Fact of the day

Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Fact N° 2022
New York was briefly named New Orange.
The initial Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam wound up providing New York with many of its more notable geographic names (including Breukelen, Haarlem and the 12-foot wall whose adjacent street would come to be known as Wall Street). The English captured the colony and renamed it New York, but in 1673, the Dutch briefly took it back and rechristened it New Orange. (A treaty the following year caused the settlement's control, and name, to revert once again).
Fact N° 2023
The fastest speed ever traveled by human beings is nearly 25,000 miles per hour.
Apollo 10, which was essentially a practice run for the Apollo 11 moon landing, returned to Earth on May 26th, 1969. During reentry, the command module hit a velocity of 24,791 miles per hour (39,897 km/h), according to Guinness World Records. The Apollo 10 mission report's own estimate is actually slightly faster (24,816 mph).
Fact N° 2024
Edison helped develop the electric chair to demonstrate the comparative safety of DC over AC.
After Nikola Tesla went to work for George Westinghouse in the development of AC devices, Thomas Edison (who was in the process of promoting direct current, and in competition with Westinghouse and Tesla) hired an employee to help develop the first electric chair, relying on alternating current in order to demonstrate that it was more dangerous than DC. The first-ever electric chair execution took place in 1890, and was particularly gruesome (the condemned man had to be electrocuted twice, over a prolonged period, until he finally died).
Fact N° 2025
Calvin Coolidge owned a legion of unusual pets, including a lion named Tax Reduction.
Coolidge and his wife owned several cats and dogs, a raccoon that was apparently sent to the White House to be eaten one Thanksgiving but was instead named Rebecca and kept, a wallaby, a duiker (small African antelope), and two lion cubs (Tax Reduction's partner was named Budget Bureau). As many of these pets simply arrived at the White House, Coolidge wound up sending most to the zoo, though he kept a chow chow named Tiny Tim.
Fact N° 2011
The world's largest crossword puzzle covers the side of a building in Ukraine.
A residential tower in Ivov, Ukraine is adorned with a 100-foot-tall pattern of large interlocking squares, some blanked out, the rest seemingly bare during the daytime. The questions for the puzzle are located around the city in public places of interest, and at night, the crossword squares are illuminated and the answers written on them become visible.
Fact N° 2012
Hyundai is the only major automaker with greater U.S. sales in 2009 than in 2008.
The Hyundai Kia Automotive Group (which is the world's fourth-largest automaker) was the only car company to report sales growth in 2009. In a year in which Toyota and GM -- the largest and second-largest automakers, respectively -- posted huge decreases, down 50% from the previous year in some months, Hyundai's sales were occasionally up as much as 30% from the previous year. (In 2010, Hyundai's numbers are still up from last year, but its sales growth is decelerating).
Fact N° 2013
Scientists have created a rocket fuel composed of nothing but aluminum and ice.
Aluminum is both very common (the most common metal in the Earth's crust) and very reactive, and it is already used as part of a space shuttle's rocket booster. Using a mixture of nanoaluminum (aluminum broken into much smaller pieces than typical fuel aluminum) and ice, called ALICE, scientists at Purdue successfully propelled a rocket 1300 feet in the air; it accelerated to 200 mph in under a second.

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