Odds

In 1841, the London Times carried a most unusual classified ad. It was placed by a young woman interested in wallpapering her bedroom walls. And she wanted to do it with postage stamps!

This young woman thus became the world's first philatelist, or stamp collector. The millions of philatelists the world over who followed her in stamp collecting, however, did not collect for the purpose of papering their bedroom walls.  read more »

Historians are not certain how the United States began using the $ as a dollar sign.

Some believe that it came from a design marked on old Spanish coins called pieces of eight. These pieces of eight were used by Americans as dollars before they coined their own silver dollars.

A Spanish piece of eight was given its name because eight smaller coins equaled that coin.

One side of the piece of eight had two pillars stamped on it, with a ribbon curling around them. The "S" formed by the ribbon around each pillar may have led to our dollar sign, $.

You'd probably like to have the government send it to you, naturally! But the Treasury Department has other ideas. Every day, it collects worn and dirty bills, 4-5 tons of them! Which are too old and worn to be used.

These bills are destroyed in a machine called a macerator, which shreds $1,000,000 a minute into tiny confetti-sized pieces of paper.

Not all damaged money is worthless. If, for example, you have a bill with part of it torn away, you can redeem it.  read more »

Perhaps you noticed that United States dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and silver dollars have ridges, or grooves, around their edges. They were not put there for decoration, but had a very important purpose at one time in history.

During our country's earlier years, all coins were made of gold or silver, and did not have ridges. Each coin's value was based on the amount of gold or silver in it. For example, a $10 gold piece contained ten dollars worth of gold, and silver dimes contained ten cents worth of silver.  read more »

Surprisingly enough, the answer is 292 ways.

If you used all the different American coins minted, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars, you could actually come up with these 292 different ways.

There's 100 pennies; 20 nickels; 10 dimes; 4 quarters; 2 half-dollars; 1 half-dollar and 2 quarters; 1 half-dollar and 5 dimes; 1 half-dollar, 1 quarter, 2 dimes, and 1 nickel; 2 quarters and 5 dimes; 2 quarters and 10 nickels. How many of the remaining 282 ways can you find?

Although most of the paper money issued by our government have portraits of presidents, not all do. The presidents who do appear on bills are:

George Washington on the $1;

Thomas Jefferson on the $2;

Abraham Lincoln on the $5;

Andrew Jackson on the $20;

Ulysses S. Grant on the $50;

William McKinley on the $500;

Grover Cleveland on the $1,000;

James Madison on the $5,000;

Woodrow Wilson on the $100,000.  read more »

If you started to count today and continued counting day and night, without stopping, for the rest of your life, you would never get to a last number, because there isn't one.

Mathematicians tells us that no matter how large a number you would get to, there would always still be one larger.

This idea is important in science and has a special name, infinity, and its own special symbol, ∞.

Naturally, that depends on how fast you can count.

But if you can count from 1 to 100 in one minute, and you keep counting every minute, without stopping, for eight hours every day (taking time off to eat, sleep, and go to school), you would reach 1,000,000 in 20 days, 6 hours, and 40 minutes, or almost 3 weeks.

If, however, you give up eating, sleeping, and school, and just count every minute of every hour of every day, you would reach 1,000,000 in 6 days, 22 hours, and 40 minutes, almost 1 week.

Sounds like some strange animal or a creature from outer space, doesn't it? But it's neither of them. A googol is a number, a very large number. You are probably familiar with numbers such as:

1 + 6 zeroes = 1,000,000 — one million

1 + 9 zeroes = 1,000,000,000 — one billion

1 + 12 zeroes = 1,000,000,000,000 — one trillion

1 + 15 zeroes = 1,000,000,000,000,000 — one quadrillion.

But did you know that there are names for numbers larger than these?

1 + 18 zeroes = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 — one quintillion  read more »

1,000,000 seconds equals 11.6 days.

1,000,000 minutes equals 1.9 years.

1,000,000 inches equals 15.7 miles.

1,000,000 feet equals 189.4 miles.

1,000,000 pennies, stacked one on top of another, reach almost one mile high.

1,000,000 dollar bills weigh 2,000 pounds!