99 Fun Facts About Useless

Roughly how long did the 1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War last?

Under an hour: accounts put the fighting at between 38 and 45 minutes.

Which animal is known for leaving cube-shaped droppings?

Wombat cubes are stackable and hard to roll away, which is thought to be the point of the shape.

How many hearts does an octopus have?

Three: one systemic heart circulates blood around the body, and two branchial hearts push it through the gills.

What is the name for the dot that sits above a lowercase i or j?

Tittle: the small dot over a lowercase i or j. In English it appears only on those two letters, though dots sit over other letters in other languages.

Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to produce what?

Handmade playing cards: craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi's first product was hanafuda, the Japanese flower cards, and Nintendo went on producing them for more than a century.

Despite its name, how many years did the Hundred Years' War actually run?

116 years, since the conflict between England and France is conventionally dated 1337 to 1453.

In heraldry, the unicorn is the emblem of which country?

Scotland: the unicorn is its national animal, and two unicorns supported the royal arms of the King of Scots before the 1603 Union of the Crowns.

Which planet of the Solar System has an average density lower than water?

Saturn would float in a big enough bathtub: its average density is about 0.69 g/cm3, roughly 30 percent below water.

Bubble wrap was created in 1957 when two inventors set out to make what?

Three-dimensional plastic wallpaper: Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes sealed two shower curtains together hoping to sell textured wallpaper, got a sheet of trapped air bubbles, and found no decorating market for it.

The first item ever sold on eBay was a broken example of what?

A laser pointer: it sold for $14.83 in 1995, and when Pierre Omidyar checked that the buyer knew it was broken, the man replied that he collected broken laser pointers.

Google began in 1996 as a Stanford research project under what name?

BackRub: Larry Page and Sergey Brin ran their search project under that name as Stanford PhD students before renaming it Google in 1997.

What sort of creature is Sir Nils Olav III, the knighted Norwegian military mascot living at Edinburgh Zoo?

A king penguin: Nils Olav has been mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard since its 1972 visit to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, was knighted in 2008, and was promoted to major general in 2023.

A clay tablet sent to Ur around 1750 BC preserves a customer's complaint about a delivery of what?

Copper: a customer named Nanni accused the merchant Ea-nasir of delivering sub-standard copper ingots and treating his messenger with contempt; the tablet is about the size of a postcard.

The world's shortest scheduled flight, about 1.7 miles, links Westray and Papa Westray in which archipelago?

The Orkney Islands: Westray and Papa Westray lie off the north coast of Scotland, and Loganair's hop between them is timetabled at about two minutes.

The longest place name in any English-speaking country, 85 letters, is a hill in which country?

New Zealand: the Maori name Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu belongs to a 305-metre hill in southern Hawke's Bay on the North Island.

In 1932 the Australian Army deployed soldiers with Lewis machine guns against which animal, and lost?

Emus split into small, mobile groups; the commander compared them to tanks and the cull was abandoned.

A wave of what killed 21 people in Boston's North End in January 1919?

Molasses from a burst storage tank rushed through the streets; residents said the neighbourhood still smelled sweet on hot days decades later.

A burst vat at a London brewery in 1814 released a flood of which drink into a slum, killing eight?

Porter: a giant vat of porter at Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road burst, and the inquest ruled the deaths 'casually, accidentally and by misfortune'.

What did Frau Troffea start doing in a Strasbourg street in July 1518 that dozens of others then joined?

Dancing, for days; the city council hired musicians to let the afflicted dance it out, which made things worse. Ergot poisoning and mass hysteria are the leading explanations.

The 1859 'Pig War' over the San Juan Islands began when a farmer shot a pig eating his what?

Potatoes: Lyman Cutlar shot a Hudson's Bay Company pig rooting in his potato patch, offered $10, and its owner demanded $100. The pig was the conflict's only casualty.

In 897, Pope Stephen VI put whom on trial in Rome, propped up on a throne?

Formosus had been dead nine months; a deacon answered for him, he was found guilty and later thrown in the Tiber.

What fell from the sky over Bath County, Kentucky, for several minutes in March 1876?

Chunks of meat: theories range from vulture vomit to 'blood rain', and witnesses who tasted the flakes guessed beef, lamb, deer or bear.

Gary Dahl became a millionaire in 1975 selling what for just under $4 each?

