15 Fascinating Facts | Amazing Facts 4U
- Mansa Musa (1280-1337) emperor of the Malian Empire of Mali West Africa in its golden years between 1312 and 1337 A.D. became one of the most powerful and wealthiest leaders of his time. Musa’s empire touched the Atlantic Ocean in the west and the Niger River in the east. It was thought to be the world’s largest depository of salt and gold. Most noted for his amazing 3,000 miles, a nine-month pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 with a caravan of 60,000 porters in a caravan of 80 camels, each carrying 100-300 pounds of gold including 12,000 servants, all dressed in brocade and Persian silk. Mansa Musa himself rode on horseback, and preceding him were 500 servants, each carrying four-foot-long shining golden staffs weighing about six pounds. His senior wife accompanied him with 500 maids. He gave away so much gold to the poor and spent so much on souvenirs that he caused super inflation and devalued the metal for the next decade in the middle east. In fact, according to a recent inflation-adjusted list, Mansa Musa was worth $400 billion, which places him as the No. 1 richest person in history, ahead of the Rothschild family ($350 billion), John D. Rockefeller ($340 billion), and Henry Ford ($199 billion).
- Andre-Francois Raffray, a lawyer in France sought out a 90-year-old lady, who agreed to give him her apartment if he paid her $500 each month for the rest of her life. Amazingly she went on to become the oldest living person ever, living for another 30 years and even outliving the lawyer who by then had paid her $180,000, which was twice the value of the apartment.
- During the Ahom Dynasty (1228–1826) in Assam, India, claimants to the throne had to be physically unblemished which meant that threats to the throne could be in fact removed by merely slitting the ear of an ambitious prince.
- A budgie named Puck is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “The bird with the largest vocabulary in the world”. He has a vocabulary of 1728 words. The puck just doesn’t mimic, he amazingly often creates his own phrases and sentences.
- A man named Wally Wallington built a Stonehenge-like structure using no modern technology to prove there was nothing paranormal about it. He is now working on a replica of Stonehenge using only simple machines.
- Mongols had rules against spilling noble blood over the ground. Instead, they used loopholes like making them bend backward until the backbone snapped, pouring molten silver into eyes and ears, and rolling up in a rug, and trampled to death by the Mongol cavalry.
- A fascinating Fact is that aboriginals of Australia in their “coming of age” ritual cut a “birth control” hole in the base of the genital organs and insert a splinter in to keep it from closing. Urine and semen come out of the hole unless this sub-incision is plugged with a finger.
- In 1954, a flight Ernest Hemingway was on crash-landed in Africa. He and his companions were rescued and put in another plane, which burst into flames on the runway. Finding the door jammed, he used his head as a battering ram, butted the door twice, and got out.
- A fascinating Fact is that Riot control agents (e.g. pepper sprays) are considered chemical weapons and are in fact forbidden in warfare.
- During WWII, a German and British airplane shot each other down in Norway, and the crew met and then helped each other survive. Two of them then visited each other several years after the war was over as friends.
- The “jump” you sometimes get while falling asleep is known as hypnic myoclonus and as much as 70 percent of people worldwide experience this.
- In the city of Yiwu in eastern China, people were confused about how a Chinese couple managed to run a busy restaurant 21 hours a day without getting tired. Locals named them “robot couple restaurant”. Amazingly it turned out that the restaurant was run by two couples, both the men and women were identical twins.
- If the Native Americans really did sell Manhattan to the Europeans for $16 in the 1600s and if they had invested that $16 at annual interest rates of 8%, today that $16 would have been worth enough for them to buy back all of Manhattan and still have $222 Trillion dollars left over.
- Speed is now so important in financial trading that a new $300 million transatlantic cable was laid down in order to just shave 5 milliseconds off communications between New York and London.
- Fascinating Fact is that In 2009, Stephen Colbert won a NASA competition to have a module of the ISS named after him, but NASA opted to name it ‘Tranquility’ instead. They did, however, name a treadmill on the ISS after him. It is called the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (C.O.L.B.E.R.T.)
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