Archives: Useless Facts

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, using the pen name Lewis Carroll, wrote “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which was banned in China.

In China, animals are forbidden to use human language. This belief led China to ban which book written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Ferdinand Magellan was trying to find a way to sail through the land mass of the new world (the Americas) to reach the Spice Islands and ultimately circle the earth with his ships.
The search proved difficult, but finally in October of 1520, after almost a year and the loss of one of his five ships, he found what would come to be known as the “”Straits of Magellan.” It took him 38 days to sail through the straits, but he eventually reached the Pacific at the end of November 1520.
Not realizing how large the Pacific was, they thought a crossing would only take a few days. Exhausted and almost out of supplies, four months later the ships reached Guam (March 1521). The explorers were now able to find fresh supplies and continue their quest to reach the Spice Islands.
Unfortunately Magellan was killed by Philippine natives only a month later, although his crew eventually completed their journey – having lost 4 of their original 5 ships! The surviving ship finally returned to Spain in the fall of 1522 proving Magellan’s belief in circumnavigation true. Sadly he never lived to see it.

Of Portuguese birth, but sailing under the Spanish flag, Ferdinand Magellan set sail in September of 1519, trying to reach the Spice Islands. He believed he could get there sailing West and circumnavigating the globe, but he needed to find something to convince skeptics he was right. What?

Most people are unaware of the fact that the RMS Titanic had two far less famous sister ships, the older Olympic and the younger Britannic. Prior to the Titanic sinking (Sept. 20, 1911), the HMS Hawke collided with the Olympic, damaging both ships badly, although fortunately no lives were lost. But after the Titanic sank (Nov. 21, 1916), the Titanic’s younger sister Britannic was hit by a mine in the Aegean Sea. It sank and took 30 lives with her.
On board all three ships at the times each of their disasters struck were Violet Jessop, a nurse, and Arthur John Priest, a stoker. Truth is stranger than fiction!

On April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in mid-Atlantic with the loss of 1,500 lives. What most people don’t know is what happened to her two, almost identical, sister ships and what they all had in common. Do you?

The automobile that Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were riding in a car had a license plate “A 111118.” World War I ended four years after the assassination that started it, when the armistice (“A”) came into effect Nov. 11, 1918 (11 11 18). You can’t make this up!

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, set off World War I. What is fascinating about the automobile he and his wife were riding in at the time?

Although the chance of a meteorite striking a house is small, of the three that have occurred in the US last century, two of the houses that were hit are in the town of Wethersfield, Connecticut. That town is only 13.1 square miles in size. The homes were struck 11 years apart, in 1971 and 1982. There were no injuries in either of those instances, but on November 30, 1954, a meteor appeared in the Alabama sky and exploded in the atmosphere just before 3:00 p.m. A chunk went through the home of Mr. & Mrs. Hodges, smashing a hole in the roof and striking Elizabeth Ann Hodges in the hip. Although there were reported close calls and some reported incidents of animals being struck prior to that incident, until then there had been no authenticated cases of a person actually being struck by a meteorite.

The number of documented cases of meteorites striking a house is extremely small. Only three are known to have occurred in the U.S. in the 20th century. What’s interesting about that?