Pet Rocks sold nearly 1.5 million in about six months, clearing 95 cents on each.

Andre Geim won a satirical Ig prize in 2000 for levitating a frog. What did he win in 2010?

A Nobel in physics for graphene made Geim the only person to hold both an Ig Nobel and a Nobel.

'Boaty McBoatface' won a 2016 vote to name a polar ship. What was it actually called?

RRS Sir David Attenborough got the name although Boaty took a third of the vote, ten times Attenborough's; Boaty went to a yellow submarine on board instead.

Stubbs, honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska from 1997 to 2017, was what kind of animal?

A cat named Stubbs drew 30 to 40 tourists a day to Nagley's General Store, his 'mayoral office'.

According to Suetonius, the Roman emperor Caligula's horse Incitatus ate from a manger made of what?

Ivory: Suetonius writes that Incitatus had an ivory manger, a marble stall and purple blankets. The claim that he was made consul is legend; Suetonius says only that Caligula planned it.

How did several German nobles die at a royal meeting in Erfurt in 1184?

Drowned in a cesspit: the hall floor collapsed under the crowd, dropping nobles through the ground floor into the latrine pit beneath, where about 60 drowned.

The WWII 'bat bomb' idea came from a Pennsylvania dentist after a visit to which national park?

Carlsbad Caverns: dentist Lytle Adams, impressed by its bat colonies, wrote to the White House a month after Pearl Harbor; each bomb casing held more than a thousand bats carrying tiny timed incendiaries.

The CIA's 1960s 'Acoustic Kitty' project surgically fitted what into a cat?

A microphone and transmitter went into the cat in an hour-long operation; a former officer put the cost at about $20 million, and the first mission was to eavesdrop in a Washington park.

B. F. Skinner's WWII 'Project Pigeon' trained birds to do what?

Guide bombs by pecking a screen: the pigeon rode in the nose cone pecking at the target's image on a screen, and its pecks steered the 'Pelican' glide bomb toward it.

Sergeant Stubby, the most decorated dog of World War I, allegedly caught a German soldier by what?

The seat of his pants: Stubby held a German soldier mapping Allied trenches until American troops arrived, and also warned the 102nd Infantry of incoming gas attacks.

Instead of a salary, what did a Japanese railway pay Tama, the cat it made station master in 2007?

A year of cat food: Wakayama Electric Railway made Tama station master of Kishi Station in January 2007 and paid her in cat food, plus a gold name tag giving her name and position.

Where did the party game 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' begin in 1994?

Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania: three students there invented it in 1994 after watching Footloose and The Air Up There back to back on TV.

What was the first product scanned with a UPC barcode at a checkout, in 1974?

A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum: on 26 June 1974 a ten-pack of the gum was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, the first retail use of the UPC barcode.

What did naval engineer Richard James watch 'step' off a shelf in 1943, inspiring the Slinky?

A torsion spring 'stepping' off a shelf became the Slinky; James demonstrated it at Gimbels in Philadelphia in 1945, priced at $1, and sold out.

Fortune cookies most likely originated with immigrants from where?

Japan: the tsujiura senbei, a darker sesame-and-miso cracker with a fortune tucked inside, was baked near Kyoto shrines in the 1800s, before Japanese bakers in California served the sweet version.

Hawaiian pizza was invented in which country?

Canada, not Hawaii: Greek immigrant Sam Panopoulos created it in Ontario and named it after the canned pineapple brand he used.

Racers at Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire chase a wheel of which cheese down a steep slope every spring?

The Double Gloucester gets a one-second head start and is never actually caught; a foam replica was used only in 2013.

The 1922 "Straw Hat Riot" broke out in New York because men wore straw hats after which unofficial cut-off date?

September 15: straw hats were supposed to come off on 'Felt Hat Day', and in 1922 New York youths began knocking them off two days early, setting off eight days of fighting.

The 1618 Defenestration of Prague helped start which war?

The Thirty Years' War: Protestant nobles threw two Catholic regents and their secretary from a Prague Castle window in May 1618, and the Bohemian revolt that followed spread into a Europe-wide war.

At the peak of Dutch tulip mania in February 1637, a single bulb could sell for more than ten times what?

