Daniel Webster, who ran for president and lost three times, declined the Vice Presidency twice, thinking it a worthless office. Both presidents who offered it later died in office, meaning that if he had accepted, he would’ve become president after all.
10
It has been calculated that every 2 minutes, we take more pictures than all of humanity in the 19th century.
13
In 1956, the IBM 350 hard disk drive had 3.75 MB of storage, weighed over 2000 lbs, had to be moved around with forklifts, and was delivered via large cargo airplanes.
11
Astronomer Percival Lowell believed that he was the first person to observe canals on Venus, but because of a faulty adjustment of the eyepiece on his telescope, he was in fact looking at the blood vessels in his own eye.
4
Sergeant Stubby was the only war dog to be promoted to sergeant through combat in WWI. He saved his regiment from surprise mustard gas attacks, found and comforted the wounded, and even once caught a German spy by the seat of his pants, holding him there until American Soldiers found him.
16
Iceland has been so culturally isolated through history since the Vikings, that compared to other Scandinavian counties, people who speak Icelandic can still read the old Norsk sagas.
4
Ice cream cones were popularized in America during the 1904 World’s Fair in Saint Louis when an ice cream vendor ran out of cups and asked a nearby waffle vendor to roll up his waffles to hold the ice cream.
17
Romans used a plant called Silphium as contraception. They had so much sex that they drove it into extinction.
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