| 2921/
Joe Davis earned just £6.10s.0d. for his initial first
World Snooker Championship win in 1927.
2922/ The microprocessor
- a special kind of chip that includes the functions of the
central processing unit (CPU) of a computer - was first made
by Intel in 1971 from a design by Marcian Hoff.
2923/ In 1879, W. H.
Preece, then Post Office Assistant Engineer in Chief, testified
to a House of Commons Committee that, whatever the situation
in the USA, Britain had little use of the telephone because
: "Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand
boys and things of that kind".
2924/ The Samaritans'
telephone service for potential suicides was introduced in
1953 following an article in "Picture Post" by the
Rev Chad Varah on the subject of sex; a number of those who
subsequently wrote to him wanted to end it all.
2925/ Sometime in 2003,
the total number of mobile telephones worldwide exceeded the
total number of fixed telephones.
2926/ Before Johannes
Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1438, there were
only about 30,000 books throughout the whole of Europe, nearly
all Bibles or biblical commentary.
2927/ Today there are
over 24 million books in the US Library of Congress alone.
2928/ The "Encyclopaedia
Britannica" - a word of 44 million words - used to be
available in 32 volumes at around £3,000, then became
available on two CD-ROMs for £99, and is now available
on-line for free.
2929/ The British system
of Braille, which dates from 1868, only uses lower case and
there is now a debate about introducing capitalisation which
would add up to 10% to the length of documents and books.
2930/ An analysis of
more than 2 million cuttings from all the main British national
and regional daily newspapers found that there are 15 times
more items of bad news than those of good news.
2931/ Sales of CDs surpassed
those of vinyl in the UK in 1988.
2932/ The first commercial
transister radio was the Regency TR1 which went on the market
in the USA in 1954.
2933/ Britain's television
service was suspended for defence reasons in 1939, ending
- without explanation - midway through a Mickey Mouse cartoon.
2934/ In the Kingdom
of Bhutan, televisions were only allowed in 1999.
2935/ Britain's television
service was resumed in 1946 when Leslie Mitchell - in typical
English fashion - commented : "As I was saying before
we were so rudely interrupted".
2936/ Around 50% of the
films made in the USA never achieve a cinema release.
2937/ The first film
made for the Web was a $3 million 30-minute comedy called
"Quantum Project" directed by Eugenio Zanetti in
2000.
2938/ In late 2002, a
10-strong team of Japanese computer specialists ran a computer
program which took five years to design for a total of 400
hours at the top speed of two trillion calculations a second
to work out the value of pi - the ratio of the circumference
of a circle to its diameter. They calculated the value to
1.2411 trillion places, a figure that would stretch around
the world 500 times.
2939/ In 2002, the world
computer industry shipped its one billionth PC. Acccording
to Gartner Dataquest, another billion PCs will be built in
the next six years.
2940/ The idea of using
"emoticons" - symbols that indicate certain emotions
- in e-mail was made by Kevin MacKenzie in 1979.
Click on the links below for more great
facts...
More
next week... |
