The first-ever edition of the Daily Mirror came with a free mirror.
No one has ever seen an atom.
They're too small to be seen by a microscope and can't be counted or weighed individually.
For 48 years after tinned food was invented, people who wanted to eat it had to use a hammer
and chisel.
The can opener wasn't invented until 1858.
People in Victorian Britain who couldn't afford chimney sweeps dropped live geese down their
chimneys instead.
Pigeons can tell the difference between impressionist paintings by Monet and cubist works by Picasso.
They can even tell when the Monets are hung upside down.
Tour de France riders need to eat the equivalent of 27 cheeseburgers a day.
Summer on Neptune lasts for 40 years, but the temperature is minus 200°C.
The name of the first human being in Norse mythology was Ask.
The technology behind most smartphones relies on up to 250,000 separate patents.
On a clear, moonless night the human eye can detect a match being struck 50 miles away.
The International Space Station is as roomy as a five-bedroom house and travels at 17,500
mph.
The Bank of America was originally called the Bank of Italy.
Lightning strikes the Earth 8.6 million times a day or about 100 times a second.
The screwdriver was invented a hundred years before the screw.
It was originally used to extract nails.
The tadpoles of the South American paradoxical frog are larger than the frog itself.
The whole works of Shakespeare contains only about 20,000 different words – less than
half the vocabulary of the average English speaker today.