A skilled artisan's yearly pay: at the peak some bulbs changed hands for more than ten times a craftsman's annual income. It is usually called the first recorded speculative bubble, and prices collapsed in February 1637.

Which pig was nominated for President of the United States in Chicago in 1968?

Pigasus: the Yippies nominated the pig outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and police confiscated him and arrested his handlers at the launch rally.

The 'Year Without a Summer', 1816, was caused by the eruption of which volcano the year before?

Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, erupted in April 1815; global temperatures fell, New England saw summer snow, and a rainy Swiss holiday in 1816 produced Frankenstein.

A 2005 University of British Columbia study concluded that cow tipping by a single person is what?

Impossible for one: zoologist Margo Lillie calculated it would take at least four people, more likely five or six, since a cow can brace itself.

Rin Tin Tin, the canine film star of the 1920s, was rescued from where?

A World War I battlefield: American soldier Lee Duncan found the puppy in a bombed-out kennel near Flirey, France, in September 1918, nicknamed him 'Rinty' and got him silent-film work.

For how long did Mike, the Colorado chicken beheaded in 1945, go on living without his head?

Eighteen months, because the axe missed the jugular and most of his brain stem, so Mike could still balance on a perch; Fruita holds an annual festival in his honour.

The Great Stink of 1858 prompted which engineer's plan to pipe London's sewage east along the Thames?

Joseph Bazalgette: his interconnected outfall sewers took from 1859 to 1875 to build, complete with ornate pumping stations such as Abbey Mills.

The ghost word 'dord' appeared in a 1934 Webster's dictionary defined as a synonym for what?

Density: a chemistry editor's slip reading 'D or d', the abbreviations for density, was typeset as a single word, and the error survived in print until it was spotted in 1939.

The Dutch and the Isles of Scilly made peace in 1986, ending a 'war' that ran how long?

335 years: the Dutch had declared war on Royalist Scilly in 1651 and never signed a peace, so in 1986 council chairman Roy Duncan invited the Dutch ambassador over to sign one, with not a shot fired.

Fred Baur had some of his ashes buried in the packaging he designed for which snack?

Pringles: his children placed part of his cremated remains in an Original-flavour Pringles can in his grave near Cincinnati; Baur had designed the tubular canister in the 1960s.

Liechtenstein added a crown to its flag in 1937 after finding it matched which nation's?

Haiti: both countries turned up at the 1936 Berlin Olympics flying identical blue-over-red bicolours, so Liechtenstein added a gold crown to its upper hoist the next year.

On a hot day, the top of the Eiffel Tower can lean away from the sun by up to how far?

About 18 cm: the sunlit side of the ironwork expands more than the shaded side, tilting the summit away from the sun; wind adds a smaller sway of its own.

The world's first webcam, set up at Cambridge University in 1991, was pointed at what?

A coffee pot: the Trojan Room camera let researchers elsewhere in the Cambridge computer lab check whether a trip down the corridor would be rewarded with a full pot.

'Steady' Ed Headrick, father of the modern Frisbee, had his ashes moulded into what?

Flying discs: his ashes were moulded into memorial discs, some given to friends and family, the rest sold to help fund a disc-golf museum in Georgia.

Which US state is at once the northernmost, westernmost and easternmost in the nation?

Alaska: the Aleutian Islands stretch across the 180th meridian into the Eastern Hemisphere, which is what wins Alaska the 'easternmost' title on top of northernmost and westernmost.

Elvis Presley was born how many minutes after his stillborn twin brother, Jesse Garon?

35 minutes: Jesse Garon was delivered stillborn on 8 January 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi, and Elvis followed about 35 minutes later; he grew up an only child and spoke of his lost twin throughout his life.

The word 'nerd' first appeared in print in a 1950 children's book by which author?

Dr. Seuss: in If I Ran the Zoo (1950), young Gerald McGrew plans to collect 'a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too', the word's earliest known appearance in print.

The nine-banded armadillo almost always gives birth to how many identical young?

A single fertilised egg splits into four embryos, making every litter a set of identical quadruplets.

Strictly speaking, 'Big Ben' is the nickname of which part of London's Elizabeth Tower?

The great bell: the 13.7-tonne bell's name is usually traced to Sir Benjamin Hall, the commissioner of works who oversaw its installation in 1859.

The much-reused 'Wilhelm scream' sound effect was first recorded for which 1951 film?

