1AA Flight 587 Tragedy Survivor
Hilda Yolanda Mayol, a woman who survived the 9/11 attacks, boarded AA Flight 587 out of John F. Kennedy International Airport two months later. Five minutes after takeoff, the plane crashed, and all 260 occupants perished. It was the second deadliest aviation incident in US history.
2. While Danny Trejo was filming "The Muppets: Most Wanted!" his mother passed. The cast all offered their sympathy, but he shrugged it off because of his 'tough guy' persona. It wasn't until Steve Whitmire apologized in character as Kermit the Frog that Trejo broke down crying.
3. The Norden Bombsight, used by US bomber aircraft in World War II, cost $1.1 billion to research and produce, about half as much as the Manhattan Project and over a quarter of the cost of all B-17 bombers manufactured. While it was successfully precise in state-side testing, it was far less accurate in combat.
4. In the Mossdale Caverns tragedy, a party of ten went into it, and four of them left after three hours. When one of the four returned and found the entrance flooded, she alerted rescuers, but the water made entry impossible, resulting in the discovery of five bodies the next day, and the sixth was found the day after.
5. On January 12, 1928, Ruth Snyder received the death penalty by electric chair. She was secretly photographed mid-execution, which became the first photo of an execution by the electric chair printed in the media.
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6Slip 'N Slide Warning for Adults
Persons over the age of 12 shouldn't use WHAM-O's Slip 'N Slide. There have been rare instances (and lawsuits) of adults breaking their necks while using it, and in 1993, the U.S. CPSC warned that the slide might cause permanent spinal cord injury to teens and adults.
7. Andrew Jackson gave his 21-year-old niece the role of First Lady when his wife died, and she was praised for the food and alcohol she served during her tenure.
8. After World War II, Hungary's inflation was so severe that the government stopped collecting taxes because even a single day's delay in collecting would cause the value of the currency to disappear.
9. In preparation for his role in the movie Hunger (2008), Michael Fassbender went on a special diet of less than 900 calories a day for ten weeks. After meeting with a nutritionist, he settled on a diet of berries, nuts, and sardines and underwent periodic medical checks.
10. Jennifer Connelly had one of her fingers partially bitten off by a chimpanzee during the filming of Darío Argento's 1985 film "Phenomena."
11Ruby Red Grapefruit's Radioactive Roots
Ruby Red grapefruit, among other modern foods, was the result of irradiating the seeds in the "gamma gardens" of the 1950s, an effort to show peaceful uses for fission energy.
12. Ancient Native Americans consumed a highly caffeinated ceremonial beverage of roasted holly leaves called cacina, or black drink. Conquistadores who consumed the drink daily provide some of the earliest written accounts of caffeine addiction.
13. Employees at General Motor's Fremont Assembly plant were considered excessively unruly in the 1980s and often left empty glass bottles inside the doors of unfinished cars to annoy future owners.
14. Until the 1990s, the entire US supply of botulism antitoxin was developed from a single horse, named First Flight.
15. Not all species die of old age. Some animals, such as hydra, planarian flatworms, and certain sponges, corals, and jellyfish, exhibit potential immortality.
16USS Eastland's Tragic Lifeboat Addition
In 1915, the USS Eastland cruise ship was retrofitted with additional lifeboats due to new regulations following the Titanic disaster. The additional top-heavy weight caused it to sink before it left port, killing 844 passengers.
17. Singer Teena Marie suffered a serious blow to the head while sleeping, from a large frame in a hotel room that might have contributed to her death.
18. Alice Kober, who helped decipher an ancient script known as Linear B, meticulously recorded her research in a collection of 180,000 index cards over 20 years. The script was deciphered in 1952, shortly after her death. It remains the only Bronze Age Aegean script that is readable now.
19. The Rambo lunchbox by Thermos in 1985 marked the end of the metal lunchbox era. Due to cost savings and a complaint from a group of mothers in Florida that children were using metal lunchboxes as weapons, manufacturers switched to making lunchboxes out of plastic.
20. Kenyan scientist Hope Mwanake uses throw-away plastics to build homes in Kenya. She apparently makes roof tiles and other construction materials from plastic and glass waste in Kenya. After realizing that locals were throwing away plastic buckets and bottles, she had this idea.
21Babe Ruth's Final Record-Breaking Hit
Babe Ruth, at the age of 40, hit his 714th and final home run over 500 feet, clearing Pittsburgh's Forbes Field's triple deck and bouncing off a nearby resident's roof.
22. Pumpkin pie and Thanksgiving were a matter of mid-19th-century identity politics. When Abraham Lincoln declared a day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November in 1863, many Southern families refused Thanksgiving and especially pumpkin pie as cultural artifacts of the Yankees.
23. The Old London Bridge was crowded with houses and shops, some of them reaching up to six stories in height.
24. McDonald's was fined $4 million in 1999 for not reporting 400+ injuries to children using Big Mac Climber jungle gyms, where children climbed up a tube from the ground and played between two giant metal hamburger buns. The last Big Mac Climbers were removed from McDonald's playgrounds in 1997.
25. Boeing used depleted uranium plates as counterweights in its 747 airplanes and some helicopters. While relatively safe, some of these plates have been lost. They stopped using it completely in 1981.
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RE: Fact #33 (Shotgun Houses: Southern Architectural Trend) – Wow….I live in a house that would be considered a shotgun house. I also live in the south. Alabama to be exact.