Superglue is now used in forensic detection. When investigators open a foil packet of ethyl-gel cyanoacrylate, the fumes settle on skin oils left behind in human fingerprints, turning the invisible smears into visible marks.
TIPS FOR USING SUPERGLUE
A little dab’ll do ya. Superglue bonds best when it’s used at the rate of one drop per square inch. More than that requires a much longer bonding period, which may result in a weaker bond.
If you’re gluing two flat surfaces together, rough them up with sandpaper first. That’ll give the glue more surface area to bond to. But make sure you blow off any dusty residue first.
Glued your fingers together? Use nail polish remover. Don’t have any? Try warm, soapy water and a little patience. Your sweat and natural skin oils will soon loosen the bond.
Music & Musicians
Marcel Marceau’s greatest-hits album consisted of 40 minutes of silence, followed by applause.
More than 2.2 million Americans play the accordion.
There are more bagpipe bands in the United States than there are in Scotland.
When he needed inspiration, Ludwig van Beethoven poured water on himself.
Mozart wrote a piano piece that required the player to use both hands and his nose.
J. S. Bach played the cathedral organ. So did 100 of his descendants.
Sixty-one percent of Americans like to hear music when put on hold. Twenty-two percent prefer silence.
The “five golden rings” in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” weren’t originally rings. They were ring-necked pheasants.
The original jukeboxes came with earphones—only one person could listen at a time.
Artists who have recorded the most songs: the Mills Brothers (about 2,250).
The musical Cats ran on Broadway for 18 years.
Traditionally it isn’t a “big band” unless it has 10 different instrumentalists.
There are 158 verses in the Greek national anthem.
Singer Wayne Newton is a descendant of Pocahontas.
No one knows exactly where Mozart is buried in Vienna.
It’s Mind-Boggling
111,111,111 × 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
If you tried to count off a billion seconds, it would take you 31.7 years.
One speck of dust contains a quadrillion atoms.
Take a century and divide it into 50 million. You get about a minute.
Experts say time is getting shorter: 280 million years ago a year lasted 390 days.
The average drinking glass holds 50 teaspoons of water.
There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year.
It takes seven shuffles to thoroughly mix a 52-card deck.
The official definition of a “jiffy” is 1/100 of a second.
The Gregorian calendar is accurate to within half a day per 1,000 years.
Number of toothpicks you can make from one cord of wood: 75 million.
The word million was invented sometime around the year A.D. 1300
The Chinese were the first to use a decimal system, in the 6th century B.C.
There are 3 x 10 to the 33rd power (3,000 quintillion) individual living things on earth. (Of these, 75 percent are bacteria.)
The odds of someone winning a lottery twice in four months is about one in 17 trillion. But Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery in both 1985 and 1986.
And the Wiener Is ...
Known as the Animal, Ed Krachie is America’s wiener-eating champion. His best: 22.5 wieners (including buns) in 12 minutes.
Wieners are an economical buy. With virtually no weight loss during preparation, a pound of wieners yields a pound of edible food.
In 1970, at Camp David, the presidential retreat, wieners were served to Great Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Anne.
More hot dogs—2 million a year—are sold at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport than at any other single location in the world.
NASA included the hot dog as a regular menu item on its Apollo moon flights, Skylab missions, and the space shuttle.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture “officially recognizes” the following as legitimate names for the hot dog: 1) wiener, 2) frankfurter, 3) frank, 4) furter, 5) hot dog.
The favorite meal of acclaimed actress Marlene Dietrich was hot dogs and champagne.
Lucky dog: In May 2000 Larry Ross stopped for a hot dog at Mr. K’s Party Shoppe in Utica, Michigan. He had a $100 bill and bought lotto tickets with the change. One ticket was a $181.5 million winner.
“Some people don’t salivate when they walk by a hot dog stand and smell that great symbol of American cuisine, bursting with grease and salt. But they are a very, very small group.”
—New York Times
Brand Names
ACE BANDAGES
When World War I broke out in 1914, the Becton Dickinson Company had to stop importing German elastic bandages and start making them in the United States. They held a contest to give the new product a name. The winners: a group of doctors who called it ACE, for All Cotton Elastic.
DIAL SOAP
The name refers to a clock or watch dial. The reason: it was the first deodorant soap, and Lever Brothers wanted to suggest that it would prevent body odor “all around the clock.”
WD-40
In the 1950s the Rocket Chemical Company was working on a product for the aerospace industry that would reduce rust and corrosion by removing moisture from metals. It took them 40 tries to come up with a workable Water Displacement formula.
SARA LEE
Charles Lubin and his brother-in-law owned three bakeries in the Chicago area. But Lubin dreamed of bigger things. He wanted a product that would be distributed nationally. In 1949 he created a cheesecake that he could sell through supermarkets, and named it after his daughter, Sara Lee Lubin. Within five years the company had developed a way to quick-freeze Sara Lee cakes and was selling them all over the United States.
