70 Fun Facts About Trivia for Smart People

The Antikythera mechanism could predict which astronomical events decades in advance?

The mechanism predicted solar and lunar eclipses on a spiral dial at the back; it also modelled the Moon's irregular orbit, speeding it up at perigee, a motion studied by Hipparchus of Rhodes.

How many teeth did the largest gear of that ancient Greek device originally carry?

That count matches the Saros eclipse cycle of 223 lunar months, which is how the machine could forecast eclipses at all.

Machinery as complex as the Antikythera mechanism did not reappear until which century in western Europe?

Geared machinery of comparable complexity did not reappear in western Europe until the 14th century, with the astronomical clocks of Richard of Wallingford and Giovanni de' Dondi.

Besides the heavens, what four-year cycle did the Antikythera device track?

A small dial on the back tracked the four-year cycle of the Panhellenic athletic games, naming the Olympic, Isthmian, Pythian and Nemean games in turn.

Radiocarbon dating placed the vellum of the Voynich manuscript in which period?

Radiocarbon dating at the University of Arizona in 2009 placed the vellum between 1404 and 1438, the early 15th century; analysis also found no sign of earlier erased writing.

Which library has held the Voynich manuscript since 1969?

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale has held it as MS 408 since the dealer Hans P. Kraus donated it in 1969.

The Voynich manuscript's parchment was made from the skin of which animal?

The vellum is calfskin, from calves; protein analysis in 2014 indicated at least fourteen or fifteen whole calf hides went into the book.

The Challenger Deep lies inside the exclusive economic zone of which country?

The Challenger Deep sits inside the Federated States of Micronesia's exclusive economic zone, which is why the US Marianas Trench Marine National Monument declared in 2009 stops short of the deepest point.

Water pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is roughly how many times that at sea level?

At about 1,086 bar, pressure in the Challenger Deep is roughly 1,072 times atmospheric, close to eight tons on every square inch, yet single-celled monothalamea live there.

Of NASA's twin outer-planet probes launched in 1977, which lifted off first?

Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977; Voyager 1 left 16 days later on a faster trajectory and overtook it, which is why the numbering looks backwards.

Voyager 1's close flyby of Titan in 1980 cost it the chance to visit which world?

Voyager 1 could have gone on to Pluto, but NASA chose a close pass of Titan, already known to have a thick atmosphere; the flyby flung the probe out of the planetary plane.

Before being renamed in 1977, Voyager 1 carried which designation?

Voyager 1 began as Mariner 11 of the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn 1977 project, successor to the cancelled Grand Tour; the Voyager name was adopted months before launch as the design diverged from earlier Mariners.

The 1944 monetary conference that created the IMF was held in which US state?

Bretton Woods is in New Hampshire; delegates from 44 Allied nations met at the Mount Washington Hotel from 1 to 22 July 1944 and signed the agreement on the final day.

Which 1976 agreement formally ratified the end of the Bretton Woods system?

The Jamaica Accords, agreed in Kingston in January 1976, amended the IMF articles to legitimise floating exchange rates and formally demonetise gold.

The IBRD, founded alongside the IMF in 1944, became part of which institution?

The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development is the original arm of the World Bank Group, which also includes the IDA, IFC, MIGA and ICSID.

On what date did the United States end the convertibility of its currency into gold?

On 15 August 1971 President Nixon suspended dollar-gold convertibility, the 'Nixon shock'; the Smithsonian Agreement that December briefly re-pegged currencies before they floated in 1973.

The Rosetta Stone records a decree issued in 196 BC on behalf of which ruler?

The decree honours Ptolemy V Epiphanes, the boy king crowned at Memphis, and was issued by a council of priests in 196 BC on the anniversary of his coronation.

What kind of rock is the Rosetta Stone actually made of?

The stone is granodiorite, long misidentified as basalt because white chalk in the inscriptions and a carnauba wax coating had darkened it; cleaning in 1999 revealed the grey, pink-veined rock.

In which year did Jean-Francois Champollion announce his transliteration of the Egyptian scripts?

Champollion announced his decipherment in the Lettre a M. Dacier, read in Paris on 27 September 1822; the stone itself had been found by French soldiers in July 1799.

Which body of water holds between 22 and 23 percent of the world's fresh surface water?

Lake Baikal in Siberia holds about 23,600 cubic kilometres of fresh water, more than all five North American Great Lakes combined, in a surface area barely larger than Belgium.

How old is the world's deepest lake estimated to be?

It sits in a rift valley where the crust is still pulling apart, which keeps deepening the basin instead of silting it up.

Why did the 1908 Tunguska explosion leave no crater?

The object exploded in the air, an airburst some 5 to 10 kilometres up, so nothing large reached the ground; the blast nonetheless flattened about 2,150 square kilometres of Siberian taiga.

The Tunguska blast is estimated at what explosive yield?

Estimates put the Tunguska airburst between 3 and 50 megatons of TNT, hundreds of times the Hiroshima bomb; the object was probably a stony asteroid tens of metres across arriving at about 27 kilometres per second.

