Vacheron Constantin was founded in Geneva, Switzerland in 1755 and is the oldest watch manufacturer in the world with an uninterrupted history.
Vevay, Indiana, is the seat of Switzerland County. The town claims to have housed the first commercial winery in the USA.
In Valais, Switzerland, women’s suffrage wasn’t granted at the Cantonal level until 1970.
According to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (www.fhs.ch/en/links.php) there are 197 brands of Swiss-manufactured watches. There’s one for every letter of the alphabet except for Q, including W - Waltham, X - Xantia, Y - Yves Saint Laurent, and Z - Zeno-Watch Basel; and, of course, there’s Rolex and Breitling.
Rough numbers here: Switzerland is 16,000 mi² in size, so that means there’s one Swiss watch manufacturer for every 80 mi² throughout the entire country. To compare, Denmark is roughly the same size but does not have any watch manufacturers (of high quality/value, at least; Jules Jurgensen, Skagen and Ole Mathiesen are made elsewhere. Cite)
Maybe this is urban legend, but I read that digital watch technology was invented by the Swiss who somehow bungled patenting it, with the result that the Japanese became dominant in the market.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes Earthlings as being so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a good idea.
The Education of Henry Adams is a long essay on how much society changed during Adams’s lifetime and how his 19th century education did a poor job of helping him to cope with the changes occurring in the 20th century.
The New York Central Railroad’s *Twentieth Century Limited *made the New York - Chicago run in only 16 hours, along the road’s “Water Level Route” through upstate New York. Despite the increased distance, the route was faster than the competing Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited, through Philadelphia and over the Allegheny Mountains.
Jimmy Stewart had no plans to attend the Oscar ceremony the year he was nominated for The Philadelphia Story. Just before the ceremony began, he received a call at home “advising” him to slip into a dinner jacket and attend the ceremony. He did, and he received the award for Best Actor. This was in the days before an accounting firm kept the Oscar voting results secret.
Jimmy Stewart’s birthplace and hometown is the town of Indiana, Pennsylvania. The town’s largest employer is its University, called Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
California University of Pennsylvania (its full, formal name) calls its athletic teams the Vulcans.
Vulcan was a hypothetical small planet orbiting between Mercury and the sun, an attempt to explain discrepancies in Mercury’s orbit. It was later found that the discrepancies were due to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and that the planet did not exist (at least, until Federation starships discovered a different one).
The Federation is a hip-hop group from Fairfield, California, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. The group consist of Doonie Baby (now Doon Koon), Stressmatic, and Goldie Gold, along with their producer Rick Rock. Rick Rock and Doonie Baby’s friendship and collaborative work dates back to the early ‘90s in Alabama, where they recorded as two-thirds of the group Cosmic Slop Shop along with Big Lurch. At age 16 and using a wheelchair after being shot, the Nevada-born, Fairfield/Vallejo-raised Federation member Goldie Gold met Rick Rock at a local mall, impressing Rock with his rapping skills. In 2002, Rick Rock recruited Doonie Baby, Goldie Gold, and Mr. Stress to form the group
Jello Biafra, the lead singer and songwriter for San Francisco-based punk band the Dead Kennedys, ran for the mayoralty of that city in 1979. As Wiki says, "His platform included unconventional points such as forcing businessmen to wear clown suits within city limits, erecting statues of Dan White (who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978) all over town and allowing the parks department to sell eggs and tomatoes with which people could pelt them, hiring out of job workers, due to a tax initiative, to become pan handlers in wealthy neighborhoods (one being where Diannne Feinstein lives), and a citywide ban on cars (although the latter point was not considered completely outlandish by many voters at the time, as the city was suffering from serious pollution)
When Mary Kennedy commited suicide by hanging, a tabloid speculated that she was probably murdered because “women do not usually hang themselves, and Kennedys are often murdered.”
Composer Richard Rodgers’ daughter Mary wrote the popular musical Once Upon a Mattress, as well as the book Freaky Friday, which has been made into two different movies (one starring Jodie Foster, the other starring Lindsay Lohan).
Julie Andrews auditioned for a part in Richard Rodgers’s musical Pipe Dream and was the clear leader for the role when she got an offer to play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. When she mentioned the offer, Rodgers urged her to take the other role. She paid him back by performing in the TV musical Cinderella while My Fair Lady was still on Broadway.
The musical My Fair Lady was based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Shaw won an Oscar for Best Screenplay when he adapted*** Pygmalion ***for Hollywood, which made him the first man ever to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize.
Contrary to popular belief, Nobel Prize winner Al Gore did not win an Oscar. Gore went on stage when An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar for Best Documentary, but the Oscar goes to the Director and Gore was not the Director.
The director was Davis Guggenheim, whose wife is actress Elisabeth Shue.