Fascinating Facts ~Page 6~

Music & Musicians: Haydn could write music only on clean white paper. Mozart composed while playing billiards. Christoph Gluck would write only when seated in the middle of a field. Rossini composed most of his music when he was drunk. Wagner found it easiest to compose when he was dressed up in historical costumes. Haydn believed he could not compose well unless he was wearing a ring given to him by Frederick the Great.

Sports: Seven thousand years ago, the ancient Egyptians bowled on alleys not unlike our own.

Royalty: The Japanese emperor Hirohito is the 124th holder of his title. The same family has held the throne in Japan since the sixth century A.D. Hirohito has published several books on ichthyology (the study of fish) and is considered an expert on the subject.

Survival: A person who is lost in the woods and starving can obtain nourishment by chewing on his shoes. Leather has enough nutritional value to sustain life for a short time.

Weights & Measures: A ten-gallon hat holds less than a gallon.

Physics: No one can drown in the Dead Sea. It is 25 percent salt, which makes the water very heavy. This property makes a body extremely buoyant on the Dead Sea, so that it is almost impossible to remain submerged.

Books: The oldest known books in the world were made of clay. Actually earthen tablets on which written symbols were imprinted and baked, these "books" were used for recording land deeds and business transactions by the Babylonians five thousand years before movable type was invented in the West.

The Classical and Ancient World: There was a "pony express" in Persia many centuries before Christ. Riders on this ancient circuit, wearing special colored headbands, delivered the mails across the vast stretch of Asia Minor, sometimes riding for hundreds of miles without a break. The Greek historian Herodotus has left us this description of them: "Nothing mortal travels as fast as these Persian messengers. The entire plan is a Persian invention... along the whole line of road there are men stationed with horses in number equal to the number of days which the journey takes... The first rider delivers his dispatch to the second, and the second passes it to the third, and so it is borne from hand to hand along the whole line, like the light in a torch race."

Insects & Spiders: The female praying mantis devours the male while they are mating. The male sometimes continues copulating even after the female has bitten off his head and part of his upper torso.

The body: The Ketchua Indians of the Andes Mountains in South America have 2 to 3 more quarts of blood in their bodies than people who live at lower elevations.

Weather: Studies in modern China have found that one can predict weather with 80 percent accuracy by monitoring the croaking of frogs. A peasant named Chang Chi-tsai devised the following formula, which has been adopted by millions of Chinese farmers and peasants: "If frogs croak on a fine day it will rain in two days. If frogs croak after rain, there will be fine weather. It will continue to rain if frogs do not croak after successive overcast days."

Birds: The bird with the largest population in the world is the red billed quela (Quelea quelea), an inhabitant of Africa. To farmers red-billed quelas are known as "feathered locusts," for they travel in flocks that number in the millions and leave devastation behind them whenever they land on crops. At last count there were approximately 10 billion of these birds in existence. The only other bird with nearly so great a population was the passenger pigeon, which in 1840 had a population of about 9 billion. As a result of excessive hunting by man, the passenger pigeon was extinct less than eighty years later.

Automobiles: In 1906 a car known as the Autocar was manufactured in the United States with a new invention---headlights (they burned kerosene). The Autocar, however, lacked another important accessory---the steering wheel. The driver directed the vehicle by means of a sticklike shaft situated to the right of the driver's seat.

Architecture and Construction: The base of the Great Pyramid in Egypt is large enough to cover ten football fields. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, it took 400,000 men twenty years to construct this great monument.

War and Weapons: Soldiers in Genghis Khan's army were made into executioners after every battle. The inhabitants of a defeated town were ordered to assemble outside the walls of the town, and each Mongols soldier, armed with a battle axe, was assigned to kill as many as fifty of the captives. As proof that they had carried out their orders, the soldiers were obliged to cut an ear off every victim, collect the ears in sacks, and bring them to their officers to be counted.

Crime: In seventeenth-century Europe there were wandering bands of smugglers called comprachicos whose stock-in-trade was buying children, deforming them, and selling them to the aristocracy, who thought it fashionable to have freaks in court. The comprachicos "arts" included stunting children's growth, placing muzzles on their faces to deform them (it was from this practice that Dumas took his theme for The Man in the Iron Mask), slitting their eyes, dislocating their joints, and malforming their bones. James II of England hired comprachicos to kidnap the heirs of families whose lines he wished to extinguish. Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs had a grotesque permanent smile carved by the comprachicos.

Flowers, Plants, & Trees: The cucumber is not a vegetable; botanically, it is a fruit. So are the eggplant, the pumpkin, the squash, the tomato, the gherkin, and the okra. Rhubarb, however, is botanically a vegetable, not a fruit.

Geography: Panama (because of a bend in the isthmus) is the only place in the world where one can see the sun rise on the Pacific Ocean and set on the Atlantic..

Fashion: In the late nineteenth century, it was the fashion among many English women to wear gold rings through their nipples. In an 1899 edition of the British journal Society, fascinating details are given about this peculiar fad. The woman who wished to wear such ornaments, the magazine said, had holes bored through her nipples and thin golden rings threaded through the holes. It was believed that wearing such rings made the breasts fuller and rounder, and that the rings were a stimulating sight for men when exposed. The operation was performed not by doctors, but by jewelers, much the way ear piercing is done today.

Drugs: In 1865 opium was grown in Virginia, U.S.A. and a product was distilled from it that yielded 4 percent morphine. In 1867, it was grown in Tennessee, U.S.A.; six years later it was cultivated in Kentucky, U.S.A. During these years opium, marijuana, and cocaine could be purchased legally over the counter from any druggist.

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