1Miguel de Cervantes
In 1575, Don Quixote author Miguel de Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo were captured and enslaved by Barbary pirates. After two years, his family could only afford one ransom, so Rodrigo was freed. Cervantes was freed three years later after a religious charity paid his ransom.
2. Queen Elizabeth I required 600 horse carts to carry everything she needed for her summer excursions to the countryside. She'd stay with the local nobles, but if their castle was too small, the nobility would get kicked out to make room for her. Of course, no Noble could refuse her or demand payment for her stay.
3. Many formulas exist to calculate wind chill. The current one that is extensively used was only implemented in 2001. It is calculated for a bare face facing the wind while walking into it at 5.0 km/h, or 3.1 mph. It converts the officially measured wind speed to the wind speed at face height, assuming the person is in an open field.
4. Pekin, Illinois, was named under the mistaken belief that the city is located on the opposite side of the globe from Beijing, China. It was later found out that it was actually located on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean.
5. The feeling of falling while you're asleep happens because your muscles become very relaxed and enter a temporary state of paralysis. The brain thinks that you are falling, so it sends signals to your muscles to make you jump up, which wakes you up.
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6Inventor Elisha Gray
In 1887, inventor Elisha Gray, who lost the patent for the telephone to Alexander Graham Bell, invented the first fax machine, using telegraph lines to transmit handwriting and documents.
7. Newborn babies are partially blind because they can only see the world in black and white with shades of gray, and more than that, they can only see objects that are 8 to 12 inches away from their faces.
8. The familiar music played during Final Jeopardy is called "Think." It was written in 1963 by Merv Griffin, creator of Jeopardy, to help his then 5-year-old son Tony fall asleep. Since its first use in the show in 1964, the song has earned the Griffin estate over $100 million in royalties.
9. Uwe Hohn is the only person in history to have thrown the javelin more than 100 meters. His world record of 104.8 meters was declared an "Eternal World Record" as it will likely never be broken due to the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) redesigning the javelin in 1986 and resetting the world record to coincide with the change.
10. Phosphate mining has harmed the Pacific island nation of Nauru so much that Australia offered to repopulate the entire country on Curtis Island near the Australian coast in 1964. Nauru turned down the offer because it did not want to join Australia and lose its independence.
11Nazi-occupied Scandinavia
During World War 2, when the Nazis controlled Scandinavia, they set up maternity centers to harvest babies with "Aryan" traits from the north and send them south to "correct" the genes of the German people.
12. Pythagoras, who invented the Pythagoras Theorem, was a cult leader who claimed he could speak with animals, time travel, and had an extreme hatred for Fava Beans. He believed you should never eat fava beans because they give you gas, and expelling gas took away the "breath of life." At the same time, he claimed fava beans contained human souls. He fought against their consumption or destruction. One account of his death claims that he would not enter a bean field to escape pursuers, so they killed him.
13. Edward Leedskalnin was a man with a fourth-grade education who solely built the Coral Castle in Florida with over 1,100 tons of coral rock in 1920, using only hand tools. When asked how, his reply was that he understood the laws of weight and leverage. Today, it is a museum open to the public.
14. When Star Wars was first being made in 1977, the long title crawl at the start of the film, describing the lore ahead of the action, was actually a 6 ft. long piece of black paper with yellow text, and the camera was then rolled over the paper to make it appear as if the text was moving.
15. The largest urban old-growth forest in the United States is Wesselman Woods. It is located in the middle of Evansville, Indiana. It is 190 acres of virgin forest, with some of the tree cores dating back to the 1650s and 1990s.
16Minced Oaths
Minced oaths are a type of euphemism based on a profanity or blasphemy that has been altered to remove the objectionable characteristics of the original expression. One example of this would be the use of the phrase "Yippie-ki-yay Martha Falcon" in the censored television showing of Die Hard.
17. Shirley Temple actually disliked the drink named after her. She quiped, "People think it's funny; I hate them." "It's too sweet."
18. A work of fiction between 20,000 and 49,999 words is considered a novella. Once a book hits the 50,000-word mark, it is generally considered a novel.
19. While in the uterus, foals have soft capsules called eponychium covering their hooves. Also known as "golden slippers," or "fairy fingers," these capsules protect the mother from injury during pregnancy and birth. They are shed within hours after the foal is born.
20. Ohio was technically not admitted to the United States until 1953; before that, it was still part of the Northwest Territory. The state petitioned to join the union in 1803 but the constitution was never ratified. In 1953, a bill was passed admitting Ohio, but it was backdated to March 1, 1803.
21Momčilo Gavrić
During World War 1, an 8-year-old Serbian boy named Momčilo Gavrič lost his entire family to a heinous war crime committed by the Croatian soldiers. He then enlisted in a nearby artillery unit and identified the location of the enemy soldiers that killed his family, then participated in the bombardment that wiped out that entire enemy unit.
22. Tacit collusion is collusion in which competing groups work together without an explicit agreement. One example is "price leadership," in which one company changes its prices and competitors follow. In one case, automated price setting led to the book, "The Making of a Fly" having a price of $23,698,655.93 on Amazon.
23. The Dip is a 50/50 solution of white vinegar and hydrogen peroxide that is often used to clean lead off of suppressors and other firearm parts. The resulting chemical reaction dissolves the lead into lead acetate, which can cause lead poisoning from simple contact with the skin.
24. Karoly Takacs was a Hungarian Army shooter, who lost his winning "right" hand due to a grenade explosion months before the Olympic games. He decided to practice shooting with his left hand and won the Hungarian National Pistol Shooting Championship in 1939 and won gold in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics.
25. For the 2002 DVD release of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," some changes were made to the original film. Director Steven Spielberg replaced the agents' weapons with walkie-talkies, and the word "terrorist" was replaced with "hippie." This led to many saying that Spielberg "sanitized" the film.
