A person will usually swallow around 250 times during dinner
The word 'health' comes from the Anglo-Saxon term hal meaning 'wholeness.'i
A dog was the first in space and a sheep, a duck and a rooster the first to fly in a hot air balloon.
The world's first travel agencies were Cox & Kings, founded in 1758, and Thomas Cook, founded in 1850.
The 16th century Escorial palace of King Phillip II of Spain had 1,200 doors.
The deepest hole ever drilled by man is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, in Russia. It reached a depth of 12,261 meters (about 40,226 feet or 7.62 miles). It was drilled for scientific research and gave up some unexpected discoveries, one of which was a huge deposit of hydrogen so massive that the mud coming from the hole was 'boiling' with it. The borehole is pictured above.
In 1811 and 1812, three earthquakes measuring around 8 on the richter scale, caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards. These earthquakes also created Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee.
Glaciers store between 70% and 80% of all the freshwater on the planet. 99% of those glaciers are in the Arctic and Antarctic.
The hottest temperature recorded on earth is El Azizia Libya at 136 F, the coldest was -134 degrees fahrenheit in Vostok Antarctica. The hottest average temp is in western Australia, it is 96 degrees year round on average.
The largest city in the world based on surface area, is Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia which is 263,953 km squared.
Gorgias of Epirus (3rd century BC), a Greek sophist, was born in his dead mother's coffin! Pallbearers heard him crying out as they carried his mother's coffin to the grave.
In the 1700s in Paris, women wore hats with lightning rods attached when venturing outdoors during bad weather. Bad idea.
In 1958, the US sent two mice called Laska and Benjy into space.
Accounts from Holland and Spain suggest that during the 1500s and 1600s urine was commonly used as a tooth-cleaning agent.
Playing-cards were known in Persia and India as far back as the 12th century. A pack then consisted of 48 instead of 52 cards.
Beer was the first trademarked product – British beer Bass Pale Ale received its trademark in 1876.
Music was sent down a telephone line for the first time in 1876, the year the phone was invented.
On 21 June 1913, over Los Angeles, Georgia Broadwick became the first women to parachute from an airplane.
The first parachute jump from an airplane was made by Captain Berry at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1912.
Only one of the Seven Wonders of the World still survives: the Great Pyramid of Giza.
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