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.