In 1897 a bill implying a false value of pi passed the House of which US state?

Indiana's House passed Edwin Goodwin's 1897 bill unanimously; it claimed to square the circle and offered the method royalty-free to the state's schools before the Senate shelved it.

Who happened to be in the legislature that day and killed the pi bill?

Clarence Waldo, a Purdue University mathematics professor, was at the statehouse on other business, saw the bill, and briefed senators, who postponed it indefinitely.

Squaring the circle with straightedge and compass had already been proved impossible in 1882 by whom?

Ferdinand von Lindemann proved in 1882 that pi is transcendental, which rules out squaring the circle with straightedge and compass, settling a question open since antiquity.

Which institution created and funds the sixth Nobel, the prize in economic sciences?

Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, endowed the economics prize in 1968 to mark its 300th anniversary; the first award went to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen in 1969.

How many patents did Alfred Nobel hold in his lifetime?

Nobel held 355 patents, including dynamite (1867), gelignite and ballistite; he bought the Bofors ironworks in 1894 and turned it into an arms maker.

Who is the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, at 41?

Rudyard Kipling won in 1907 aged 41, the youngest literature laureate, and the first English-language writer to receive the prize.

Who was the oldest literature laureate, receiving the 2007 prize at 88?

Doris Lessing was 88 when she received the 2007 prize, the oldest literature laureate; she had learned of the award from reporters outside her London home on 11 October, eleven days before her birthday.

The literature prize has been awarded posthumously exactly once, in 1931, to whom?

Erik Axel Karlfeldt, the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, died in April 1931 and was awarded the prize that autumn; since 1974 the Nobel statutes have barred posthumous awards.

The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 divided the newly found world between Portugal and which crown?

The treaty, signed on 7 June 1494, split the non-European world between Portugal and the Crown of Castile; it modified Alexander VI's 1493 bull and was sanctioned by Pope Julius II only in 1506.

The Tordesillas meridian was drawn 370 leagues west of which islands?

The Tordesillas line ran 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, roughly halfway between them and the Caribbean islands Columbus had claimed; it later placed eastern Brazil on Portugal's side.

Which 1529 treaty fixed the Spanish-Portuguese dividing line on the far side of the globe?

The Treaty of Zaragoza, signed in 1529, set the antimeridian of the Tordesillas line east of the Moluccas, leaving the Spice Islands in Portugal's half.

Who created Esperanto, publishing it in 1887 under a pseudonym?

L. L. Zamenhof, a Warsaw eye doctor, published Unua Libro in 1887 as 'Doktoro Esperanto', 'one who hopes'; the pen name stuck to the language rather than to him.

Roughly how many native speakers does Esperanto have?

Around 100,000 people speak it at all, which still makes it the only constructed language with a sizeable native-speaking population.

Which earlier invented language did Esperanto largely displace?

Volapuk, devised by the German priest Johann Martin Schleyer in 1879, had proved there was demand for a neutral world language; its movement collapsed in internal disputes and most adherents moved to Esperanto.

The 1883 Krakatoa explosion was heard as far away as which inland Australian town?

It was also heard on Rodrigues near Mauritius, in the opposite direction, which makes it the loudest sound in recorded history.

Which island rose out of the 1883 caldera in 1927?

Anak Krakatoa, 'child of Krakatoa', first broke the surface in 1927 and grew into a new cone; a partial collapse of it caused the deadly Sunda Strait tsunami of December 2018.

Which island is the only surviving remnant of the original volcano destroyed in 1883?

Rakata, the southern peak of the original island, is the only part left after the 1883 eruption blew away the northern two-thirds; the caldera lies in the Sunda Strait, in Lampung province.

Who first noticed a gear wheel embedded in the corroded lump from the Greek shipwreck, in May 1902?

Valerios Stais, an archaeologist at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, spotted a gear wheel in the corroded lump on 17 May 1902 and suggested it was an astronomical clock.

Who found the Antikythera shipwreck in 1900?

Sponge divers from the island of Symi, sheltering from a storm, found the wreck off Antikythera in 1900; it yielded bronze and marble statues, glassware, jewellery and coins.

The Mariana Islands, and so the trench beside them, are named in honour of whom?

The islands were named Las Marianas in 1668 for Mariana of Austria, a Spanish queen, Philip IV's widow and regent, who funded the Jesuit mission there; the trench and plate took the name later.

How old is the oceanic crust being subducted at the Mariana Trench?

The Pacific crust entering the Mariana Trench is Jurassic, up to about 170 million years old; such old crust is cold and dense, so it sinks steeply, which helps make the trench the deepest place on Earth.

Wilfrid Voynich, who bought the famous manuscript in 1912, worked as what?

Wilfrid Voynich was a Polish-born antiquarian book dealer with shops in London and New York; he bought the manuscript from the Jesuit Villa Mondragone near Rome in 1912.

The shortest war in recorded history, in 1896, was fought between Britain and which sultanate?

