Fast Facts

The tongue of a blue whale is as long as an elephant. Our eyes are always the same size from birth. Earth is not round, it is slightly pear-shaped. On average, people move house every 7 years. Mel Blanc, who played the voice of Bugs Bunny, was allergic to carrots. In this directory you’ll discover many more fascinating Fast Facts.

Tough little planet we live on:
At any time there are some 44,000 storms; lightning strikes the earth 100 times every second, and there are on average 35 earthquakes per day. Those are all acts of God, one may argue, but us humans don’t make it any easier on mother earth. Every year more than 2 million cases of arson is reported, and more than a million trees are chopped just to make toothpicks. Not all is gloom, however: 200 million couples make love (and 400,000 babies are born) every day.

Slavery:
Throughout history some 200 million people were enslaved. For more than 1000 years, Arab traders transported small groups of African slaves; the first record of a sizable slave trade dates to the 7th century. The majority of African slaves were acquired through wars by African rulers. One famous traders, Madam Tinubu, grew from rags to riches from it. But another African trader who called himself Grandy King George once specified a payment of only “one lucking-glass, six foot long by six foot wide,” an armchair, a stool and a cane. Not well known – and hardly spoken about – is that millions of Europeans were also traded as slaves. In the 17th and 18th centuries large numbers of poor whites were kidnapped on the streets of Europe and sold in the West Indies and elsewhere. Most countries in the world, including African countries, traded with slaves. Excluded were Russia and the Balkan countries. And, unlike what you might have expected, the slave trade is very active today still.

Steam and Jell-O:
Heron of Greece invented steam power in 50 BC. But the leaders of the day thought that it would cause unemployment and the invention ran out of steam. The steam engine reappeared in the 1600s in Ferdinand Verbiest’s steam car and then years later again, in 1804, when English inventor Richard Trevithick introduced the steam locomotive in Wales. In 1815, George Stephenson built the world’s first workable steam locomotive. In 1845, another steam engine manufacturer, Peter Cooper of New York (who built the Tom Thumb, the first American steam locomotive), concocted a gelatine dessert made almost entirely of sugar… which became popular as Jell-O.

Bad hair day:
Having a bad hair day? Spare some thought for your great-grandparents because in their time it took about 10 hours to complete the process of waving hair to withstand washing, weather and time. Compton’s Online Library explained that the advent of electricity sparked a major change in the concept of hairdressing when in London in 1906 the hairdresser Charles Nestlé invented the permanent-wave machine. The bulky machine – about the size of today’s fridge – took almost 20 minutes to get to usable heat and up to 10  hours to complete perming. Still, it was great 20th-century technology. The next year a Parisian chemistry student, Eugène Schueller founded the company L’Oréal, created a dye to cover gray hair with natural-looking colors in a permanent process, and made life a little more fun for a lot of people.

Food for thought:
Stephen Baldwin worked in a pizza parlor,
Jean-Claude Van Damme delivered pizzas,
Bill Murray was a pizza maker,
Madonna worked at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Julia Roberts worked in an ice cream parlor,
Queen Latifah worked at Burger King,
Andie McDowell worked at McDonalds, as did Quintin Tarentino,
Jennifer Aniston worked as a waitress in a burger cafe.
There’s hope for all of us!
Also see Real names of famous actors