Fascinating Facts ~Page 3~

Royalty: King George I of England couldn't speak a word of English. His native tounge was German (he came from Hanover, Germany); he communicated with his cabinet in French.

War & Weapons: During World War I the punishment for homosexuality in the French army was execution. If the offender was an officer he was allowed a final charge against the enemy on the understanding that he would get himself shot.

Art & Artists: In his youth Adolf Hitler was a landscape and portrait painter and, according to some who have seen his work, not a bad one. It was Hitler's inability to get into the Vienna Art Academy, it has been said, that caused him to hate that city forever. Of Hitler's three hundred paintings, only about twelve still exist. Four or five of these are in the U.S.A.

Fashion: In eighteenth-century England, women's wigs were sometimes 4 feet high. These remarkable headdresses were dusted with flour and decorated with stuffed birds, replicas of gardens, plates of fruit, or even model ships. Sometimes the wigs were so elaborate they were worn continuously for several months. They were matted with lard to keep them from coming apart, which made mice and insects a constant hazard. Special pillows had to be constructed to hold these giant creations, and rat-resistant caps made of gilt wire were common items. Mercifully, the wig craze died out quite suddenly in England in 1795, when a hair-powder tax made their upkeep too expensive.

The Bible: In the history of printing, several early English Bibles are famous not so much for their workmanship or their beauty as for their textual idiosyncrasies. A few famous examples, much sought after by rare-Bible collectors, are: The Breeches Bible (1560)---so named because it states that Adam and Eve "sewed fig tree leaves together and made themselves breeches.", The Bug Bible (1551)---so named because of an incorrect translation of a line in the Ninety-first Psalm. The line "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night" reads "Thou shalt not be afraid of any buggies by night.", and The Treacles Bible (1568)---so named because it uses the word "treacle" for "balm" in the line "Is there no balm in Gilead?"

Death: Undertakers report that human bodies do not deteriorate as quickly as they used to. The reason for this, they believe, is that the modern diet contains so many preservatives that these chemicals tend to prevent the body from decomposing too rapidly after death.

Drugs: In sixteenth-century Europe many druggists sold medicine made from the powder of Egyptian mummies. Such "medicine" was considered good for gout and catarrh and was often incorporated into products known as "mummy balm" or "Egyptian salve." In 1564 someone named Guy de la Fontaine attempted to corner the mummy market in Alexandria, a center for the export of such commodities. He discovered that Alexandrian merchants had for some time been selling the mummified remains of derelicts who had died not so long before from a variety of rather loathsome diseases.

Money: On March 16, 1970, a bidder at Sotheby & Company in London paid $20,000 for one glass paperweight.

Diet: The United States Postal Service assures its customers that they will not get fat licking stamps. There is no more than one-tenth of a calorie's worth of glue on every stamp.

Crime: Marie-Augustin Marquis de Pelier of Brittany was arrested in 1786 and spent the next fifty years of his life in prison. His crime: whistling at Queen Marie Antoinette as she was being ushered into a theater.

Animals: Kangaroo rats never drink water. Like their relatives the pocket mice, they carry their own water source within them, producing fluids from the food they eat and the air they breathe.

People: Thomas Edison was deaf from the time he was twelve years old. The malady was caused while Edison was trying to board a train at Frazer Station, Michigan, U.S.A. A conductor took hold of his ears to help pull him aboard. "I felt something snap inside my head," Edison later said. "My deafness started from that time and has progressed ever since." Edison never went to school---his formal education consisted of three months' attendance at a public school in Port Huron, Michigan, U.S.A.

Aviation: Houdini was the first man to fly an airplane solo in Australia.

Architecture and Construction: The sixty-story John Hancock Tower in Boston, U.S.A. is haunted by one of the more mysterious problems in skyscraper history: its windows, hugh 4-by-11-foot panes of glass, pop out unexpectedly and shatter on the street below. The building, completed in 1972, was less than a month old when suddenly dozens of its windows began popping for no discernible reason. Determined to remedy the situation, the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company replaced all 10,334 windows with 400-pound sections of half-inch tempered glass. The windows kept popping out. Today the mystery remains unsolved, and windows occasionally still pop. To protect passers-by, John Hancock has hired two permanent guards who do nothing but peer up and spot the cracked panes before they tumble to the sidewalk.

Fallacies: Big Ben is not a clock. It is a bell located in the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament in London. It weighs 13 1/2 tons, is 9 feet in diameter, and stands higher than a man (7 1/2 feet). Nor is the bell an ancient English landmark: it was installed a little more than a hundred years ago, in 1859.

Music and Musicians: Mozart wrote his last and, many think, his greatest symphony, No. 41 (the "Jupiter") in less than sixteen days. His last three symphonies were written in a period of three months in 1788. Though these three works are today considered some of the finest music ever composed, Mozart was not able to get even one of them performed during his lifetime.

Firsts: Of the first five men to reach the North Pole, one was black, four were oriental, and one was white. The orientals were Eskimos serving as porters for their white leader, Robert Peary. The black was Matthew Henson, Peary's personal aide.

Fashion: The Maya Indians filed their front teeth to points and drilled holes in them so that they could be embellished with precious gems. They filled cavities in their teeth with pieces of jade.

Food & Drink: Americans spend $600 million a year on hot dogs. They consume enough of them each year to form a chain stretching from the earth to the moon and back again. The average American eats forty hot dogs a year. But the hot dog is not an American invention; it was first produced in Germany in 1852 by a group of butchers in Frankfurt.

Executions: Those condemned to die by the axe in medieval and Renaissance England were obliged to tip their executioner to ensure that he would complete the job in one blow. In some executions, notably that of Mary, Queen of Scots, it took fifteen whacks of the blade before the head was severed.

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