CoolFacts--People
- 7'1 basketball star Wilt Chamberlain's parents were 5'8.
- Adolf Hitler had planned to change the name of Berlin to Germania.
- Adolf Hitler's mother would have had an abortion but the doctor talked her out of it
- Adolf Hitler refused to shake Jesse Owens hands at the 1936 Olympics.
- Adolf Hitler was Time's "Man of the Year" in 1938.
- Al Capone's brother was a town sheriff.
- Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952.
- Albert Einstein's last words were in German. Since the attending nurse did not understand German, his last words will never be known.
- Alexander Graham Bell made a talking doll that said "mama", when he was a young boy in Scotland.
- Alexander Graham Bell, never telephoned his wife or mother. They both were deaf.
- Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle.
- America media mogul Ted Turner owns 5% of New Mexico.
- At age ninety, Peter Mustafic of Botovo, Yugoslavia, suddenly began speaking again after a silence of 40 years. The Yugoslavian news agency quoted him as saying, "I just didn't want to do military service, so I stopped speaking in 1920; then I got used to it."
- Caeser Augustus had achluophobia--the fear of sitting in the dark.
- Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the U.S. national symbol.
- Benjamin Franklin was the first head of the United States Post Office.
- Benjamin Franklin's peers did not give him the assignment of writing the Declaration of Independence because they feared that he would conceal a joke in it.
- Bill Gates' first business was Traff-O-Data, a company that created machines which recorded the number of cars passing a given point on a road.
- By age 16, Andre the Giant (who's real name is Andre Russimof) was 6'10' tall. He had a rare glandular disorder that made his body continue to grow. Even as he died, his body was still growing.
- Charles Dickens was an insomniac, who believed his best chance of sleeping was in the center of a bed facing directly north.
- Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look alike contest.
- Despite his great scientific and artistic achievement, Leonardo daVinci was most proud of his ability to bend iron with his bare hands.
- Einstein couldn't speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought he might be retarded.
- French Astronomer Adrien Auzout had once considered building a telescope that was 1,000 feet long in the 1600s. He thought the magnification would be so great, he would see animals on the moon.
- Harry Truman's middle name was just 'S'. It isn't short for anything. His parents could not decide between two different names beginning with S.
- Hitler was claustrophobic. The elevator leading to his Eagles' nest in the Austrian Alps was mirrored so it would appear larger and more open.
- Hrand Araklein, a Brink's car guard, was killed when $50,000 worth of quarters crushed him.
- In 1911, Bobby Beach broke nearly all the bones in his body after surviving a barrel ride over Niagara Falls. Sometime later in New Zealand, he slipped on a banana and died from the fall.
- In 1976, a Los Angeles secretary named Jannene Swift officially married a 50-pound rock. The ceremony was witnessed by more than 20 people.
- Julie Nixon, daughter of Richard Nixon married David Eisenhower, grandson of Dwight Eisenhower.
- March 2 is Dr. Seuss' birthday.
- Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs' Bunny) was allergic to carrots.
- More than 100 descendants of Johann Sebastian Bach have been cathedral organists.
- Napolean conducted his battle plans in a sandbox.
- Napolean favored mathematicians and physical scientists but excluded humanists from his circle, believing them to be troublemakers.
- The 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel with one of his students over a mathematical computation. He wore a silver replacement nose for the rest of his life.
- Thomas Edison had a collection of over 5,000 birds.
- Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark.
- When Beethoven was a child, he made such a poor impression on his music teachers that he was pronounced hopeless as a composer.
