Amazing Facts archive

• Outside of Asia, soya sauce was first sold in the Netherlands
• The Kikkoman soy sauce bottle design was invented by a Japanese sailor.
• The designer, Kenji Ekuan was awarded the 2003 Lucky Strike Designer Awards and is displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
• Soya sauce contains 10 times the anti-oxidants found in red wine
• Soya sauce takes 6 months to make

• The first message sent via Morse Code was “What hath God wrought?”
• The Morse Code distress signal “SOS” was initially “CQD” (“sécu” of sécurité) and means “All stations: distress.”
• The first distress code was sent 60 years after its invention and 30 years after the death of its creator Samuel Morse
• Samuel Morse was a supporter of slavery

• A manuscript by Jules Verne predicted camera phones as far back as 1874

• By 2010, electronically stored information was estimated at 1.2 billion terabytes (by IDC)
• If these information were stored on CDs, the stack would reach the moon and back.
• Our digital world grew by 2/3 in 2010 alone
• An estimated 15 per cent of that information would be stored in an internet cloud system

• New York Times had the telephone number 1111111111
• 75,000 trees are cut down each week to print the Sunday edition of the New York Times

• Recycling one aluminium can will generate enough energy to power a television for 3 hours

• It is a fact that there are over 250,000 sweat glands in our feet
• Our feet produce almost 1/2 a cup of sweat a day
• Foot odour comes from bacteria eating dead skin and sweaty feet provide the right environment for bacteria and fungi
• Your foot produces sweat even when you are not exercising
• Your feet sweats in order to keep the skin supple
• I feel for people with smelly feet, so here are some ways to cure them

1. Use antibacterial soap to wash your feet
2. Newspaper is a great way to absorb the odour in smelly shoes. Just crumple some and leave them in
3. Baking soda can take away the stink in your shoe
4. Drink lots of water

• Truffles were first discovered by pigs
• The ancient Greeks thought that truffles were made when lightning struck damp soil
• Pigs are used to find truffles because truffles produce a sex pheromone almost identical to that found in a male pig’s saliva
• Contrary to belief, truffle oil only contains tiny amounts of truffle
• The most expensive truffle sold for over £28,000

• The contact lens was invented in 1888, the same year the first beauty contest was held
• It is a fact that contact lenses were first made of heavy glass

It is an interesting fact that in olden times, people were so superstitious and gullible that animals were often used to cure ailments and fix problems:

• after a fall, one had to drink the blood from a cat’s tail that had been chopped off
• a bad chest was cured by drinking blood from a cat’s ear mixed with red wine
• A field full of weed could be fixed by burying a dead cat in it
• in the middle ages, quacks believed that animals spoke in Latin and that their cries had significance
• a person with scarlet fever was cured by taking hair from the patient and feeding it to an ass, which was to contract the fever and thus curing the patient
• children with measles were treated by plucking hair from the nape of their necks and feeding it to dogs
• patients with rickets would be passed over the back and under the belly of an ass (donkey) nine times without uttering the word by successive numbers
• if you had fits, every morning you will need to chew on some grass and feed it to a jay. Once the bird died, you would be cured
• In Europe, epilepsy was cured by cutting the nose off a mole and letting 9 drops of blood fall on a cube of sugar which was then eaten by the patient
• In Shropshire, a toothache was treated by simply applying the amputated foot of a poor mole
• a person bitten by a dog was to eat the hair from the same dog
• eels were placed in the ears of deaf people to cure them