|
681/ A ball of glass will
bounce higher than a ball of rubber. A ball of solid steel
will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.
682/ A bicycle headlight mostly
allows others to see you. However, some of the brighter lights
do aid nighttime vision. Most lights range in wattage from
2.4 to 20. Police department bikes in the United States use
a minimum of 15 watts.
683/ A device invented as
a primitive steam turbine by the Greek engineer Hero
of Alexandria, about the time of the birth of Christ,
is used today as a rotating lawn sprinkler.
684/ After his death in 1937,
Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph was
honoured by broadcasters worldwide as they let the airwaves
fall silent for two minutes in his memory.
685/ Colonel Waring, New York
City Street Cleaning Commissioner, was responsible for organizing
the first rubbish sorting plant for recycling in the United
States in 1898.
686/ Computers and Hard Drives
aren't as fragile as they were a few years ago, but you're
asking for trouble if you move your PC around while it is
running. While your computer is running, its hard disk is
very vulnerable. A tiny magnet literally floats less than
a hair's breadth above a platter where data is stored. A minor
bump can send the magnet skittering into the disk's surface.
The damage cannot be repaired. Not only will you need a new
hard disk, but you will be likely to lose the information
the disk held.
687/ Cooking and salad oils
could lubricate machinery, such as cars and boats, according
to Penn State chemical engineers. Tests found that when blended
with an additive developed at Penn State, some vegetable oils
perform as well as or better than commercial oils.
688/ During the US Civil War,
telegraph wires were strung to follow and report on the action
on the battlefield. But there was no telegraph office in the
White House, so President Lincoln trekked across the street
to the War Department to get the news.
689/ Rust is everywhere. According
to a recent study, the annual cost of metallic corrosion in
the US is approximately $300 billion.
690/ Gold salts are sometimes
injected into the muscles to relieve arthritis.
691/ Turning a clock's hands
counterclockwise while setting it is not necessarily harmful.
It is only damaging when the timepiece contains a chiming
mechanism.
692/ In 1969, the Navy spent
$375,000 on an "aerodynamic analysis of the self-suspended
flare". The study's conclusion was that the frisbee was
not feasible as military hardware.
693/ Inside an asbestos suit
coated with aluminium, a fire fighter may experience a sweaty,
but tolerable, 85 degrees to 100 degrees F, while attempting
to extinguish an inferno of jet fuel raging at over 2,000
degrees.
694/ It is estimated that
1.8 billion light bulbs are manufactured each year in the
United States.
695/ It takes 1,100 watts
to run an electric toaster.
696/ It took Henty Ford's
Motor Company seven years to manufacture 1 million cars. One
hundred and thirty two working days after this original milestone
was reached (in 1924), the company had made 9 million more
cars.
697/ Nanotechnology has produced
a guitar no bigger than a blood cell. The guitar, 10 micrometres
long, has six strummable strings.
698/ Natural Gas has no smell.
The odour is artificially added so that people will be able
to identify leaks and take measures to stop them.
699/ Not until Herbert Hoover
was US president in 1929, did the US CEO have a private telephone
in his office. (The telephone had been invented 53 years earlier).
The booth in a White House hallway had served as the president's
private phone before one was installed in the Oval Office.
700/ On December 2nd 1942,
a nuclear chain reaction was achieved for the first time under
the stands of the University of Chicago's football stadium.
The first reactor measured 30 feet wide, 32 feet long, and
21.5 feet high. It weighed 1,400 tons and contained 52 tons
of uranium in the form of uranium metal and uranium oxide.
Although the same process led to the massive energy release
of the atomic bomb, the first artificially sustained nuclear
reaction produced just enough energy to light a small flashlight.
Click on the links below for more great
facts...
More Next Week...
|