Distant Drums: the scream was recorded for a scene in which a soldier is dragged under by an alligator, and it took its name from Private Wilhelm, shot with an arrow in 1953's The Charge at Feather River.

In World War II, the future Queen Elizabeth II trained in the women's army corps as what?

A driver and mechanic: she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in February 1945 with service number 230873, learned to drive and maintain lorries, and was made an honorary junior commander five months later.

Tug of war was an official Summer Olympic event from 1900 until which Games?

1920: Antwerp was tug of war's last Olympics. Teams were often drawn from police forces, and the City of London Police won Britain's golds in 1908 and 1920.

'Octothorp' is a name coined at Bell Labs for which symbol on the telephone keypad?

Engineers needed names for the two extra keys added to the keypad in the 1960s; the word first appeared in a US patent in 1973.

Green Eggs and Ham was written to win a bet that a book could use how many distinct words?

50: Bennett Cerf bet Dr. Seuss $50 that he could not write a book with just 50 distinct words; the 1960 result used exactly 50, and by most accounts Cerf never paid up.

Machine-spun cotton candy was co-invented in 1897 by William Morrison, who worked as what?

A dentist: Morrison, a Nashville dentist, built the machine with confectioner John C. Wharton and sold 'Fairy Floss' at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair; another dentist, Joseph Lascaux, patented a rival machine in 1921.

Australia exports live feral camels as a prized delicacy to which country?

Saudi Arabia: the outback herd descends from camels imported in the 1800s, and Australia has shipped live animals and meat to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states because the herd is disease-free.

Twitter's original bird logo, 'Larry', was named after a star of which sport?

Basketball: the tribute was to Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird; co-founder Biz Stone grew up in Massachusetts.

Turritopsis dohrnii is nicknamed the 'immortal jellyfish' because it can do what?

After reaching adulthood it can turn back into a sedentary polyp colony and start over, at least in theory indefinitely.

In medieval timekeeping, a 'moment' was a unit equal on average to how long?

90 seconds: a moment was a fortieth of a solar hour, so its exact length drifted with the seasons as the daylight hours stretched and shrank.

Samsung began in 1938 as a small trading company dealing mainly in what?

Dried fish and noodles: Lee Byung-chul's Samsung Sanghoe in Daegu traded groceries and dried fish and made its own noodles, moving into textiles, insurance and retail long before electronics.

Nokia was established in Finland in 1865 as what kind of business?

A pulp mill: mining engineer Fredrik Idestam built a wood-pulp mill beside the Tammerkoski rapids in Tampere, then a second at the town of Nokia in 1868; rubber boots and cables came later.

Before building sports cars, Ferruccio Lamborghini made his fortune manufacturing what?

Tractors: his first 'Carioca' models were cobbled together from surplus military engines during Italy's post-war boom, and Lamborghini Trattori made him rich before the cars.

Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin is credited with inventing which car safety feature in 1959?

The three-point seat belt: it debuted in the Volvo PV544 and Amazon in 1959, and Volvo left the patent open so rival carmakers could adopt the design.

Play-Doh was first sold in 1930s Cincinnati as what?

A wallpaper cleaner: Kroger asked Kutol Products for a putty to lift coal soot off wallpaper; as coal heating faded, a nursery-school teacher's suggestion sent it to the classroom as modelling clay.

Listerine, developed in 1879, was originally formulated as what?

A surgical antiseptic: Joseph Lawrence formulated it in St. Louis in 1879 and named it for Joseph Lister, who pioneered antiseptic surgery in Glasgow; the mouthwash marketing came decades later.

Which playing-card king is nicknamed the 'suicide king'?

Hearts: in the standard design the king of hearts appears to be driving his sword into the side of his own head, a relic of an axe lost in early copying.

Thomas Hicks won the 1904 Olympic marathon after being dosed with brandy, eggs and what?

Strychnine: his handlers dosed him with the rat poison as a stimulant, and he finished hallucinating and near collapse; Fred Lorz, first across the line, had ridden part of the way in a car.

The Guinness Book of Records grew out of a 1951 shooting-party row over the fastest what?

Game bird: Sir Hugh Beaver missed a golden plover and could not settle whether it or the red grouse was Europe's fastest game bird; the first edition appeared in 1955.

Alexander Graham Bell proposed which word as the standard way to answer a telephone?

