Fact Republic

Question Everything

[factrepublic]

For more Facts visit : https://factrepublic.com/fact-cards/

[factrepublic]

A British police constable named Steve Hutton, on 2 separate occasions, barked at fleeing criminals to trick them into thinking he had a police dog with him and it worked.

[factrepublic]

After a Black female postmaster named Minnie Cox was wrongly pressured out of her post in Mississippi in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt continued to pay her federal salary and punished the town by rerouting their mail to a city 30 miles away.

[factrepublic]

The Japanese word “arigata-meiwaku” translates to the feeling you have when someone does you a favor you didn't want them to do, and which might have caused you trouble, but you have to act grateful anyway.

[factrepublic]

Although Nazi Germany sterilized or murdered 73%-100% of all schizophrenics in Germany (220,000-269,000 people), there were no long-term effects on subsequent rates of schizophrenia in Germany. In fact, rate of people diagnosed with schizophrenia after World War 2 were unexpectedly high.

[factrepublic]

In 1998, Marvel offered the cinematic rights of almost all of its characters to Sony for a mere $25 million. Sony rejected the offer, and only purchased the rights to Spiderman for $10 million believing that movie audiences would only care about him.

[factrepublic]

95% of all Thoroughbred racehorses can be traced back to a single 18th-century stallion named Darley Arabian.

[factrepublic]

Trees near rivers with salmon grow three times faster than trees without them because bears leave their carcasses to decompose on the banks.

[factrepublic]

Mill workers in Manchester, England refused to touch slave-picked cotton during the US Civil War. Lincoln wrote a letter of thanks, and relief shipments were sent to the workers. Today, a statue of Lincoln stands in Manchester's Lincoln Square.

[factrepublic]

Pearl Jam's song Jeremy is based on the real-life classroom suicide of Jeremy Wade Delle of Texas, who was released from a mental hospital and sent back to school. Reportedly, once his insurance money ran out, he was deemed “cured.”

[factrepublic]

Scarlett Johansson really did approach random men while filming Under the Skin (2013), asking them “Are you single? What are you doing tonight?” and offering them a lift. None of them were actors and some of the footage ended up in the film.

[factrepublic]

The UK military recruiter mistook “cryptogamist” (algae expert) for “cryptogramist” and sent Geoffrey Tandy to join the code breakers. He wasn't so useful until captured German papers arrived water-logged. With his expertise they salvaged them, cracked the code, and hastened the victory.

[factrepublic]

In 2007, "Big Bang Theory" set designers toured the apartments being used by current graduate students to see how young scientists really live. They did a faithful re-creation of the apartments, but after CBS tested the show, the sets were scrapped because they were too depressing.

[factrepublic]

John F. Kennedy enjoyed a "privileged childhood of elite private schools, sailboats, servants and summer homes" during the Great Depression. He later claimed that he only learned about the Great Depression in the books he read while attending Harvard.

[factrepublic]

Psychologist László Polgár theorized that any child could become a genius in a chosen field with early training. As an experiment, he trained his daughters in chess from age 4. All three went on to become chess prodigies, and the youngest, Judit, is considered the best female player in history.

[factrepublic]

The Sex Pistols were once asked by their manager to write a song called “Submission”, hoping that they would write a song about bondage. Instead they wrote a song about a submarine mission.

[factrepublic]

The Oh-My-God particle detected over Utah in 1991 was probably a proton traveling at about 99.99999999999999999999951% the speed of light. It is the fastest moving object ever recorded and it carried the same kinetic energy as a baseball traveling at 90 kilometers an hour (50 mph).