FastFacts

Things you've always never wanted to know

• The giant squid continues to grow as long as it lives. Some specimens reach a length of 50 feet from the tip of the tentacles to the end of the tail.

• The tallest bird of all time was the moa, a flightless inhabitant of New Zealand that became extinct 400 years ago. It grew to be 11 feet tall. Its drumstick was a yard long.

• To help raise funds for the starving poor of Berlin, Albert Einstein in 1930 sold his autograph for $3 per signature and signed photographs for $5 each.

• To get at every ounce of gold the earth might yield, miners have dug as deep as 2.5 miles.

• During the "blackout" of July 13 to 14, 1977, when electric power to New York failed during the early evening and was not restored until the next afternoon, a record 80 million telephone calls were made. On an average business day, 36 million calls are made in the city.

• A brick wall and a plate-glass window are made from the same principal ingredient: sand.

• The first man ever to set foot on the continent of Antarctica was an American sealer, John Davis. He arrived there on Feb. 7, 1821, but the fact was not known till 1955, when the log of his ship was discovered and studied.

• According to scholars, Shakespeare's last two plays, "Henry VIII" and "Two Noble Kinsmen," were written in collaboration with John Fletcher, another English dramatist of the period.

• The first person on record to denounce slavery as an evil was Euripides. He wrote in his play "Hecuba," "That thing of evil, by its nature evil,/Forcing submission from a man to what/No man should yield to."