Fascinating Facts

"Predictions"

Roger Bacon, a thirteenth-century Franciscan monk, predicted the following things in his Communia Mathematica:

High-speed sea travel. "It is possible to make machines of navigation," wrote the erudite monk, "which need no man to navigate them, so that very large seagoing ships may go along with one man to steer, and at a greater speed than if they wee full of men working them."

The automobile. "Cars could be made which move at inestimable speed without animals to draw them as if they were the chariots in which men fought of old."

The airplane. "Flying machines can be built so that a man sitting in the middle of the machine may turn an instrument by which wings artificially made will beat the air, like a bird flying."

The microscope and telescope. "Instruments can be designed so that enormous things will appear very small, and contrariwise..."

Gundpowder and bombs. "Sounds like thunder can be made in the air but more terrifying than those which occur in nature; for an appropriate material in moderate quantity, as big as a man's thumb, makes a horrible noise and shows a violent flash; and this can be done in many ways by which a whole town or army may be destroyed."

Royalty: Louis XIV of France owned 413 beds.

Art and Artists: The Venetian painter Tintoretto (1518-1594) once painted a picture of Paradise that was 72 feet long. It was made for the Doge's palace in Venice.

Weights & Measures: There are two kinds of tons, a regular ton (2,000 pounds) and a long ton (2,240 pounds). There are also two kinds of pounds, an apothecary pound (12 ounces) and a troy pound (16 ounces).

Names: The first letter of every continent's name is the same as the last: AmericA, AntarticA, EuropE, AsiA, AustraliA, AfricA.

Biology: Scientists at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, U.S.A. have bred mice that have more than one set of parents. Known as "multimice," these creatures are spawned by taking two embryos created by two sets of parent mice, placing them together in such a way that embryos grow together, then transplanting the entire organism into the womb of a third female mouse. The result is a baby mouse born with genetic characterstics of both sets of parents.

The Universe: Five times as many meteors can be seen after midnight as can be seen before.

Language: The word "live" spelled backward is "evil."

Miscellaneous: The average lead pencil will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words. More than 2 billion pencils are manufactured each year in the United States. If these were laid end to end they would circle the world nine times.

Architecture and Construction: The only manmade structure visible from space is the Great Wall of China.

Natural Phenomena: The Niagara Falls have eroded their way 10 miles upstream since they were first formed some 10,000 years ago. The tremendous amount of water tends to eat through its limestone base relatively rapidly, and if erosion continues at its present rate, geologists estimate that the falls will disappear completely in 22,000 years.

Sports: Before 1859 baseball umpires sat in a padded rocking chair behind the catcher.

Flowers, Plants, and Trees: It is estimated that millions of trees in the world are accidentally planted by squirrels who bury nuts and then forget where they hid them.

Music & Musicians: Wooden clarinets are always made of wood from the granadilla tree.

Animals: Almost half the pigs in the world are kept by farmers in China.

Executions: In the Middle Ages animals were tried and publicly executed. Birds, wolves, insects, all were tried by ecclesiastical courts as witches and heretics, and suffered excommunication, torture, and death. The last such trial took place in 1740, when a French judge found a cow guilty of sorcery and ordered it hanged by the neck until dead. In 1386 at Falaise a judge ordered a pig to have its legs mutilated and then be hanged for killing a little girl. The pig was dressed up in the child's jacket and dragged to the town square with all the ceremony due a first-rate criminal. The execution, it is recorded, cost 6 sous plus a pair of gloves for the executioner so that he might carry out the killing with clean hands.

Weather: No one has ever discovered two snowflakes with exactly the same crystal pattern.

Physics & Chemistry: An ice cube in a glass of water will not raise the water level when it melts. The amount of space it displaces as a cube is equal to the amount it takes up when liquefied.

Presidents: Grover Cleveland is the only United States president to have been married in the White House.

Automobile: The Buick, the first automobile manufactured by General Motors Corporation in the United States, was actually built by a man named David Buick. Buick, a plumber by trade, also invented a process whereby porcelain could be annealed onto iron, hence making possible the production of the white porcelain bathtub.

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