Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (5 page)

Average weight of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, uninflated: 300 pounds.

In 1982 Californian Larry Walters tied 45 weather balloons to his lawn chair, hoping to fly 300 miles to the Mojave Desert. Instead, he rose to 16,000 feet…and used a pellet gun to pop the balloons on the way down.

Relatively Speaking

Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star Spangled Banner,” but his son Philip Barton Key also made a name for himself—he was shot and killed in 1859 by New York congressman Daniel Sickles for having an affair with Sickles's wife, Teresa.

Francis Scott Key was also a very distant cousin and namesake of author F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald's “F” stands for Francis.)

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt were fifth cousins. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were fifth cousins, once removed.

Elvis Presley was related to both Abraham Lincoln and Jimmy Carter.

Glenn Close and Brooke Shields are second cousins.

Madonna and Céline Dion are both distant cousins of Prince Charles's second wife, Camilla.

Al Capone's brother Vince was a policeman in Homer, Nebraska.

Phone Home

It was Thomas Edison who popularized the tradition of saying “hello” to answer the phone. In 1877 he wrote a letter to a forerunner of AT&T suggesting it. Now, using “hello” has spread worldwide, with most phone users saying it or a close approximation like
allo, hallo, halo
, or
hola
.

But telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell's preferred greeting for answering a ringing phone was “Ahoy!” or “Hoy! Hoy!”

Taiwan and Luxembourg both have more cell phones than people.

February 2012 was the first month that nearly half of all Americans owned smartphones.

The telephone was originally called a “harmonic telegraph.”

The average lifespan of a cell phone is 18 months. Americans throw out 350,000 of them every day.

One in three iPhone owners has ended a relationship via text message.

More than 100 million telephone calls connect through New York City every day.

New York City's first phone directory, published in 1878, contained listings for just 256 numbers.

Americans use about 6 billion minutes of cell phone talk time every day.

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Q.
What inspired Herman Melville to write
Moby-Dick
?

A.
On November 20, 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale sunk the
Essex
, a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts. The 20 crew members escaped in small whale boats and began to row more than 3,000 miles back to civilization. The boats were rescued after four months, and just five men survived (some killed and eaten by fellow sailors), giving Melville the idea for his most famous work.

Class Notes

As early as 1647, Massachusetts passed a law mandating that all towns with more than 50 families set up a school or face a fine.

Milton Hershey made chocolate in order to fund the Milton Hershey School for Orphaned Boys. The school trust still owns 56% of the company's stock.

First person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel: a Michigan schoolteacher named Annie Taylor (1901).

Textbook titles used to be a lot longer. Here's one from the 19th century:
Osgood's Progressive Fifth Reader: Embracing a System of Instruction in the Principles of Elocution, and Selections for Reading and Speaking from the Best English and American Authors: Designed for the Use of Academies and the Highest Classes in Public and Private Schools
.

In their first year of school or preschool, kids average 6 to 10 colds.

In 1969, 90 percent of kids who lived within a mile of their school walked or biked. In 2001 that number was 31 percent.

Schoolhouses in the 1800s were painted red for the same reason that barns were: Red paint was cheap and it contained a chemical called ferrous oxide (iron rust), which killed the mold that grew in and weakened the wood.

The average high school student has a vocabulary of about 60,000 words.

Benito Mussolini was a substitute teacher before he became the fascist dictator of Italy. (Many schoolkids will tell you this makes perfect sense.)

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GOING EXTINCT

In the mid-1990s there were 2.7 million pay phones in the United States; in 2004 the number was down to 1.8 million. And by 2013, there were fewer than 500,000 left in the country.

Food Fears

Turophobia:
Fear of cheese.

Lachanophobia:
Fear of vegetables.

Alliumphobia:
Fear of garlic.

Mycophobia:
Fear of mushrooms.

Arachibutyrophobia:
Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.

Carnophobia:
Fear of meat.

Ichthyophobia:
Fear of fish.

Oenophobia:
Fear of wine.

Cibophobia:
Fear of eating.

Fashion Sense

France's King Louis XIV wore some of the first high heels—he stood only 5'4" and had height added to his boots.

First TV-inspired fashion fad: All-black clothes, inspired by 1950s TV cowboy Hopalong Cassidy.

The 1980s soap opera
Dynasty
once had its own fashion line based on costumes from the show.

The
Mona Lisa
's lack of eyebrows was not a mistake by Leonardo da Vinci. It was the style of the day in Florence, Italy; women plucked their eyebrows off.

In 2006 a London fashion show called “Naked Fragrance” featured nude models wearing different brands of perfume and walking in front of a blindfolded audience.

Average measurements of a fashion model: 5'11" and 117 pounds. Average American woman: 5'4" and 140 pounds.

For centuries, hatmakers needed beaver skins, nearly driving the animals to extinction. Luckily, in 1850, England's Prince Albert began wearing silk hats. Fashion followed, and the beaver was saved.

Gerald Ford once worked as a fashion model.

Mick Jagger and Ian Anderson (of the band Jethro Tull) both tried to revive the codpiece as fashion. They failed.

Leave It to Beaver

In winter, you can tell a beaver is at home if you see steam rising from the vent at the top of its lodge. Like all mammals, beavers generate heat, and the moist air from their wet fur and breath creates a plume of steam when it rises.

Beaver teeth keep growing throughout their lives—the animals wear their teeth down by chewing wood.

