36 Totally Awesome Random Facts You Never Knew – Part 187

Heels were first made by the Persian cavalry to give them stability while shooting arrows. It later became popular in Europe as a masculine symbol until 1630 when women followed the fashion. So first they were a military asset, then a masculine symbol and now are feminine.

2. Swing dancing teenagers in Nazi Germany would mock Nazis by saying 'swing heil' and called Hitler Youth 'Homo Youth.'

3. Owls don't have eyeballs. The eyes are long and shaped more like a tube. Therefore their eyes can't turn in their sockets because of their shape.

4. In 2011, a 39-story building in Seoul was evacuated after tremors were felt on the top floors. Investigation found it wasn’t an earthquake. The building violently shook because on the 12th floor 17 people were performing exercises to Snap!’s “The Power” in a fitness center. Their rhythm matched the building's resonant frequency and caused it to violently shake.

5. In 2014, an elderly lady in Chiba Prefecture, Japan bought a building, sight unseen, that ended up being a fully stocked 90s arcade.

Due to the fact that NASA Astronauts were not allowed to take gifts or endorsements, GM leased several Astronauts Corvettes during the 1960s and 70s for just $1.

7. Charles Morgan, an escrow agent working for the FBI and 2 big crime groups, was found shot in the back of the head. He had on a bulletproof vest, had a map to the location his body was found, had his tooth in his pocket and a bill with a bible reference. His death was ruled as suicide.

8. Scott Carpenter was the only NASA Mercury astronaut who hadn’t finished college. After his spaceflight, the university granted him his degree because "his subsequent training as an astronaut more than made up for the deficiency in the subject of heat transfer."

9. A woman named Chau Smith ran 7 marathons in 7 consecutive days on 7 continents in celebration of her 70th birthday.

10. A 2014 study found that Calvin, of 'Calvin and Hobbes', caused nearly $16,000 in property damage throughout the strip's 10-year run.

Albert Einstein was born with a part of his brain missing, which influences speech, so he did not speak until the age of 3. However, his parietal lobe, responsible for math and spatial recognition, was abnormally large.

12. The lyric “they stab it with their steely knives” from “Hotel California” by the Eagles is a nod to Steely Dan for the free publicity they gave them when the Eagles were mentioned in a lyric from Steely Dan’s song “Everything You Did” which goes “turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening”.

13. In January 2019, a Florida man named Bryan Stewart told his neighbors that he was going to kill them with kindness. Then he tried to kill them with a machete named kindness.

14. Neil Armstrong before leaving for the Apollo 11 Space mission signed hundreds of autographs and had them dropped in the mail on the exact date of their moon mission, in case he died during the mission and his family could monetize his autographs.

15. There is a disagreement about what color people say tennis balls are, with 52% saying green, 42% saying yellow and 6% saying "other."

Benjamin Franklin and his friend would use chess as a means to learn Italian; the winner of each game would assign a task, such as parts of the Italian grammar to be learned by heart, to be performed by the loser before their next meeting.

17. Salvador Dalí’s brother died 9 months before the artist was born. When Dalí was 5 years old, his parents took him to his brother’s grave and told him that he was his brother’s reincarnation. Salvador believed it and incorporated this idea into his future paintings.

18. German composer Johann Sebastian Bach died after having a surgery done on his eye by a charlatan. The procedure involved sticking needles into the eye. The same charlatan also performed the procedure on Handel, who also died from complications of the procedure.

19. A Russian photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky traveled the Russian Empire from around 1909 to 1915 and would take 3 individual black-and-white photos, each with a filter (red, blue, and green) to create high-quality pictures in a full-color way before full-color images were available.

20. The city of Crush, Texas was a temporary one day city created as a publicity stunt to exhibit two trains go full speed and collide. The impact caused engine boilers to explode resulting in a shower of flying debris on 40000 spectators. It killed 2 or 3 people and caused numerous injuries.

Monterey Jack (David Jack) was a real person who owned the dairy that first mass-produced the cheese.

22. General Motors chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. invented both chlorofluorocarbons and leaded gasoline, having "more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."

23. Vitamin-D deficiency is linked with many health disorders, including depression. In a survey of almost 8,000 US residents, it was found that those with lower vitamin D levels "are at a significantly higher risk of showing depression."

24. The most successful and feared allied spy of World War 2, Virginia Hall, was an American woman with a prosthetic leg. She escaped France on foot through the Pyrenees mountains, re-entered before D-Day, and organized havoc behind the Nazi lines.

25. French fries contain nicotine. Members of the nightshade family such as tobacco and potatoes contain nicotine as a natural pesticide.