Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Monday February 2, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
Cyrano de Bergerac really lived (from about 1620 to 1655) - big nose, dueling and all. He was a poet, dramatist and a science fiction writer. He was also the first person in history to 1650) the one method that could carry us into space - rockets.
The Ch'in Dynasty (221 to 207 B.C.) buried many of its scholars alive in its program to suppress learning and Confucianism.
A study of 72 factories in Russia in 1881 revealed that some workers were on 18-hour shifts and that they often lost most of their wages in fines levied by employers.
Florence Nightingale served only two years of her life nursing soldiers. She was so weakened by a fever contracted during her service in the Crimean War that she spent the last 50 years of her life as an invalid.
Electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain can revive long-lost memories.
Monkeys' heads have been successfully transplanted by Dr. Robert J. White of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Secretary of State John Hay, who was also a poet, called the Spanish-American War a "splendid little war." The U.S. lost 5,462 men, mostly from disease.
As long ago as 1820, a prefabricated house was shipped to Hawaii by pious Bostonians wanting to ease the life of missionaries living on the far-off Pacific island.
Up to 150 tons of meteorite fragments slam into Earth every year. As far as it is known, only seven people have been struck by meteorites.