Wacky Facts

Britain’s Penny Black was the first adhesive postage stamp. India’s Scinde Dawk stamp followed in 1852.

The phrase was shortened over centuries, influenced by greetings like “good day”.

Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, a set of nearly 4,000 rules, is one of the oldest and most precise grammars ever written.

TIFRAC was developed at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and commissioned in 1960 after design began in the mid-1950s.

Dietmar Hopp, Hasso Plattner, Claus Wellenreuther, Klaus Tschira and Hans-Werner Hector left IBM to build standard software for real-time business processing. Their first customer site was a chemical company, and they worked on its computers at night.

Their wings rotate at the shoulder and beat in a figure-eight pattern, letting them hover, fly backwards and even briefly upside down. Small species beat their wings dozens of times per second.

Hungarian journalist László Bíró, frustrated by smudging fountain pens, developed a ballpoint pen with quick-drying ink and patented it in 1938.

After early hype, funding and interest collapsed in the mid-1970s and again in the late 1980s, periods now called AI winters. Promises had run far ahead of what computers could actually do.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis was coined in the 1930s specifically to be a long word; it refers to a lung disease.

Farmers grow rice up to about 2 m below sea level, one of few places in the world to do so.

It sank on 15 April 1912; lifeboats had room for barely half the people aboard.

Dadasaheb Phalke’s “Raja Harishchandra” was released in 1913. Female roles were played by men.

Two hearts pump blood through the gills and one through the body. Their blood uses copper-based haemocyanin, which makes it blue.

Diners Club, founded in 1950, is often called the first multipurpose charge card; the story says its founder forgot his wallet at dinner.

Squirrels bury nuts to eat later but fail to recover many, some of which grow into trees.

Antarctica and the Arctic are larger deserts by definition based on rainfall; the Sahara is the largest hot desert.

Louis Le Prince’s “Roundhay Garden Scene” (1888) is the oldest surviving motion picture.

3M engineer Richard Drew invented masking tape in 1925 to help car painters make clean two-tone lines.

Rules require gold medals to be at least 92.5% silver, plated with about 6 grams of gold.

No two tigers have the same stripe pattern, and the stripes are also on their skin, not just the fur. India has the world’s largest wild tiger population.

The serial-position effect: items at the beginning and end are recalled better than those in the middle.

Lake Natron is so alkaline that animals which die in it become coated in mineral deposits and preserved. Yet it is the main breeding site of lesser flamingos.

Rajasthan covers about 342,000 km², while Germany is about 357,000 km² — close, but Rajasthan is actually slightly smaller. It is still larger than Italy or the UK.

The Goods and Services Tax came into force at midnight on 1 July 2017 at a special session of Parliament.

The Moon has no wind or rain to erase them. Unless a meteorite hits the spot, the Apollo astronauts’ boot prints could survive for a very long time.

Earth has an estimated 3 trillion trees; the Milky Way is estimated to contain about 100–400 billion stars.

Engineers at Bell Labs gave the # key on telephone keypads the playful name “octothorpe” in the 1960s. It is also called the number sign or pound sign.

Boring in Oregon and Dull in Scotland became sister communities in 2012, and Bland Shire in Australia joined later to form a “trinity of tedium”.

Words and phrases such as “eyeball”, “bedroom”, “lonely” and “break the ice” are first recorded in his plays, though some may simply be the earliest surviving written use.

The layout comes from Christopher Latham Sholes’ typewriters of the early 1870s and has survived every technology change since.