Collection of Insane and Fun Facts
In 1981 Dean Koontz wrote a book “The Eyes of Darkness”. The chapter 39 it mentions a Chinese military lab outside of the city of Wuhan, where a deadly virus is invented as part of the country’s biological weapons warfare programme. Owing to the lab’s location, the virus is named ‘Wuhan-400’.
The Bikini swimsuit was introduced by Louis Réard four days after the first nuclear device was detonated over the Bikini Atoll. Réard hoped that his swimsuit’s revealing style would create an “explosive commercial and cultural reaction” similar to the social reaction the nuclear explosion.
Prescription drugs are so expensive, an insurance company is flying members from Utah to Mexico to fill their drugs, stay in a hotel overnight, and giving them a $500 stipend on top of the free travel and lower copays.
Marshall Mabey was a $1 a day NYC tunnel worker called “Sandmen”. On Feb 19 1916, he was working under the East River where the tunnel was pressurized to prevent cave ins. A crack in the ceiling vented Mabey up through the mud, the East River and 25 feet into the air. He lived and was uninjured.
In 1997 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, a pot-bellied pig named Lulu saved her owner, having a heart attack. Lulu heard the owner’s cries of pain then forced her way out of the yard and played dead on the road. Lulu successfully stopped a car and guided help to the owner, she survived.
In 1821, Thomas Jennings became the first African-American to hold a patent. He invented ‘dry scouring’, a method for removing dirt and grease from clothing that would lead to today’s dry cleaning.
The ratio of people using email for fun versus those using it for work has flipped since the 1990s. Many people nowadays dread email “because it is a conduit for unwanted advertising, a wide range of spam, and flat out attempts to scam or ‘phish’ us”.
Alan Turing once bought 150lbs of silver, but didn’t trust banks so he buried it in the woods instead. After the price of silver had almost doubled, he went to dig it up, but could no longer find it.
In 1942 there was a man called “the phantom barber”, who would sneak into people’s homes in Mississippi at night and cut their hair
Antarctica doesn’t have any permanent citizens and has no indigenous population. Only 11 children are known to have been to be born there.