42 Impeccably Awesome Random Facts You Have Never Heard Before | Random List #138

Before the 20th century, the death of the Pope used to be confirmed by striking him in the head with a silver hammer.

2. The reason movie crews use a "Clapperboard" (the blackboard they clack at the begging of a movie scene) is to help sync the audio and video together later.

3. Cows never existed in the wild and were domesticated from wild ox some 10,500 years ago.

4. There is a road in Lancaster named Musical Road, California that has hundreds of grooves carved in it, so that when you drive over them, they play ‘The William Tell Overture.’

5. 70% of lotto winners spend all their winnings within 5 years, and it doesn't matter whether they won $1 million or $100 million.

In 1851, when the refrigerated ice machine was patented, the large ice-importing industry ran a smear campaign against the technology, calling it immoral.

7. The largest centipede named Arthropleura ever existed (280 million years ago) was tall enough to rear up and look a human in the eyes.

8. In zero gravity, a candle's flame is round and blue.

9. There is a coast-to-coast hiking trail called The American Discovery Trail that connects Delaware and California.

10. Pandas were carnivorous, but they inexplicably lost their appetite for meat during evolution.

When Robert Taylor inventor of soap-in-a-pump-bottle (Softsoap), he knew larger competitors like Colgate would try to copy his product. In order to ensure that they couldn't copy him, he bought every small bottle hand-pump (100 million bottles) in the United States. This resulted in a year of the market to himself.

12. The artificial sweetener Sucralose (Splenda) was discovered when a researcher misheard a command to "Test this chemical" as "taste this chemical."

13. After winning an Oscar, actor Daniel Day-Lewis retired to become a cobbler in Italy, only returning to acting after Martin Scorsese convinced him to star in Gangs of New York.

14. Fourteen years after publication, Dr. Seuss removed a reference to pollution in Lake Erie from The Lorax. Researchers informed him that the environmental efforts to restore the lake had been successful. The line was changed in subsequent editions.

15. Bios Urn turns the ashes from a person's cremation into a tree by using them as a nutrient source for a seed.

A town in Russia named Verkhoyansk with an average temperature of -45 °C (-50 °F) in January was attacked by a pack of 400 wolves in 2012. The sun currently rises at 2 pm and sets at 3:30 pm.

17. In 1922, Americans were consuming 1 million Eskimo Pies a day that resulted in the rise of the cost of cocoa beans by 50%. This single-handedly lifted Ecuador's economy out of a depression.

18. The "cost per GFLOPS" (the cost for a computer that would operate at one billion floating-point operations per second) in 1997 was of $42,000, while nowadays it is of merely $0.03 in 2017.

19. In 1575, a German mass murderer nicknamed Puschpeter is reported to have kept his wits after being impaled. The stake hit his spine and he berated the executioner. Puschpeter commanded the executioner to draw the stake out of him and gave instructions for how to make the impalement properly.

20. Rinconada, Peru is the world's highest elevated city at 16,732 ft above sea level and its economy is based around a gold mine. The mine operates on a unique system where employees work for 30 days without payment, and on the 31st day they are allowed to take as much ore as they can carry.

In 2002, a soccer team named AS Adema scored 149 own goals against SO l'Emyrne in one match protesting a controversial referee decision in the previous game.

22. The T-shirt was invented in 1904 and it was primarily marketed towards bachelors as "bachelor undershirt." It was stretchy enough to be pulled over the head. "No safety pins - no buttons - no needle - no thread."

23. At the age of 15, Jim Carrey quit school and became a janitor to support his family after his father lost his job. They were living out of a van. He also used to carry a baseball bat in his janitor cart because "I was so angry I just wanted to beat the heck out of something."

24. New York City's Flatiron building used to cause enough downdrafts to lift the skirts of women passing by, giving a "daring" view of their ankles and legs. The phenomenon was notorious and resulted in groups of young men regularly gathering on 23rd street to watch.

25. The longest prison sentence ever requested was 384,912 years of jail, against a 22-year-old postman named Gabriel March Granados in Spain was accused of failing to deliver 42,768 letters. This sentence was requested by the prosecutor, while actually he was sentenced only to 14 years and 2 months of imprisonment.