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.