Fastfacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, February 13, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
Each square inch on human skin consists of 19 millions cells, 60 hairs, 90 oil glands, 19 feet of blood vessels, 625 sweat glands and 19,000 sensory cells.
Lewis Carroll, by his own account, wrote 98,721 letters in the last 37 years of his life.
As a boy in Scotland, Alexander Graham Bell made a talking doll that said, "Mama."
British ships in the English Channel fired a salute of 20 guns when word reached them that the country's adversary, President George Washington, had died in the states.
The Pilgrims did not build log cabins, nor did they wear black hats with hatbands, silver buckles and conical crowns.
By the end of World War II, there wasn't a German spy in Great Britain who was free from British control. All were either cooperating with the British while maintaining their German "alliance," or had been caught and "turned around."
Nearly 700,000 land mines were dug up from the banks of the Suez Canal by the Egyptians and the Israelis after their brief but bitter war in October 1973.
Adolf Hitler kept a framed photograph of Henry Ford on his desk, and Ford kept one of Hitler on his desk in Dearborn, Mich. Hitler had used some of Ford's anti-Semitic views in "Mein Kampf," and he always welcomed Ford's substantial contributions to the Nazi movement.
At the height of his power, the Roman gladiator Spartacus, who led a slave revolt in 73 B.C., had 90,000 men under his command and controlled almost all of southern Italy.
Sea level fell 400 feet during the first Ice Age. Much of the earth's water had been absorbed by ice caps.
A hibernating woodchuck breathes only 10 times per hour. An actively wood-chucking woodchuck breathes 2,100 times an hour.