Having grown up in a rare bookstore, the son of an antique dealer, many interesting things crossed my path.
From maps showing South American giants to witch-hunting manuals and shipwreck diaries written in penguin blood, all sorts of oddities cross the rare book counter at one time or another.
I started recording them in a box called 'Interesting Things'. I had no other intention than to record the existence of these things before they disappeared again behind the closed doors of private collections.
When I moved to London to work for an auction company, Interesting Things and its vast array of notebooks, folders and hard drives came with me and, inevitably, my collection grew.
My interests even led me to work as a researcher and scriptwriter on the BBC TV program QI, as the so-called 'QI Elf'. So it’s fair to say I have a few “fun facts” up my sleeve. Here is a selection of the best I have collected. So how many did you know?
Which of these did Man leave on the Moon? A dart, a golden olive branch or four armrests: the answer is all three
World in numbers
- 0.5 percent of the global male population is descended from Genghis Khan.
- 0.7 percent of the global population is drunk right now.
- Potatoes have two more chromosomes than humans.
- Andy Murray has three kneecaps.
- Singer Harry Styles has four nipples.
- 20% of British teenagers think Winston Churchill is a fictional character.
- Ed Sheeran can put 55 Maltesers in his mouth.
- 86% of Fortune 500 executives cheat at golf.
- 145 pairs of underwear were buried with Tutankhamun.
- There are 421 Scottish words for snow.
- 2.5 million Mills & Boon pulped romance novels were mixed into the foundation of the M6 toll road to help bind the tarmac.
- A single city in China produces more than a third of the world's socks. Datang, known as 'Sock City' in the eastern province of Zhejiang, is home to more than 10,000 companies that produce socks and socks. Every year they produce 27 billion socks.
The Universe
So far, humans have left more than 187,400 kg of material on the Moon, including a javelin, an olive branch made of gold, five American flags, four armrests and 96 bags of human waste.
A 2019 YouGov poll found that 48 per cent of Brits would not want to go to the Moon even if their safety was guaranteed – 23 per cent were “not interested”, 11 per cent said there was “not enough to see or do on the Moon.” Moon' and 9% did not understand the meaning.
Alien Abduction Insurance was first sold by the Saint Lawrence Insurance Agency of Florida in 1987
The Moon has lunar earthquakes and the stars have stellar earthquakes. The largest earthquake occurred on December 27, 2004, about 42,000 light years away. It released an intense burst of gamma rays equivalent to 1,037 kW. If this had happened ten light years from Earth, all life on our planet would have been incinerated.
Alien Abduction Insurance was first sold by Florida's Saint Lawrence Insurance Agency in 1987. In 1994, an entity known as the 'UFO Abduction Insurance Company' claimed to have sold a similar policy to 34,000 Americans.
The first unidentified flying object (UFO) sighting dates back to Ancient Rome: 'Something that looked like ships shone in the sky… It is said that something that looked like a large fleet was seen in the sky at Lanuvius, near Rome.'
The photons, particles of light, that reach your eyes right now, passed through Mercury 5 minutes ago and left the Sun 8 minutes ago.
The Sun is not yellow, it is white – with a touch of turquoise.
The average lightning bolt carries 100 million volts and can instantly reach a temperature of 27,760°C.
About half of all water on Earth may have originated as ice particles floating in a cloud of interstellar gas that existed before our solar system. This means there is a 50:50 chance that the water in your glass is older than the Sun.
Tomorrow will always be the longest day of your life. Billions of years ago, a day on Earth lasted 13 hours. Since then, the Moon has been moving away from us at a rate of 38 mm each year. This is because the friction caused by tidal drag slightly reduces the energy with which the Earth rotates, while the Moon gains energy from this, moving it into a slightly higher orbit. As Earth's rotation slows, its days get a little longer.
History
No one knows why Neanderthals became extinct. In a sense, they didn't entirely, since modern Europeans and Asians have about 1% to 2% Neanderthal DNA. Archaeologists have revealed that Neanderthals wore body glitter, jewelry, makeup and capes.
Before it was known as The Big Apple, New York's nickname in the 19th century was The Big Onion as there were so many layers to explore.
