- To have your picture taken with the very first camera you would have had to sit still for 8 hours.
- No one has received more U.S. patents than Thomas Edison. The inventor accumulated 2,332 patents worldwide for his inventions. 1,093 of Edison’s patents were in the United States, but other patents were approved in countries around the globe.
- Albert Einstein received the 1921 Nobel prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, the phenomenon by which electrons are knocked out of matter by electromagnetic radiation such as light.
- On 11 July 1962, France received the first transatlantic transmission of a TV signal from a twin station in Andover, Maine, USA via the TELSTAR satellite.
- A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.
- The first computer mouse was introduced in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart at the Fall Joint Computer Expo in San Francisco.
- The technology contained in a single game boy unit in 2000 exceeds all the computing power that was used to put the first man on the moon in 1969.
- The Internet began as a single page at the URL http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which contained information about “World Wide Web” project, and how you too could make a hypertext page full of wonderful hyperlinks. The original page was never saved, but you can view it after 2 years of revisions here.
- The Internet is the fastest-growing communications tool ever. It took radio broadcasters 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, television 13 years, and the internet just 4 years.
- Although the MP3 standard was invented in 1991, it wouldn’t be until 1998 that the first music file-sharing service Napster, would go live, and change the way the internet was used forever.
- Amazon became the number one shopping site because in the days before the invention of the search giant Google, Yahoo would list the sites in their directory alphabetically.
- The Ericsson Company first produced cellular phones in 1979.
- 80% of microwaves from mobile phones are absorbed by your head.
- Sound travels about 4 times faster in water than in air.
- Windmills always turn anti-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland.
- A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent of 8,000 one megaton bombs.
- The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.
- No matter its size or thickness, no piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
- No matter how cold it gets, gasoline will not freeze.
- Skylab, the first American space station, fell to the earth in thousands of pieces in 1979.
- The only letter not appearing on the Periodic Table is the letter “J”.
- Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe (75%).
- If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.
- If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.
- Venus spins in the opposite direction compared to the Earth and most other planets. This means that the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East.
- The planet Saturn has a density lower than water.
- Due to gravitational effects, you weigh slightly less when the moon is directly overhead.
- Some large asteroids even have their own moon.
