1V2 rocket
Nazi Germany spent 50% more on the V2 rocket program than the U.S. did on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb.
2. The Roman Emperor Nero did not play the fiddle as he watched the Great Fire burn Rome. When the fire broke out he was at his villa in Antium, 35 miles away. When he received news of the fire, he immediately rushed back to Rome to begin relief efforts.
3. Howard Hughes gave Orville Wright his last flight on a Lockheed Constellation (Airliner). Orville said the wingspan on the Constellation was longer than their first flight.
4. There's a special font for people with dyslexia which makes it easier for them to read.
5. 1920s Bootlegger George Remus had one of the worst breakups in history. His wife, owning all his assets, divorced him, tried to have him deported, hired a hitman to kill him, and left him with $100 from a Multi-Million dollar empire.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
6Super Saiyan
There is a reason behind Super Saiyan’s golden hair transformation in Dragon Ball. Its creator Akira Toriyama said he “Wanted to eliminate the time spent coloring in black [hair].”
7. In 1980, Punk Rock band Dead Kennedys was invited to play at an awards show to give the event “new wave credibility.” Seconds into their set, they stopped to perform “Pull My Strings”, a song that was written specifically to take the piss out of the music executives in the room. They never played it again.
8. The word "nightmare" is derived from the Old English "mare", a mythological demon that rides on people's chests while they sleep, causing bad dreams.
9. Tuberculosis has killed some of the most influential people in history. Popular names include Pocahontas, George Orwell, Andrew Jackson, Franz Kafka, Jane Austin, John Smith, Frederic Chopin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
10. In 1998, a professor named Dr. Theodore P. Hill at Georgia Institute of Technology asked his students to either flip a coin 200 times and record the results or give the fake results of 200 coin tosses. The students were amazed at how the professor easily identified the real results by seeing if they had six heads or tails in a row.
11Lace monitors
Lace monitors dig into a termite mound to lay their eggs, the termites then reseal the mound keeping the eggs at a constant temperature. The lizard returns 9 months later to dig the eggs out so they can hatch.
12. Genie is a feral child who was strapped to a potty chair for 13 years of her life, deprived of human interaction and never gained the proper ability to speak any language.
13. All Golden Hamsters in captivity today descend from a single brother-sister pairing, found in Syria in 1930. The captured litter began with eleven, but the rest either escaped or ate each other.
14. Soviet Union had a program to dig a hole (Kola Superdeep Borehole) through to the Earth's crust in the 1970's. They reached 40,318 feet deep before they had to stop due to higher-than-expected temperatures of 356 degree Fahrenheit, making the project infeasible.
15. Sylvester Stallone was so broke while developing Rocky that he had to sell his dog (Butkus) because he couldn't afford dog food.
16Vodka
In Russian, "vodka" basically means "lil water." The word for water is "voda," and "ka" is a diminutive ending.
17. Candace Newmaker, a child with "behavioral problems," was taken from her birth parents, adopted, and placed in controversial "rebirth therapy." She was suffocated for 70 minutes and declared brain-dead afterward.
18. A man named Victor Hugo Green published a series of travel guides named ‘The Green Book’ between 1936 and 1966, which was mainly aimed at African-Americans. It listed Black-friendly hotels and restaurants across North America.
19. Anna Swan at 7 feet 11 inches (2.41 m) and Martin Bates at 7 feet 9 inches (2.36 m) are not only the tallest couple ever to have ever lived, but also to have given birth to the largest baby ever in 1878. The baby at birth weighed 23 pounds 9 ounces (10.7 kg) and nearly 30 inches tall (75 cm) and each of his feet were six inches (152 mm) long, but he only lived for 11 hours.
20. Cocktails such as Rum and Coke and Jack and Coke, use Coke, not Pepsi, because of the popularity of a song called “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Pepsi offered to pay to rename the song but was outbid. It became the second-highest grossing song of the 1940s, behind "White Christmas."
21Fred Rogers
Fred Rogers (of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame) after filming a segment on David Letterman, stopped by Eddie Murphy’s dressing room to give him his regards, and tell him how much he liked his portrayal.
22. Mummies are sometimes used in medicine to calibrate CAT scan machines.
23. Heath Ledger was the first choice for the major role of Peter Parker in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie that was released in 2002. He turned it down as he didn't want to take someone else's dream away from playing Spider-Man. The role then went to Tobey Maguire.
24. Despite his famous last name, before becoming president Franklin Delano Roosevelt inherited most of his wealth from his grandfather Warren Delano Jr., who made his fortune as a drug smuggler in China.
25. Dennis Wilson recorded a song for ‘The Beach Boys’ which was originally written by Charles Manson. After finding out he wasn't credited, he showed Wilson a bullet and said: “Every time you look at it, I want you to think how nice it is your kids are still safe.” Wilson proceeded to “beat the sh*t out of him.”
