FastFacts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Things you've always never wanted to know
Grandfather clocks with metal pendulums lose time in warm weather. The solid expands, making the pendulum bigger and thus slower-moving.
Stevie Wonder was 11 when he signed his contract with Motown.
Rita Moreno was the first performer to win an Oscar, Grammy, Emmy and Tony award.
Stone Street in New York was the first paved street in the U.S. It was paved so beer wagons could get to and from the breweries.
The youngest person to win a Nobel Prize was 25-year-old William Lawrence Bragg, who shared the award for physics with his father in 1915 for work done on the determination of crystal structures by X-ray diffraction.
In order to equal the amount of energy transmitted every day from the sun to the Earth, it would be necessary to burn 550 billion tons of coal, more than could be mined in a thousand years.
An adult sitting in a relaxed position inhales about 1 pint of air with every breath.
President Taft weighed 352 pounds.
Only 16 percent of the able-bodied males in the American colonies participated in the Revolutionary War.
It snows more in the Grand Canyon than it does in Minneapolis.
The average blue whale weighs as much as 30 elephants and is as long as three Greyhound buses.
Many houses in the rural districts of Nepal are constructed of cow dung mixed with mud, sand and clay.
In 1950, the U.S. had 70 percent of all the automobiles, buses and trucks in the entire world.
Many species of butterflies, like birds, fly south for the winter.
Louis XIV owned 413 beds.
Termites are members of the cockroach family.
The Nazis used the guillotine to execute prisoners during World War II. Their version of the punishment had the condemned person lying on his back with his eyes forced open so he had to watch the blade as it descended.