Ahoy: Bell favoured the nautical greeting for years, but Thomas Edison's suggestion of 'hello', put forward in 1877, won out instead.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi is recognised by Japan as the only person to have survived what?

Both atomic bombings: he was in Hiroshima on business on 6 August 1945 and made it home to Nagasaki in time for the second blast three days later; Japan recognised him in 2009, and he lived to 93.

Gutzon Borglum began a hidden 'Hall of Records' at Mount Rushmore behind which president?

Abraham Lincoln: the chamber was cut into the canyon behind Lincoln's head as a vault for the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and only a rough room was finished before Borglum died in 1941.

A 'butt' is an old English cask unit used for measuring what?

Wine: a butt held roughly 126 US gallons and was exactly half a tun; Shakespeare's Clarence is drowned in a butt of malmsey wine.

Cashew nuts grow hanging beneath a fleshy structure known as the cashew what?

Apple: the cashew apple's sweet, astringent pulp is pressed into juice or fermented into liquor in Brazil and India, while the nut hangs beneath it.

Kongō Gumi, the world's oldest documented company, was founded in 578 to build what?

Prince Shōtoku brought in carpenters from Korea to raise Shitennō-ji in Osaka, and the firm kept building temples for 14 centuries.

The Pentagon was built with duplicate lavatories to obey which state's segregation laws?

Virginia: the building sits in Arlington, where state law required separate facilities by race, but President Roosevelt had the 'Whites Only' signs removed before it was even dedicated.

Which Russian tsar introduced a tax on beards in 1698?

Peter I: Peter the Great taxed beards to westernise Russia's nobles; men who paid carried a copper or silver 'beard token' stamped with a nose, moustache and whiskers.

The term 'spam' for junk messages derives from a sketch on which comedy show?

Monty Python's Flying Circus: in the 1970 sketch, Vikings in a cafe drown out conversation by chanting the name of the tinned meat.

Counting overseas territories, which country spans 12 time zones, more than any other?

France: counting territories from French Polynesia to Wallis and Futuna it spans 12 time zones, and its Antarctic claim would make 13; Russia, the usual guess, has 11.

Which country has the world's only national flag that is not rectangular?

Nepal: its flag is two stacked crimson pennants with a blue border, which also makes it the only national flag taller than it is wide.

Discovered in 1930, Pluto completes its first full orbit since discovery in which year?

2178: one trip around the Sun takes Pluto close to 248 Earth years, so the orbit it was on when Clyde Tombaugh found it in 1930 closes in 2178.

Jeanne Calment, the oldest verified person ever, said she met which painter as a teenager?

Vincent van Gogh: she said he came into her family's fabric shop in Arles in 1888, when she was 13, and struck her as dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable; she lived to 122 years and 164 days.

According to 1960s Random House novels, Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent what?

Roberts: the novels gave her the name Barbara Millicent Roberts, with parents George and Margaret Roberts in the fictional town of Willows, Wisconsin.

Lizzie Magie's The Landlord's Game was the direct precursor to which board game?

Monopoly: Magie patented The Landlord's Game in 1904 to teach the anti-landlord economics of Henry George, the opposite of how people play Monopoly today.

Alfred Butts's word game, eventually sold as Scrabble, was first called what?

Lexiko: Butts devised it in 1931, renamed it Criss-Crosswords in 1938, and James Brunot finally turned it into Scrabble in 1948.

Designer Toru Iwatani said the shape of Pac-Man was inspired by what?

A pizza with a slice missing: Iwatani told the pizza story for decades, though he has also said he rounded out the Japanese character for 'mouth', kuchi.

Nintendo's Mario was named after Mario Segale, who was what to the company?

Its warehouse landlord: Nintendo of America rented one of Segale's warehouses in Tukwila, Washington, from 1981, and staff named the Donkey Kong hero after him.

After scrambling his first wooden prototype, how long did Ernő Rubik take to solve it?

A month: Rubik built the wooden prototype in Budapest in 1974, scrambled it, and needed more than a month of trial and error to work out how to restore it.

Which food does not spoil and has been found still edible in tombs thousands of years old?

Honey: its high sugar content and low pH stop microbes growing; 5,000-year-old traces were found in clay vessels in Georgia, and sealed jars from Egyptian tombs remained edible.