Fascinating Facts ~Page 9~

Churches: Many Gothic churches of the Middle Ages were built in the following way: a quarry site was established, often as much as 50 miles from the place where the church was to be erected. When the rocks were mined, volunteers from all over the countryside would form a living chain from the quarry to the building site. The rocks would then be passsed from hand to hand all the way to the construction grounds.

People: Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the man who designed the Eiffel Tower, also designed the inner structure of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

Laws: In seventeenth-century Japan, no citizen was allowed to leave the country on penalty of death. Anyone caught coming or going without permission was executed on the spot.

Animals: The average porcupine has more than 30,000 quills. Porcupines are excellent swimmers because their quills are hollow and serve as pontoons to keep them afloat.

Human Oddities: In 1657 Jakob van Meekren, a Dutch physician, recorded the case of a Spaniard named Georgius Albes, who could stretch the skin of his left breast up to his left ear and pull the skin at the base of his neck up over his chin. He was able to perform these feats because of a condition known as dermatolysis, a phenomenon that also explains the abilities of many so-called India-rubber men seen at carnival side shows.

The Universe: If one were to capture and bottle a comet's 10,000-mile vapor trail, the amount of vapor actually present in the bottle would take up less than 1 cubic inch of space.

Aviation: The top of the tower on the Empire State Building was originally intended (though never used) as a mooring place for dirigibles.

Gambling: In 1950 at the Las Vegas Desert Inn, an anonymous sailor made twenty-seven straight passes (wins) with the dice at craps. The odds against such a feat are 12,467,890 to 1. Had he bet the house limit on each roll he would have earned $268 million. As it was, he was so timid with his wagers that he walked away from the table with only $750. The dice today are enshrined in the hotel on a velvet pillow under glass.

Money: In 1975 a birdhouse costing $10,000 was built in Quebec by the city fathers.

Literature: All the proceeds earned from James M. Barrie's book "Peter Pan" were bequeathed to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for sick children in London.

Weather: According to Professor Walter Connor of the University of Michigan, U.S.A., men are six times more likely than women to be struck by lightning.

The Classical and Ancient World: High-wire acts have been enjoyed since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Antique medals have been excavated from Greek islands depicting men ascending inclined cords and walking across ropes stretched between cliffs. The Greeks called high-wire performers neurobates or oribates. In the Roman city of Herculaneum there is a fresco representing an aerialist high on a rope, dancing and playing a flute. Sometimes Roman tightrope walkers stretched cables between the tops of two neighboring hills and performed comic dances and pantomimes while crossing.

Food & Drink: The term "cocktail" was invented in Elmsford, New York, U.S.A. A barmaid named Betsy Flanagan decorated her establishment with the tail feathers of cocks. One day a patron asked for "one of those cock tails." She served him a drink with a feather in it.

Games & Hobbies: The game of dominoes was invented by French monks. It is named for a phrase in the Vesper services: Dixit Dominus Domineo Meo.

First: King George VI of England became the first British monarch to set foot on American soil when he visited the World's Fair in New York City in 1939.

Executions: During the French revolution, a magistrate named Jean Baptiste Carrier, commissioner of the National Convention at Nantes, dispatched a number of boatloads of political prisoners into the Loire River. When the boat was in midstream he ordered a trap door in the bottom of the boat opened, sending an entire group of prisoners to their death. From his merciless methods of extermination the word "noyade," meaning "mass drownings," was coined.

Safety: Natural gas has no smell. The odor is artificially added so that people will be able to identify leaks and take measures to stop them.

People: The African country of Rhodesia is named after an English entrepreneur, Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, prime minister of Cape Colony in South Africa in the late nineteenth century and creator of the South Africa diamond syndicate, at one time controlled 90 percent of the world's supply of diamonds. When he died, in 1902, his will stipulated that a great part of his fortune was to be used for the establishment of a foundation for the furtherance of higher education, which today grants the Rhodes Scholarship.

Survival: More than 50 percent of the people who are bitten by poisonous snakes in the United States and who go untreated still survive.

Records: The record for traveling from New York to Los Angeles, U.S.A. by motorcycle is 45 hours, 41 minutes. It was set in 1968 by Tibor Sarossy, riding a BMW Model R69S. Sarossy made four fuel stops, never slept, fainted twice, and averaged 58.7 miles per hour all the way across.

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