Joshua Abraham Norton was a businessman in San Francisco. After losing a significant amount of money investing in Peruvian rice, he proclaimed himself as the Emperor of the US. He did not have any political power, but everyone in San Francisco humored him, and he got saluted by police. He issued currency in his name, and people used it near his establishment. Although people believed him to be a lunatic, he was treated like royalty. After his death, 30,000 people of the 230,000 living in San Francisco came to his funeral to pay homage.(source)
7 The first known usage of the word “fun” was in the year 1727.
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Although it may be hard to believe, the word “fun” as we know it today wasn’t actively used until 1727. People used it as an adjective or a verb meaning “to cheat or to hoax” before that. It has an uncertain origin which probably derived from the middle English word “befool”. Now, that’s a “fun” fact for you!(source)
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8 Penguins have a gland above their eyes that turns saltwater into freshwater.
Penguins are such cute animals, aren’t they? But what makes them even more fun is that they have a superpower to filter salt out of water due to the supraorbital gland located in between their eyes. Usually, we have kidneys that do that job but penguins have small kidneys that can only filter 1/3rd of the salt in seawater to create urine. This is where the supraorbital gland helps the penguin to filter the remaining salt, and so quench its thirst.(source)
9 On Venus, a day is longer than a year.
Venus’ rotation is very slow and because of its proximity to the sun, the revolution is faster. Venus rotates on its axis only once every 243 Earth days, but it orbits the sun once every 224.65 Earth days. As a result of this, a year on Venus is a little longer than a day on the Earth. Imagine that, birthday every day! Furthermore, this suggests that the sun rises only twice a year on Venus.
Bonus fact: Venus rotates opposite to the direction of the Earth’s rotation on its axis, and because of that, the sun rises in the west and sets in the east!(source)
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10 The name of the search engine google comes from misspelling the number Googol (10100).
When Google’s founders, Larry Paige and Sergey Brin were trying to come up with a name for their search engine, they found out about the number Googol (10100) and decided to call it that. They wanted a name that depicted the indexing of immense amount of data. While Sergey tried to look for the domain name, he misspelled it as Google, and both of them liked the name. Thus, they decided to stick with it and registered on September 15, 1997.(source)
In conclusion, the world has so many facts waiting to be unveiled, and what’s most noteworthy is that these almost never fail to amaze you.