ADIDAS
Adolph and Rudi Dassler formed Dassler Brothers Shoes in Germany in 1925. After World War II the partnership broke up, but each brother kept a piece of the shoe business. Rudi called his new company Puma; Adolph, whose nickname was Adi, renamed the old company after himself—Adi Dassler.
Word Origins
BOO
Meaning: An exclamation used to frighten or surprise someone
Origin: “The word boh!, used to frighten children, was the name of Boh, a great general, the son of the Norse god, Odin, whose very appellation struck immediate panic in his enemies.” (Pulleyn’s Etymological Compendium, by M. A. Thomas)
HANGNAIL
Meaning: A small piece of skin that’s partially detached from the side or root of the fingernail
Origin: “Had nothing to do with a hanging nail—the original word was angnail. The ang referred to the pain it caused—as in ang/uish.” (Take My Words, by Howard Richler)
GYPSY
Meaning: A nomad, or a member of a nomadic tribe
Origin: “In the early 16th century members of a wandering race who called themselves Romany appeared in Britain. They were actually of Hindu origin, but the British believed that they came from Egypt, and called them Egipcyans. This soon became shortened to Gipcyan, and by the year 1600, to Gipsy or Gypsey.” (Webster’s Word Histories)
PEDIGREE
Meaning: A register recording a line of ancestors
Origin: The term comes from the French words pied de grue, which mean “foot of a crane.” French families of old kept family trees, but that’s not what they called them. They thought the look of a genealogy chart—small at the top and branching out at the bottom—looked more like the webbed foot of a bird than the roots of a tree. Any Frenchman who came from a family prominent enough to have a family tree was said to have a pied de grue.
TROPHY
Meaning: Something gained or given in victory or conquest
Origin: From the old Greek word trope, which meant the turning point in a battle. The Greek
s used to erect monuments at the exact spot on a battlefield where the tide had turned in their favor. Over the centuries the word evolved to represent any battle monument, whether or not it was on a battlefield . . . and even if it just commemorated a sporting victory.
CASTLE
Meaning: A large building, usually of the medieval period, fortified as a stronghold
Origin: “Castle was one of the earliest words adopted by the British from their Norman conquerors. Originally hailing from the Latin castellum (diminutive of castrum, ‘fort’), it reminds us that Old English also acquired castrum, still present in such place-names as Doncaster and Winchester. From Old French’s chastel (a version of castel) came the word château (circumflex accent marking the lost ‘s’).” (The Secret Lives of Words, by Paul West)
MIGRAINE
Meaning: A severe recurring headache
Origin: “Migraine had its beginning as a word in the Greco-Latin parts hemi-, ‘half,’ and cranium, ‘skull,’ which is descriptive of the violent headache that attacks one-half of the head.” (Word Origins, by Wilfred Funk)
BOULEVARD
Meaning: A broad avenue, often with one or more strips of plantings (grass, trees, flower beds) on both sides or down the center
Origin: “The name originally came from the Middle Low German Bolwerk, the top of the wide rampart—often 20 or more feet wide—that served as the defensive wall of medieval towns. As more sophisticated weaponry rendered such structures obsolete, they sometimes were razed to ground level and used as a wide street on the town’s perimeter. Vienna has such a broad boulevard, called the Ring, circling the old town on the site of its original city walls.” (Fighting Words, by Christine Ammer)
Americans at Home
Seventy-two percent of Americans don’t know the people who live next door.
Eleven percent of Americans have thrown out a dish just because they don’t want to wash it.
Researchers say one in four people admits to snooping in their host’s medicine cabinet.
If you’re an average adult, you spend 11 to 13 minutes in the shower.
Every 45 seconds, a house catches fire in the United States.
More than 50 percent of Americans get out of bed before 7 a.m.
Americans recycle more than 60 percent of their soft-drink containers.
Seventy-four percent of Americans say they make their beds every day. Five percent say they never do.
Fifty-seven percent of American households have three or more telephones.
Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of where they grew up.
Do you alphabetize your spice rack? Only one in 12 Americans does.
Experts say the average person spends 30 years mad at a family member.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American marriage lasts 9.4 years.
In 71 percent of baby boomer households, both spouses work.
According to a Tupperware study, you’ll wind up throwing out about three fourths of your leftovers.
Forty percent of Americans who move to a new address switch toothpaste brands at the same time.
Everyday Origins
SCOTCH TAPE
Believe it or not, the sticky stuff gets its name from an ethnic slur. When two-toned paint jobs became popular in the 1920s, Detroit carmakers asked the 3-M Company for an alternative to masking tape that would provide a smooth, sharp edge where the two colors met. 3-M came up with two-inch-wide cellophane tape, but auto companies said it was too expensive. So 3-M lowered the price by applying adhesive only along the sides of the strip. That caused a problem: The new tape didn’t stick—and company painters complained to the 3-M sales reps, “Take this tape back to your stingy ‘Scotch’ bosses and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” The name—and the new tape—stuck.