The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 27 August 1896 lasted between 38 and 45 minutes; Royal Navy ships shelled the palace and Sultan Khalid bin Barghash fled.

Which monarch holds the record for the longest verified reign of any sovereign, at 72 years?

Louis XIV reigned from 1643 to 1715, 72 years and 110 days, coming to the French throne aged four and outliving both his son and his grandson.

How many chemical elements are named after the Swedish village of Ytterby?

Yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium all take their names from one quarry, which also yielded holmium, thulium, scandium and gadolinium.

Which country has the world's only non-rectangular national flag?

Nepal's flag is two stacked crimson pennants with a blue border, the only non-rectangular national flag and the only one taller than it is wide.

Which African capital city is named after a US president?

Monrovia, capital of Liberia, was founded in 1822 as a settlement for freed African Americans and named for the sitting US president, James Monroe.

Who is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes?

Linus Pauling won the 1954 Chemistry prize and the 1962 Peace prize, each unshared; Marie Curie's 1903 Physics prize and Frederick Sanger's 1980 Chemistry prize were shared.

Which body of water is the deepest in Africa?

Lake Tanganyika reaches 1,470 metres, the deepest lake in Africa and the second-deepest on Earth, and holds about 16 percent of the world's fresh surface water.

Which is the only named sea with no land boundaries at all?

The Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic has no coastline; it is bounded by four currents, the Gulf Stream, North Atlantic, Canary and North Equatorial, that form a clockwise gyre.

Which US president served the shortest term, dying 31 days after taking office?

William Henry Harrison died on 4 April 1841, 31 days after his inauguration, the first president to die in office and the shortest-serving.

How many years did the Hundred Years' War actually last?

The Hundred Years' War ran from 1337 to 1453, 116 years, as a series of conflicts between England and France rather than one continuous war.

Which animals did the Soviet Zond 5 mission carry around the Moon in 1968?

Zond 5's two tortoises, chosen because they were easy to secure and needed little care, circled the Moon in September 1968 and returned alive, having lost about a tenth of their body weight.

Which is the only US state with a single-chamber legislature?

Nebraska voters approved a unicameral legislature in 1934, and the single-chamber, nonpartisan Nebraska Legislature first met in 1937.

Which country's national anthem has the oldest combined words and music, dating from the 1570s?

The Netherlands' Wilhelmus was written between 1568 and 1572 during the Dutch revolt against Spain, predating the country itself; Japan's Kimigayo has older words but an 1880 melody.

Ouagadougou is the capital of which country?

Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso, the former Upper Volta, whose colonial administration made it the capital in 1919; the country took its present name under Thomas Sankara in 1984.

Which chicken-sized bird lays eggs about six times the size of a hen's egg?

The kiwi's egg can be about 20 percent of the female's body weight, roughly six times a hen's egg; DNA studies show its closest relatives were Madagascar's extinct elephant birds.

The Vietnamese currency, the dong, takes its name from the Sino-Vietnamese word for which metal?

Dong comes from the Sino-Vietnamese reading of the Chinese character for copper, tong, as in dong tien, 'copper coin', the old term for money.

Bluetooth technology is named after a 10th-century king of which country?

Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark from about 958, united the Danish tribes and converted them to Christianity; the name was chosen to suggest a standard uniting communication protocols.

The 1932 'Emu War' was waged by the Australian Army in which state?

The Emu War took place in Western Australia's Wheatbelt around Campion in late 1932; soldiers with Lewis guns were sent to cull emus wrecking farms, and the emus largely won.

The ancient city of Carthage stood in which modern country?

Carthage lies in Tunisia, on the Gulf of Tunis just outside the modern capital; legend credits its founding to the Phoenician queen Dido in the 9th century BC.

Under what name was Amazon founded in 1994?

Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra, Inc. in July 1994 in Bellevue, Washington, but renamed it Amazon within months after a lawyer misheard the name as 'cadaver'.

Point Nemo, the ocean spot farthest from land, is named after a character by which author?

Captain Nemo is Jules Verne's submarine commander in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; the Croatian-Canadian engineer Hrvoje Lukatela located the point in 1992, and 'nemo' is Latin for nobody.

Iceland's Althing, the world's oldest legislature, was founded in which year?

The Althing was founded in 930 at Thingvellir, about 45 kilometres east of modern Reykjavik, where chieftains met outdoors each summer.

Which planet's existence was predicted mathematically before it was observed?

Neptune was found by Johann Galle in September 1846 less than a degree from where Urbain Le Verrier had calculated it must be, from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus.

Where did Sultan Khalid bin Barghash take refuge after losing the 1896 war to Britain?

Khalid bin Barghash sheltered in the German consulate before escaping to German East Africa.

Which Swedish lieutenant found the unusual heavy black mineral at Ytterby in 1787 that led to new elements?

Carl Axel Arrhenius, an army lieutenant and amateur chemist scouting the area for fortifications, picked up the black mineral at Ytterby in 1787; Johan Gadolin isolated the new earth yttria from it in 1794.