● The 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz was an adaptation of a 1900 children's novel by L. Frank Baum, but not the first. It was the eighth. Counting radio adaptations, the novel has been retold 17 times, so far.
● The highest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 134.1 °F at Furnace Creek Ranch, Death Valley, California, on July 10, 1913. On September 13, 1922, that record was surpassed by a measurement of 136 °F in Aziziya, Libya. Later, however, the Libya reading was decertified, returning the official record to Death Valley.
● Eddie Van Halen played a guitar solo in the Michael Jackson song "Beat It," but he did it without credit because he had promised his band he wouldn't take side jobs.
● Silly Putty, the bouncy, stretchy toy for kids, was created after WWII when the US government funded research to develop a synthetic rubber. The substance flopped as a rubber replacement, but caught on as a toy.
● As you may know, the gladiators of ancient Rome fought to entertain the citizenry. Many gladiators earned acclaim for their skills and bravery, and Roman society held lavish gladiator games for a thousand years.
However, the Hollywood stereotype notwithstanding, gladiators did not fight to the death. The goal was to outfight the opponent and get him to yield. Deaths occurred, and the bigshot overseeing the contest could give the dreaded thumbs down, but those were exceptions.
● In 1895, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) transmitted electrical signals inside his house through the air, thus inventing wireless telegraphy — radio. Thereafter, Marconi experimented with larger and larger transmitters. In 1901, he erected powerful transmitters in England and Newfoundland and successfully sent radio signals between them.
● Your tongue-print is unique, just like your fingerprints.
● The nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb (followed her to school, etc.) originated in 1830 as a poem by Sarah Josepha Hale, a Rhode Island teacher. Hale said the poem was based on a real and quite chaotic incident at her school.
Today, the poem often is sung to the tune of Merrily We Roll Along, which later was adopted as the theme song of the Warner Bros. cartoons.
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