Fastfacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
President William Howard Taft weighed 350 pounds. He got stuck in a bathtub in the White House, and someone had to be called to pull him out. He then had a special tub made. It was so big that, when it was delivered, four White House workmen climbed into it and had their picture taken.
The number 37, which cannot be wholly divided by any number except itself and 1, will wholly divide numbers 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888 and 999.
Sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage" by Americans during World War I. And in their denunciation of all things German, some Americans actually kicked dachshunds.
In 1971, in English mental asylums, there was a ratio of 35 women to one man. In prisons in England, however, this ratio was reversed.
A study of the common cold, made by two epidemiologists at the University of Michigan, disclosed that the incidence of colds was greater among the better educated.
At the close of the 15th century, the University of Paris boasted 50 colleges and 20,000 students.
As a reward for snatching a boy from the path of an oncoming railroad locomotive, the teenage Thomas Edison was offered telegraphy lessons by the boy's grateful father. Edison quickly became one of the best and fastest telegraphers in the United States.
Benjamin Franklin invented the rocking chair.
The British put a statue of President George Washington up in London's Trafalgar Square; his armies overthrew British rule in the colonies.
The Inuit tribes in Alaska and northern Canada make and use wooden "eyeglasses" with only narrow slits for eyepieces to protect their eyes from glare reflected by ice and snow.