Fastfacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, December 5, 2003
Things you always never wanted to know
Isaac Newton's only recorded utterance while he was a member of Parliament was a request to open the window.
Somewhere out there in space, amid the junk, is the Hasselblad camera dropped during a space walk by the U.S. astronaut Michael Collins. It will orbit the Earth for an indefinite period.
The Winchester House, near San Jose, Calif., is perhaps the most bizarre house ever built. Mrs. Sara Winchester was convinced that if she stopped adding rooms to her house, she would die. So, everyday for 38 years construction went on. The house contains 2,000 doors and 10,000 windows, many of which open onto blank walls, and stairways that lead nowhere. The eight-story house has 48 fireplaces and miles of secret passages and hallways. When Mrs. Winchester died in 1922, at the age of 84, her mansion contained 160 rooms and covered over six acres of ground. It's also supposedly haunted.
Prior to takeoff, the "engine" was fueled with bananas, apples, hard rolls, and one pint of water. The engine was the pilot himself, 26-year-old Bryan Allen, whose long, powerful legs pedaled a 70-pound airplane, the Gossamer Albatross, the 23 miles across the English Channel from England to France in two hours and 49 minutes in June 1979. The plane, which flew little more than a few feet above the waves, had a 96-foot-long wing made of Mylar 0.0005 of an inch thick. Two tiny wheels weighing one ounce each were the landing gear.
The Scientific American magazine rejected the story by A.I. Root, a beekeeper in Medina, Ohio, on the first motor-powered air flight of the Wright brothers. Root had read a brief account in a Dayton, Ohio, paper, realized its significance, and wrote a full-fledged account. After the Scientific American rejection, Root submitted it to the magazine Gleanings in Bee Culture, which published the exclusive story.
The United States Refuse Act of 1899 is a long-ignored federal statute. It prohibits all industrial charges into bodies of water. Every industrial discharge since 1899 has been a crime.