Beavers never stop growing. During a full 24-year lifespan, they can grow to be about 55 pounds. But unlike most mammals, female beavers generally grow larger than males.

Beavers don't hibernate or hunt much for food during the winter. Instead, they store a huge supply of branches inside their lodges and eat the bark.

On a single breath of air, a beaver can swim for a half-mile…or hide quietly for 15 minutes without emerging from the water.

Beavers don't move out of their parents' lodges until they're three years old.

When I Get Older

By age 75, most people will have spent 25 years of their lives sleeping.

Every day, about 7,900 Americans turn 60 years old.

On your 75th birthday, you'll have lived for 27,760 days…or 2,398,000,000 seconds.

Studies show that most people feel about 13 years younger than they actually are.

The average life span after retirement in 1900: 1.2 years. In 2000: 19.2 years.

Worldwide, there are now about 340,000 people who are at least 100 years old. The country with the highest percentage of people over 100 is Japan, with 34.85 centenarians per 100,000 people. That's twice as high as the United States (17.3 per 100,000).

Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was 90 when he retired in 1932, making him the oldest justice so far.

Of all the states, Florida has the highest percentage of senior citizens. Alaska has the lowest.

About 50 percent of elderly women live alone.

Directors' Cuts

In 1968 Steven Spielberg and George Lucas took a directing class taught by Jerry Lewis.

During the famous “chest bursting” scene in
Alien
(1979), director Ridley Scott got the reaction he wanted by unexpectedly showering the actors with real blood.

Youngest movie director: Kishan Shrikanth of India directed a full-length film at age 9.

13 of the 100 top-grossing films of all time were made by Steven Spielberg or George Lucas.

Only one person has won Emmys for acting, writing, and directing: Alan Alda (for
M*A*S*H
).

Supposedly, Wes Craven named his horrifying character, Freddy Krueger, after a kid who used to bully him in school.

Leonard “Mr. Spock” Nimoy costarred in the 1985 Bangles video “Going Down to Liverpool.”

Of the more than 250 episodes of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, Alfred Hitchcock directed only 18.

The sketch that Jack drew of Rose in
Titanic
was actually drawn by director James Cameron. (Cameron has many talents: he was also once a school bus driver.)

David Lynch turned down the chance to direct
Return of the Jedi
.

Woody Allen disliked his film
Manhattan
so much that he offered to direct another movie for United Artists for free if they shelved it. (They refused.)

Italian director Frederico Fellini was nominated for 12 Oscars for writing or directing. Number of wins: 0.

Francis Ford Coppola is an honorary ambassador to Belize.

First movie Steven Spielberg ever saw:
The Greatest Show on Earth
, at age 4.

Earthquaaaake!

There are about 70 earthquakes in California…every day, Luckily, only a few are actually felt by anybody.

Before a large earthquake, ponds and canals may give off a strange smell, perhaps from earlier small shakes that disturbed sediment or released gas.

A 1775 earthquake in Portugal caused waves on Loch Ness in Scotland…1,240 miles away.

The tsunamis that sometimes follow an earthquake can be disastrous to land, but they don't usually damage ships at sea. People on a cruise ship just feel a slow rise and fall as the wave slides deep beneath them.

A 2007 earthquake lifted up the entire island of Ranongga, in the Solomon Islands, by 10 feet.

Even the UK gets earthquakes—about 300 a year. Most are pretty small, and only 11 people in history are known to have died in British quakes.

“The earthquakes” anagrams to “that queer shake.”

About 2 million people died in earthquakes during the 20th century.

The deadliest earthquake in recorded history took place in 1556 in Shansi, China, killing nearly 830,000 people.

Charles Richter, who developed the Richter scale (for measuring earthquakes), was a nudist.

Thomas Jefferson's sister, Elizabeth, died from exposure after fleeing her home following a massive, rare earthquake that struck Virginia on February 21, 1774. (She thought she'd be safer outside…in the freezing cold.)

An earthquake that measures 4.0 on the Richter scale is 100 times stronger than one measuring 2.0. Each whole number on the scale is ten times stronger than the previous one. So a 5.0 would be 1,000 times stronger than a 2.0.

Within three years of the 1906 earthquake, 20,000 new buildings went up in San Francisco.

Driving Passions

Ferrari will sometimes custom mold a car's driver's seat to the buyer's body.

The average time it takes to go through a McDonald's drive-thru is 184 seconds.

In the 1950s, there were about 5,000 drive-in theaters in the United States. Today: about 368.

Nearly 800,000 senior citizens voluntarily give up their driving privileges each year.

Until 1923, drivers in Italy drove on the right in rural areas and on the left in cities. (Now they all drive on the right side.)

The first states to require driver's licenses were Massachusetts and Missouri, in 1903.

Henry Ford never had a driver's license.

There's no evidence that drivers of red cars get speeding tickets any more often, but Mercedes SL drivers get four times as many tickets than average.

On average, Americans lock themselves out of their cars nine times in a lifetime.

Collectively, New York City cab drivers log more than a million miles a day.

The first woman to drive coast-to-coast across the U.S. was Alice Ramsey in 1909. That was an especially impressive accomplishment at a time when cars weren't that reliable and there were only 152 miles of paved road along the 3,800-mile route. She was accompanied on her trip by two sisters-in-law and a friend, none of whom could drive.