Fastfacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
The first freight shipped by air from Chicago was loaded under an armed guard. Handled by National Air Transport in 1927, the item was a "10-gallon" Stetson hat to be delivered to comedian Will Rogers.
The Nile River has frozen over at least twice, in 829 and 1010.
At the age of 12, Andrew Carnegie worked as a millhand for $1.20 per week. Half a century later, he sold his steel company for nearly $500 million.
The state of Maine has 3,500 miles of coastline.
In 1775, Benjamin Franklin pursued a small tornado for three-quarters of a mile on horseback, repeatedly lashing out his whip in an effort to dissipate the storm.
Residents in a small village in Scotland schedule their television-viewing according to the tides. At low tide, the nearby mud flats absorb the broadcast "waves."
Someone maliciously shouted "fire" at a copper miners' Christmas party in Calumet, Mich., in 1913. Panic ensued and 72 lives - mostly children's - were lost.
When Adolf Hitler was in power in Germany, policemen were not allowed to call their horses by the name "Adolf."
For several years, in the small town of Tweed, Ontario, there was a council consisting solely of women. This was the only known such case of female leadership in North America. In 1967, several men ran for office in Tweed solely on the basis of their gender, and one was elected.
The parachute was invented more than a century before the airplane. The first parachute was built by French balloonist Jean Pierre Francois Blanchard, but the first jump was made by a dog in a basket, which Blanchard had attached to the parachute and dropped from a balloon in 1785.