Fastfacts
By Things you always never wanted to know
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Lord Tennyson, for several nights following the funeral of his father, slept in his father's bed. He hoped he would see his father's ghost, but "no ghost came."
The era of the Middle Ages has been referred to as "1,000 years without a bath." Bathing was rare in Europe at the time, largely because it was considered a sin to expose the body, even to oneself.
A little more than a century ago, an observer reported sighting a flock of passenger pigeons in a column 500 yards wide that took 3 hours to pass overhead - about 1 billion birds in all. Today, the passenger pigeon is extinct.
George Washington, in 1789, had to borrow 500 francs to pay off his debts and another 100 francs for the expenses of the trip to his inauguration in New York.
Michael Faraday, the self-educated son of a blacksmith, was hired by the great chemist Humphrey Davy as a bottle washer. With time, Faraday became a greater scientist than Davy, and the last years of Davy's life were embittered with jealousy.
City Ordinance No. 352 in Pacific Grove, Calif., makes it a misdemeanor to kill or threaten a butterfly.
Noah Webster, most famous for his dictionary, was also the first epidemiologist in the United States. Webster published a collection of papers on bilious fevers in 1796. In 1799, Webster published "A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases," a work spanning just two volumes.
John Milton wanted to reform politics with poetry. When he realized that this was impossible, he gave up his long-held dream of being a superlative poet and chose instead to devote himself to revolutionary manifestoes, in prose. After the Restoration, he returned to poetry and wrote "Paradise Lost."
Cataract operations were performed in India as early as 1000 B.C.
Tooth decay in Britain is so severe that it is expected that four out of 10 adults will soon have false teeth.