Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Things you always never wanted to know
Thomas Alva Edison made only one purely scientific discovery: the "Edison effect." It involves the flow of electricity across a vacuum. He patented the effect, but could think of no use for it and went on to other things. The Edison effect, however, turned out to be the basis of the whole electronics industry - radio, television and all.
"The cow must go" - a Henry Ford dictum in 1921. Always the iconoclast, the industrialist proposed that milk be made synthetically. His regard of dairy cows as inefficient and unsanitary animals may have stemmed from unpleasant experiences on his father's farm, where milking had been an exasperating and disagreeable labor.
The speed of sound - known as Mach 1, after the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach - is different at different heights. At sea level, for example, it is 760 miles per hour. Above 36,000 feet, Mach 1 is reached at about 660 miles per hour.
The first known design for a complete lighter-than-air craft was made in 1670, by Francesco de Lana-Terzi, a Jesuit priest. The craft, shaped like a rowboat, was intended to "float on the atmosphere," with the aid of four copper spheres from which all air had been pumped. It was an idea that didn't get off the ground.
Not until Queen Elizabeth had been dead five years was the scene in Shakespeare's "Richard II" in which the king is deposed included in a printed text. In the Tudor lexicon, there was no greater sin than to attempt to depose an anointed king. Three printings of the play in Elizabeth's reign did not carry the scene.
Thousands of people poured by excursion trains into Palmetto, Ga., in 1899, to witness a lynching. Slices of the victim's heart were sold as souvenirs.
The first successful corneal transplant was performed as early as 1835 by a British army surgeon in India. His pet antelope had only one eye, and it had a badly scarred cornea. He removed a cornea from a newly killed antelope and successfully transplanted it into his pet's eye.
With the fall of Rome in the fifth century, medical teaching ceased to exist in Europe. However, the Arabs collected, studied and translated many Greek manuscripts on science and medicine, preserving them for future generations and making useful comments and additions.
Shiny metals such as tin or copper turn into black powders when ground fine. Aluminum is the exception.
A single-celled animal, the paramecium, divides in two when it is about 22 hours old. If a single paramecium began to divide on Jan. 1, and if all its offspring survived, its descendants would fill the volume of one cubic mile by March 7, and their combined volume would be as large as the Earth's by April 12.