Big Site of Amazing Facts ©

The city of New York. Sound like a lot of water, doesn't it?

In the 1980s, 10 million people used 500 million gallons of water a day. That works out to 50 gallons for every person. That is less than the average for the rest of the U.S.A.

Throughout our country, most people use 87 gallons per day. Only two of those gallons are for drinking and cooking. Did you know that things like food use water, too? Read more »

There certainly was. Ever since names have been around, there have been all sorts of funny ones.

In fact, some are so funny that their owners go to court to get them changed. People change their names because they don't like the ones they've been given by their parents or because there is a name they'd much rather have than the one they've been given.

Three men on a fishing trip once checked into a hotel, where they signed their real, legal names: Mr. Hook, Mr. Fly, and Mr. Fish. Read more »

For 2,000 years, people made bottles by blowing air into a glob of molten glass through a long, thin pipe.

The hot glass expanded the same way a balloon does. It was slow, difficult work.

Then, in 1903, a glassblower from West Virginia named Michael J. Owens invented a machine that could do the same thing much faster. In the time it took a man with a pipe to blow 216 bottles, Owens's machine could make 300,000 bottles. Read more »

You'd be pretty rich, right? After all, Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, and he became very rich.

Unlike Mickey, Superman did not make his creators rich. As a matter of fact, in 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created the Red-Caped Crusader, sold all their rights to the cartoon character to Detective Comics for $130.

They received $65.00. Other people took their wonderful cartoon character and made millions of dollars. Next time you see a Superman movie, think of Siegel and Shuster.

R. H. Macy & Co. at 34th St. and Seventh Ave. in New York City was the world's largest store in 2008.

It is more commonly known to the American public as Macy's.

This giant department store didn't appear overnight. It started as a tiny "hole in the wall" store on New York's 14th St. It was Roland H. Macy's fifth try at running a store. Read more »

It all has to do with the climate in which hundreds of generations of their people have spent their lives.

People who have lived in the cold climate of the Arctic need to save every bit of heat their bodies can produce. The more skin they have, the more heat they will lose.

That's why Eskimos are normally short, with short legs and short arms. They have less body surface than most other humans and can stay warmer in their cold climate. Read more »

They do in India. Silver can be hammered till it is 150 times thinner than a page of this book.

In India, they take this very, very thin silver and decorate food to make it look pretty. They then eat the food and the decoration, too. How would you like to see a silver chicken on your dinner table?

In fact, in India, they coat pills and medicines with silver. Fifteen percent of the world's entire supply of silver is owned by this large country. Much of that amount is used in the bracelets and jewelry the Indians wear. Read more »

Frank Richards wanted to find out. He decided to make his stomach as strong as he could.

He trained very hard, became a circus performer, and used his strong stomach muscles in his act.

In 1927, the great heavy weight boxing champion Jack Dempsey hit Richards' stomach 75 times. Dempsey hit as hard as he could, but Richards barely flinched. Richards toughened his stomach muscles even more and began to allow challengers to hit him in the stomach with a heavy sledgehammer.

Still, he felt nothing. Read more »

In the mid 1920s, Clarence Birdseye went on a hunting trip to Labrador, Canada. It was winter, the weather was bitter cold, and Birdseye was fascinated by what he saw and tasted.

He saw Eskimos catch fish and hang them outside in the sub-zero temperatures to freeze them solid. Birdseye found that when this fish was eaten months later it tasted exactly as though it had just been caught. He was amazed. Read more »

For six years around the turn of the century, they led the most successful gang in the Old West.

Then they took off for New York City, where Sundance married his sweetheart, Etta Place. All three of them then sailed for Bolivia in South America. They had spent a large amount of money in New York and wasted little time in getting back to their business of robbing. Not long afterward, Etta became ill and returned to the United States. Read more »