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- Owing to a faulty cornerstone, the church of St. John in Barmouth, Wales, crashed in ruins a minute after it was finished. It was rebuilt, and the new edifice has endured to the present day.
- A car operates at maximum economy, gas-wise, at speeds between 25 and 35 miles per hour.
- A car that shifts manually gets 2 miles more per gallon of gas than a car with automatic shift.
- A car uses 1.6 ounces of gas idling for one minute. Half an ounce is used to start the average automobile.
- Many of us feel that we have at least one book in us. But the business of publishing and the process of creating and selling a book can be forbidding. In New York City, America's publishing capital, things have gotten so hectic that some agents are seeing several editors over the course of one lunch.
- The Lord's Prayer appears twice in the Bible, in Matthew VI and Luke XI.
- The Luxor Hotel (shaped like an Egyptian Pyramid) is 36 stories tall, required more than 150,000 cubic yards of concrete, six thousand construction workers and 18 months to build. It takes a specially designed window washing device 64 hours to clean the sides of the pyramid, which is covered by 13 acres of glass. The Luxor atrium is the world's largest and could comfortably hold nine Boeing 747 airplanes.
- To prevent some numbers from occurring more frequently than others, dice used in crap games in Las Vegas are manufactured to a tolerance of 0.0002 inches, less than 1/17 the thickness of a human hair.
- A 41-gun salute is the traditional salute to a royal birth in Great Britain.
- At the height of the teddy bear's huge popularity in the early 1900s, there is record of one Michigan priest who publicly denounced the teddy as an insidious weapon. He claimed that the stuffed toy would lead to the destruction of the instincts of motherhood and eventual racial suicide.
- Beatrix Potter created the first of her legendary "Peter Rabbit" children's stories in 1902.
- The Sarah Winchester house, in San Jose, CA, is a truly bizarre piece of architecture. Mrs. Winchester, after losing first a daughter and then her husband to disease, consulted a medium to find the reason for her terrible luck. The medium advised her that there was a curse on her family, brought about by her husband's manufacturing of rifles when he was alive. To escape the curse, the medium advised, she should move West and build, and perhaps would live forever. Mrs. Winchester did just that, using the fortune she had inherited to buy a house and just keep building—adding on room after room for 36 years. Each room had 13 windows (the number was considered spiritual rather than unlucky) and many of the windows contained precious jewels. Other odd features of the house—intended to confuse evil spirits—included a staircase that went straight to a ceiling, doors that open onto two-story drops, a room with a glass floor, and a room without windows that - once entered - a person cannot leave without a key. The house contains 160 rooms, 2000 doors, and 10,000 windows, some of which open onto blank walls. There are also secret passageways.
- If an object has no molecules, the concept of temperature is meaningless. That's why it's technically incorrect to speak of the "cold of outer space" - space has no temperature, and is known as a "temperature sink," meaning it drains heat out of things.
- The gesture of a nose tap, in Britain, means secrecy or confidentiality. In Italy, a tap to the nose signifies a friendly warning.
- In 1981 a guy had a heart attack after playing the game BERSERK - video gaming's only known fatality.
- Mario, of Super Mario Bros. fame, appeared in the 1981 arcade game, Donkey Kong. His original name was Jumpman, but was changed to Mario to honor the Nintendo of America's landlord, Mario Segali.
- Alcoholics are twice as likely to confess a drinking problem to a computer than to a doctor, say researchers in Wisconsin.
- In the game Monopoly, the most money you can lose in one travel around the board (normal game rules, going to jail only once) is $26,040. The most money you can lose in one turn is $5070.
- The Grand Coulee Dam in the state of Washington in the U.S., completed in 1942, was hailed in its time as a structure more massive than the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
- The United States government keeps its supply of silver at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.
- A 17th-century Swedish philologist claimed that in the Garden of Eden God spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish, and the serpent spoke French.
- The Metro subway of Washington, DC, has several really deep stations. Its Forrest Glen station - in the Maryland suburbs - is 196 feet deep and has the longest subway escalator in the Western Hemisphere. But MOST of the subway stations in Leningrad are deeper than that.
- Out of all of the postage stamps in the United States with people's faces on them, there is not one that has the picture of someone alive.
- "Fine turkey" and "honeycomb" are terms used for different qualities and textures of sponges.
- In order to sell his sets of Shakespeare door-to-door, David McConnell offered free perfume to his customers. He realized the perfume was more popular and began selling cosmetics door-to-door. This began the company that grew into Avon.
- Some china is called "bone" china because some powdered animal bone is mixed in with the clay used to make this china: it gives the china a special kind of strength, whiteness, and translucency.
- Russians are buying skateboards from the U.S. - but not for recreational purposes. They see them as an answer to some of the country's transportation needs, because the boards are less expensive than bicycles and require little storage space. The first boards went to school instructors so they could train pupils how to ride them.
- The "black box" that houses an airplane's voice recorder is orange so it can be more easily detected amid the debris of a plane crash.
- The Colgate Company started out making starch, soap, and candles.
- In 1881, Procter & Gamble's Harley Procter decided that adding the word pure to his Ivory soap would give its sales a necessary shot in the arm. Analysis proved that Ivory was almost 100% pure fatty acids and alkali, the stuff that most soap is made of. Ivory's impurities were limited to 0.56%—0.11% uncombined alkali, 0.28% carbonates, and 0.17% mineral matter. Harley marked his soap 99 and 44/100% pure, deciding that using the exact number sounded more credible than rounding up to 100%.
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