Here are some Little Known
Facts about:
Time and Measurements
"Fortnight" is a contraction of "fourteen nights." In
the US
"two weeks" is more commonly used.
A bathometer is an instrument for
indicating the depth of the sea beneath a moving vessel.
A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a
second.
A Sphygmomanometer measures blood
pressure.
A typical lightning bolt is two to four inches wide and two
miles long.
A wind with a speed of 74 miles or
more is designated a hurricane.
Any month that starts on a Sunday will have a Friday the
13th in it.
At 4,145 miles, the Nile River is the
longest in the world.
Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power
factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5!
Easter is the first Sunday after the
first Full Moon after March 21.
England and the American colonies adopted the Gregorian
calendar on September 14th, 1752. 11 days disappeared.
Flying from London to New York by
Concord, due to the time zones crossed, you can arrive 2 hours before
you leave.
If the sun stopped shining suddenly, it would take eight
minutes for people on earth to be aware of the fact.
If you add up the numbers 1-100
consecutively (1+2+3+4+5 etc) the total is 5050.
In 1947, heavy snow blanketed the Northeast, burying New
York City under 25.8 inches snow in 16 hours; the severe weather was
blamed for some 80 deaths.
Light travels at the rate of 186,200
miles a second.
More than 99.9% of all the animal species that have ever
lived on earth were extinct before the coming of man.
Nearly 50% of all bank robberies take
place on Friday.
Ten inches of snow equals one inch of rain in water
content.
The anemometer is an instrument which
measures the force, velocity, or pressure of the wind.
The base of the Great Pyramid of Egypt is large enough to
cover 10 football fields.
The greatest snowfall ever in a
single
storm was 189 inches at the Mount Shasta Ski Bowl in February, 1959.
The Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory in
1582 AD, and was adopted by Great Britain and the English colonies in
1752.
The highest point of the earth, with
an elevation of 29,141 feet, is the top of Mt. Everest in Tibet.
The highest temperature ever recorded in the continental US
was 134 degrees on July 10, 1913 in Death Valley, California.
The highest temperature ever recorded
in the world was 136.4 degrees Fahrenheit at El Azizia, Lybia, on
September
13, 1922.
The highest waterfall in the world, Angel Falls in
Venezuela, has a total drop of 3,121 feet.
The linen bandages that were used to
wrap Egyptian mummies averaged 1,000 yards in length.
The lowest temperature ever recorded in the world was 129
degrees below 0 at Vostok, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.
The metal instrument used in shoe
stores to measure feet is called the Brannock device.
The monastic hours are matins, lauds, prime, tierce, sext,
nones, vespers and compline.
The most snow accumulation in a
one-day period was 75.8 inches at Silver Lake, Colorado, in April 1921.
The wristwatch was invented in 1868 by Patek Phillipe.
The first wristwatch for men was
invented in 1904 by Louis Cartier.
There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year.