BRASSIERES
Mary Phelps Jacob, a teenage debutante in 1913, wanted to wear a rose-garlanded dress to a party one evening. But as she later explained, her corset cover “kept peeping through the roses around my bosom.” So she took it off, pinned two handkerchiefs together, and tied them behind her back with some ribbon. “The result was delicious,” she later recalled. “I could move much more freely, a nearly naked feeling.” The contraption eventually became known as a brassiere—French for “arm protector”—a name borrowed from the corset cover it replaced. (Jacob later became famous for riding naked through the streets of Paris on an elephant.)
TOOTHPASTE TUBES
Toothpaste wasn’t packaged in collapsible tubes until 1892, when Dr. Washington Wentworth Sheffield, a Connecticut dentist, copied the idea from a tube of oil-based paint. Increased interest in sanitation and hygiene made it more popular than jars of toothpaste, which mingled germs from different brushes. Toothpaste tubes quickly became the standard.
WRISTWATCHES
Several Swiss watchmakers began attaching small watches to bracelets in 1790. Those early watches weren’t considered serious timepieces and remained strictly a women’s item until World War I, when armies recognized their usefulness in battle and began issuing them to servicemen instead of the traditional pocket watch.
FORKS
Before forks became popular, the difference between refined and common people was the number of fingers they ate with. The upper classes used three; everyone else used five. This began to change in the 11th century, when tiny, two-pronged forks became fashionable in Italian high society. But they didn’t catch on; the Catholic Church opposed them as unnatural (it was an insult to imply that the fingers God gave us weren’t good enough for food), and people who used them were ridiculed as effeminate or pretentious. Forks weren’t generally considered polite until the 18th century—some 800 years after they were first introduced.
PULL-TOP BEER CANS
In 1959 a mechanical engineer named Ermal Cleon Fraze was at a picnic when he realized he’d forgotten a can opener. No one else had one either, so he had to use the bumper of his car to open a can of soda. It took half an hour, and he vowed he’d never get stuck like that again. He patented the world’s first practical pull-top can later that year, and three years later, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company tried using it on its Iron City Beer. Now every beer company does.
CASH REGISTERS
In 1879 a Dayton, Ohio, saloon keeper named James J. Ritty was vacationing on a transatlantic steamer when he took a tour of the engine room and saw a machine that counted the number of revolutions of the ship’s propeller. He figured a similar machine might help him keep track of his saloon sales, and prevent dishonest bartenders from looting the till. When he got home, he and his brother invented Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier—a machine with two rows of keys with amounts printed on them, a clocklike face that added up the amount of money collected, and a bell that rang after every transaction. It was the first product from the business that would become the National Cash Register Company (NCR).
Smoking
A nonsmoking bartender inhales the equivalent of 36 cigarettes during an eight-hour shift.
Smokers need to ingest 40 percent more vitamin C than nonsmokers just to stay even.
In an average day 3,000 Americans take up smoking. Most of them are kids under age 18.
Twenty-one percent of U.S. smokers say they don’t believe nicotine is addictive.
Nearly 8,000 children each year are poisoned by eating cigarette butts.
Each puff of smoke inhaled from a cigarette contains 4 billion particles of dust.
The U.S. government approves 599 additives for use in the manufacture of cigarettes.
About 10 million cigarettes are sold every minute.
During London’s Great Plague of 1665, smoking tobacco was thought to have a protective effect.
Nonsmokers dream more at night than smokers do.
Christopher Columbus introduced the smoking of tobacco to Europe after discovering the “strange leaves” on the island of Cuba.
Nicotine is named for Jean Nicot de Villemain, France’s ambassador to Portugal, w
ho wrote of tobacco’s medicinal properties, describing it as a panacea.
According to the American Heart Association, an estimated 47 million Americans smoke: 25.5 million men and 24.1 million women.
Miss Liberty
Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus was inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi modeled the statue after his mother. When she got tired, his mistress stepped in for the final touches.
Lady Liberty stands looking eastward, across the Atlantic, to the Old World.
Winds of 50 miles per hour cause the statue to sway as much as three inches. Her torch sways five inches.
The 25 windows in the crown symbolize gemstones found on the earth and the heavens’ rays shining over the world.
The seven rays on her crown represent the seven seas and continents of the world.
The tablet that Lady Liberty holds in her left hand reads “July 4, 1776” in (mostly) Roman numerals.
Total weight of the concrete foundation: 54 million pounds (27,000 tons).
The statue’s two-layer gown would take about 4,000 square yards of cloth to duplicate.
The Statue of Liberty’s waist size is 35 (feet).
The Statue of Liberty’s mouth is three feet wide.
The Statue of Liberty’s index finger is eight feet long.
On average, the fingernails of the Statue of Liberty weigh 100 pounds each.
The Statue of Liberty is patented.
On Mirrors
In the 1600s the Dutch used to cover their mirrors with curtains when not in use, lest the reflectiveness be used up!
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (Bathroom Readers) Page 3
