SOME interesting facts to start your week:
Cloud-to-cloud lightning can stretch over 75 miles long.
The busiest organization in the world is the Pentagon, which has 34,500 phone lines and receives more than one million calls a day.
California is home to the oldest known tree, Methuselah, which is estimated to be almost 4,800 years old.
The Spam Museum is in Austin, Minnesota.
The first two electric companies in the world, run by Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, competed to build electric chairs used for executions in the United States.
President Jimmy Carter was the fastest speed-reader, at over two thousand words per minute, while President John Kennedy used to be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest talker, at nearly 350 words per minute.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the co-authors of the Declaration of Independence, both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of that document.
Deodorant first became available in 1888.
The first credit card in the world was Diners Club, introduced in 1950.
The average life span of a dollar bill, from printing to removal from circulation, is less than two years.
The island that is furthest from any other land is Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic.
People blink their eyes an average of 3.7 million times per year.
Every second, fifteen million blood cells are produced and destroyed in the human body.
There are 887 stone statues on Easter Island, most of which did not make it to their final display location.
If you multiply 111,111,111 by 111,111,111 you get 12,345,678,987,654,321.
James Smithson, the founder of the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., the world’s largest museum, never set foot in the United States.
The Bible contains 32 references to dogs, and none to cats.
The word “nerd” was first used by Dr. Seuss in the 1950 book “If I Ran the Zoo.”
In the state of New York, it is illegal for blind people to drive a car, while in Tennessee it is against the law to drive while asleep.
The world’s oldest amusement park is Bakken in Denmark, which opened in 1583.
John Rockefeller wanted to live to be 100 years old and make $100,000. He only lived to 97 but made $1.4 billion.
The first car ever stolen was in St. Louis, Missouri. The city is also home to the world’s first traffic accident, and the first stoplight, at the intersection where the accident occurred.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for 20 years. He currently resides on the mainland U.S.
BC Cook
