Wacky Facts

He was about 1.68–1.70 m tall — average or slightly above for a Frenchman of his time. The myth came from confusion between French and British inches, his nickname “le petit caporal” (a term of affection) and British cartoonists who drew him tiny.

The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 27 August 1896 lasted roughly 38 to 45 minutes. British ships bombarded the palace after the new sultan refused to stand down, and a ceasefire followed within the hour.

It held the record until Lincoln Cathedral’s spire in England surpassed it around 1311.

Thousands of inscriptions exist, but most are very short and no bilingual text has been found.

The word “salary” is often linked to Latin “salarium”, connected with salt, though historians debate the details.

Taxila, in present-day Pakistan, attracted students of medicine, law and politics; Chanakya is said to have taught there.

The sculpture from Sarnath was adopted as the national emblem on 26 January 1950.

The word “tittle” comes from medieval Latin and also appears in the phrase “to a T”, which some believe comes from “to a tittle” — meaning exactly.

Its earliest known printed use is in Dr. Seuss’s “If I Ran the Zoo” (1950), as the name of a small, grumpy creature. Within a year it was being used as slang for a boring or square person.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2560 BC; Cleopatra died in 30 BC, about 2,000 years before Apollo 11 in 1969.

To switch to the Gregorian calendar, 2 September 1752 was followed by 14 September. Until then the English legal new year began on 25 March.

Emperor Ashoka’s messages on rocks and pillars, from the 3rd century BCE, are among India’s earliest dated inscriptions.

A papyrus describes urinating on wheat and barley seeds; modern tests found the method worked better than chance.

It ran 34 km from Bori Bunder (Mumbai) to Thane on 16 April 1853.

An American doctor promoted tomato ketchup as a cure for indigestion and other ailments, and it was sold as pills before the claims were discredited.

Levi Hutchins of New Hampshire built a personal alarm clock in 1787 that rang only at 4 a.m. — the time he wanted to wake up. He never patented it.

Their civil calendar had 12 months of 30 days plus 5 extra days.

The Maya and Aztecs used cacao beans as a form of currency. Cacao drinks were prized, and beans could be traded for food and goods.

Czech writer Karel Čapek introduced “robot” in his 1920 play R.U.R. The word comes from the Czech “robota”, meaning forced labour — the artificial workers in the play eventually rebel.

Scottish inventor Alexander Bain patented an electric printing telegraph that could transmit images in 1843 — more than 30 years before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent in 1876.

Designed by D. Udaya Kumar, the symbol blends the Devanagari “र” and the Latin “R”. It was chosen through a public competition.

The word comes from Latin “salarium”. A popular story says Roman soldiers were paid in salt; historians say the link to salt is real but the exact origin is debated.

Nalanda in Bihar flourished from the 5th century CE and attracted scholars from China, Korea and Central Asia. Its ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In 1930 Gandhi walked from Sabarmati to Dandi over 24 days to protest the British salt tax.

It is very long but only a few metres wide and made of materials that blend into the landscape. Astronauts, including China’s first astronaut Yang Liwei, have said they could not see it unaided from orbit. Cities and airports at night are far easier to spot.

In the 1830s an American physician promoted tomato ketchup as a cure for indigestion and other ailments, and it was sold in pill form for a while.

The text covers taxation, trade, law and statecraft and is attributed to Kautilya, also called Chanakya.

The series of conflicts between England and France ran from 1337 to 1453, with long truces in between.

Most of Whittier’s roughly 270 residents live in the 14-storey Begich Towers, which also houses the police station, post office and shops; the town is reached by a one-lane tunnel shared with trains.

It was built for the 1889 World’s Fair with a permit for 20 years. It survived partly because it proved useful as a radio transmission tower.

No horned Viking-age battle helmet has ever been found. The image became popular in the 19th century through Romantic art and costume designs for Wagner’s operas.

A small population survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic until about 4,000 years ago, after the Great Pyramid was completed.

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

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

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.

Teaching at Oxford existed by 1096. Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325.

According to tradition, the first recorded Olympics in 776 BCE featured only the stadion, a sprint of about 190 metres.

She belonged to the Ptolemaic dynasty descended from a general of Alexander the Great — and was the first of them to learn Egyptian.

Around 1157 BCE, workers building royal tombs stopped work because their grain rations were late.

Mohenjo-daro and Harappa had planned streets, brick houses with bathrooms, and covered drainage systems — among the most advanced urban sanitation of the ancient world.

In 1932 soldiers with machine guns were sent to cull emus damaging crops in Western Australia; the birds proved so hard to hit that the operation was largely abandoned.

Western Union reportedly turned down the chance to buy Bell’s telephone patent in the 1870s.

A “peppercorn rent” is a token rent, historically a literal peppercorn, used to make a lease legally binding. Some leases still use it today.

In 1952 Israel’s government offered Einstein the largely ceremonial presidency. He declined, saying he lacked the aptitude for dealing with people.