirates! Band of Misfits) and Judi Dench (Mrs. Brown) have all played Queen Victoria.
At the time of its release, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was the most expensive single ever produced.
Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame was born in the Moravian town of Svitavy (now in Eastern Bohemia), in 1908.
The Chicago Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908.
Western bandits Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid were supposedly killed in Bolivia on November 6, 1908; however, there are many rumors to the contrary and their grave sites are unmarked.
Boloivia is one of only two land-locked countries in South America. The other is Paraguay.
Chile captured Bolivia’s nitrate-rich seacoast region, and some of Peru’s, in the 19th-century War of the Pacific (also called the Saltpeter War or the Guano War), in which battles occurred on the sea as well as in the Atacama Desert and the foothills of the Andes Mountains.
Although the word “guano” translates from Quechua as “the droppings of sea birds”, the term is also applied to the feces of bats and seals.
Colonel “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn) arrests Mandrake (Peter Sellers) in Dr. Strangelove, and reluctantly shoots open a Coca-Cola pop machine to get change for the overexcited British officer.