Odd Historical Facts

1. The world's youngest parents were age 8 and 9. They lived in China and had their child in 1910.
   
2. Kotex was first manufactured as bandages, during WWI.
   
3. In the 16th and 17th centuries in the country of Turkey, anyone caught drinking coffee was put to death.
4. Abraham Lincoln's dog, Fido, was also assassinated.
   
5. In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
6. About 3,000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 30.
7. The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by Egyptians in 2000 B.C.
8. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
9. The youngest pope was 11 years old.
10. Richard Versalle, a tenor performing at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, suffered a heart attack and fell 10 feet from a ladder to the stage just after singing the line, "You can only live so long."
11. 60.7 percent of eligible voters participated in the 2004 presidential election, the highest percentage in 36 years. However, more than 78 million did not vote. This means President Bush was re-elected by less than 31% of all eligible voters in the United States.
12. David Bowie used to think he was being stalked by someone who is dressed like a giant pink rabbit. Bowie noticed the fan at several recent concerts, but became alarmed when he got on a plane and the bunny was also on board.
13. Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and whose shame created the expression for ignominy: "His name is Mudd."
14. Wayne's World was filmed in two weeks.
    
15. The first Fords had engines made by Dodge.
16. In Ancient Egypt , priests plucked every hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.
17. More than 8,100 US troops are still listed as missing in action from the Korean War.
    
18. As of January 1, 2004, the population of the United States increases by one person every 12 seconds. There is a birth every eight seconds, an immigrant is added every 25 seconds, and a death every 13 seconds.
19. Inn the great fire of 1666, half of London was burnt down but only six people were injured.
20. Toto was paid $125 per week while filming The Wizard of Oz.
21. The only member of the band ZZ Top without a beard has the last name Beard.
22. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
23. In Egypt around 1500 B.C., a shaved head was considered the ultimate in feminine beauty. Egyptian women removed every hair from their heads with special gold tweezers and polished their scalps to a high sheen with buffing cloths.
    
24. George Lumley, aged 104, married Mary Dunning, aged 10, in Nortallerton, England on August 25, 1783. She was the great-great granddaughter of the woman who'd broken her engagement to Lumley, eighty years before.
25. In Elizabethan England, the spoon was so novel and prized that people carried their own folding spoons to banquets.
    
26. It costs more to buy a new car today in the United States than it cost Christopher Columbus to equip and undertake three voyages to and from the New World.
27. Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone.
28. Millie the White House dog earned more than four times as President Bush in 1991.
29. A law passed in Nebraska in 1912 set hard rules of the road. Drivers in the country at night were required to stop every 150 yards, send up a skyrocket, then wait eight minutes for the road to clear before proceeding cautiously, all the while blowing their horn and shooting off flares.
30. Louis XIV of France really was as unpleasant a fellow as he's been depicted. In 1674, when he was visiting a school at Clermont, he heard from the school's authorities that one of the children, a nine- year-old Irish lad named Francis Seldon, had made a pun about the king's bald head.
    Louis was furious. He had a secret warrant drawn up for the child's arrest, and young Seldon was thrown into solitary confinement in the Bastille. His parents, members of one of Europe's richest merchant families, were told simply that the child had disappeared. Days turned to months, months to years, and Louis himself passed away. But Francis spent sixty-nine years "in the hole" for making fun of the king's baldness.