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Fact File


In the Fact File section we bring you a new collection of quick facts each week. (Click on the links below for more facts)

 
 

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.

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