Napoleon's penis, which has its own Wikipedia page, has passed through many hands since it was stolen during his autopsy. The most recent owner, the daughter of a New Jersey urologist, was offered $100,000 but has not yet sold.
Sharks are older than trees. Fossil evidence of them dates back 450 million years. About 30 million years later, the first plant life arrived
When the Aztec Empire was founded in 1427, Oxford University was at least 330 years old.
The vending machine is almost 2,000 years old – the first known example was invented by Hero of Alexandria in 60 AD to dispense holy water when a coin was inserted into a slot.
Sharks are older than trees. Fossil evidence of them dates back 450 million years. About 30 million years later, the first plant life emerged.
Genghis Khan killed so many people that it cooled the planet. A 2020 study found that as a result of the 40 million people who died during the Khan-led Mongol invasion, huge areas of cultivated land reverted to forest. This absorbed about 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
During World War II, Jack Warner, president of Warner Bros., was worried that Japanese bombers would mistake his buildings for the nearby Lockheed aircraft factory, so he painted a twenty-foot arrow on its roof with a huge sign that read 'LOCKHEED ThatAway'.
Since 1950, the US has lost at least six nuclear weapons that have never been recovered.
US President Jimmy Carter once sent his jacket to be dry cleaned, only later realizing he had left 'the cookie' (nickname for a laminated card with the codes for the country's nuclear arsenal) in one of his pockets .
The Body
- All of the world's supply of Viagra and Botox is made in Ireland.
- There is gold in humans. A body weighing 70kg will contain on average a total of about 0.2mg of gold. The precious metal is essential in transmitting electrical signals throughout the body.
- About 150 cases of leprosy are reported in the US each year. One-fifth of these cases are reported in Florida.
- During the winter in Antarctica, Dr. Leonid Rogozov (1934-2000) was forced to remove his own appendix in 1961. Since then, doctors staying at Antarctic winter stations have had to remove their appendages before arrival.
- Fingerprints, sometimes called “random prints,” are formed by friction when touching the walls of our mother's uterus. In week 19, they are set. This is why prints are unique to each person, even genetically identical twins.
Animals
In recent films, Godzilla is about 105 meters tall, which means the monster weighs 20,000 tons, or about 100 blue whales. To sustain this mass, Godzilla would need to eat around 25 tons of food to obtain 20 million calories per day – the same requirements as a city of 10,000 inhabitants.
The first to test the ejection seat of a US Air Force jet was a two-year-old black bear named Yogi on March 21, 1962. Yogi landed dazed but unharmed 7 minutes and 49 seconds later.
In 2014, a pine tree planted in a Los Angeles park in memory of George Harrison was destroyed by beetles.
Every English elm today is descended from a single tree transported by the Romans to Britain to support and train vines.
Cats can technically be classified as liquids or solids. Physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin demonstrated that, with their ability to fill the small containers in which they usually jump, felines meet the necessary criteria for liquids.
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer is female, as are all the other reindeer that pull Santa's sleigh. We know this by the way they are always portrayed as having horns. Male reindeer use their antlers to fight each other during the autumn breeding season, but at Christmas they discard them. Only females keep them in winter.
Art and words
The Mona Lisa is the only painting of the more than 1 million works of art in the Louvre collection that has received its own postman to deal with the flood of love letters from admirers.
Novelist Barbara Cartland holds the record for the most books published in one year, producing 23 in 1976.
Donald Trump had his Twitter account (now X) hacked by a Dutch man who guessed his password as 'yourefired', his catchphrase from The Apprentice
Hapax legomenon is the term for a word that occurs only once in a written work, or in the total works of an author. The words 'girl' and 'boy' occur only once in the Bible. Only one 'burp' appears in Shakespeare's works, and it is emitted by Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night.
Donald Trump had his Twitter account (now X) hacked by a Dutchman who guessed his password as 'yourefired', his catchphrase from The Apprentice. Two years later, the same hacker guessed the new password as 'maga2020!'.
In 2013, it was revealed in a court case that footballer Wayne Rooney's password was 'Stella Artois'.
Adapted from The Most Interesting Book in the World by Edward Brooke-Hitching (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). © Edward Brooke-Hitching 2024. To order a copy for £13.49 (offer valid until 19/10/24; free UK P&P on orders over £25), go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
