101 Amazing Facts Quotes.

1. "sea otters hold each other’s paws whilst they are asleep so they don’t drift apart from each other."
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts

2. "The night of September the 14th, 1814, saw heavy bombardment of Baltimore by the British. Despite this, the next morning, the large American flag was still flying undamaged over Fort McHenry. Such a sight made lawyer Francis Scott Key feel extremely patriotic, and he wrote four verses called Defence of Fort McHenry, which he set to the music of To Anacreon in Heaven, a British drinking song. When it was later sold as sheet music, the publishers used a different title for Key’s ditty, and in 1931 it was chosen to be America’s national anthem. Yes - The Star Spangled Banner is based on a British drinking song!"
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts

3. "Using a daring and audacious method, the citizens of Konstanz in Germany managed to prevent allied forces from dropping a single bomb on their city during the Second World War... they left all of their lights on at night! As the city is very close to the border with Switzerland - who were neutral in the war - the allied forces assumed the city was Swiss, and didn’t target it."
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts

4. "There was no such thing as the Vietnam War. This rather surprising statement is in fact 100% true - on a technicality. As the US Congress never actually declared war officially against the country, the correct title is the Vietnam Conflict."
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts

5. "The original title for The Lion King was King of the Jungle - until someone pointed out that Lions don’t actually live in the jungle."
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts

6. "The identity of Jack the Ripper is surely one of the all-time classic crime mysteries. In the late 19th Century, the Ripper is believed by general consensus to have committed five murders (although a number of later killings did also bear his hallmarks, and the fifth of the ‘confirmed’ killings still raises a number of doubts). At the time police were stumped, even arresting a man purely on anti-Semitic hearsay before apologising and letting him go. Since then, more than eighty suspects have been proposed, from members of royalty to mad surgeons, and even a suggestion that the Ripper was in fact ‘Jill’ rather than ‘Jack’. The case became muddied when a number of letters were sent to the police; some obvious hoaxes, some in fact likely to have been written in the killer’s own hand. One even included half a kidney (it should be noted that one of the victim’s had a kidney removed at the scene of the attack) with a note saying the other half had been fried and was very nice to eat. Everyone has their own view on who the Ripper was, and why the killings stopped just as suddenly as they began."
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts

7. "Mosquitos prefer to bite children rather than adults - and prefer blondes to brunettes! No-one knows why."
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts

8. "Queen Elizabeth II is in fact Queen Elizabeth I and II. The reason for this is that the union between England and Scotland did not take place until 1603 - after Elizabeth I had ruled in England; therefore until 1952, there had never been a Queen Elizabeth of Scotland!"
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts

9. "In the early 20th century, one of the most popular visitor attractions in Paris was a human zoo, which millions of people visited every year to see ‘specimens’ from Madagascar, India, China, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and the Congo."
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts

10. "During the Cold War, the US Government conducted a number of highly unethical experiments on their own citizens. In one, they placed blowers on schools and low-income housing projects in St. Louis to disperse zinc cadmium sulphide, a fine fluorescent powder. They told the residents that they were testing experimental smokescreens to use should the city be invaded, however the real reason was that that layout of St. Louis was very similar to some Russian Cities, and the US were interested to know how effective chemical warfare would be against them. Despite the powder being supposedly harmless, there remains to this day abnormally high incidences of cancer in the city. In another experiment, in 1955 the CIA released the whooping cough virus over Tampa, Florida without telling anyone, so they could see how quickly it would spread; they got their data, and twelve innocent civilians died."
- Jack Goldstein, 101 Amazing Facts