Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
St. Patrick (385-461 A.D.) was not Irish. He was British, probably Welsh, and never saw Ireland until Irish raiders kidnapped him. After his escape, he became a priest and a bishop and returned to Ireland as a missionary. His success made him the patron saint of Ireland.
Peter the Great had his wife's lover executed and his head put into a jar of alcohol. Peter's wife had to keep the head in her bedroom.
The hoof-and-mouth virus contains only about 70,000 atoms, less than 1/90,000 of the number of atoms in a single human cell.
The Egyptian mummy was a standard drug of European pharmacology until the 18th century. Despite criticism within the medical profession, doctors prescribed mummy powder as a cure for internal ailments. Portions of many embalmed Egyptian dead were swallowed before science and common sense rendered the practice obsolete.
In 1806, though England was at war with France, Napoleon awarded the English chemist Humphry Davy a prize established for the best work of the year in electricity. Davy accepted it, declaring that the governments might be at war, but the scientists were not.
New York City has 570 miles of shoreline.
In the 17th century, and principally during the period of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), about 609 million people died in Europe from smallpox.
After 20 years as a faithful unpaid servant of the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII), Walter Monckton was rewarded with a cigarette case on which his name was engraved, though it was misspelled.
The registrar of the U.S. Treasury L. E. Chittenden suffered years of physical pain after signing 12,500 bonds in two days in 1863 for immediate shipment to England. As it turned out, the bonds were not used.