Short stories and Other Whatnots

General Knowledge

Have you ever wondered if the things you know are right? Like general knowledge, is Mount Everest really the highest mountain? Is the Sahara Desert really the driest place on earth? Did Marie Antoinette really say “Let them eat cake!”? Did the French invent Champagne? Did Cinderella really own glass slippers?

Let’s start with what really is the driest place on earth. It’s not the Sahara Desert, or any other desert in Africa or Arizona. The driest place on earth is Antarctica. The Sahara receives one inch of rain a year while Antarctica receives no rain for 2 million years. Just when you thought Antarctica was all snow and penguins that happy image is ruined by the picture of cracked dirt floors and no snow at all. The Dry Valleys in Antarctica are free of ice and snow; it never rains there at all. The valleys have extremely low humidity and no ice or snow covers, being the largest ice-free region on the continent. The valleys are considered the closest of any of Earth's environments to the planet Mars, and scientists are studying the ecosystem to better understand the surface of the Red Planet.

Mount Everest is not the highest/tallest mountain. If you ask what the highest mountain is, it’s on Mars and it is called Mount Olympus or Olympus Mons, if you prefer the Latin term. However, if you ask what the tallest mountain in the world is, it’s Mauna Kea. Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in the solar system and in the known universe, being almost three times the height of Mount Everest and being so wide that it could cover Arizona or the British Isles. It also has a crater big enough to swallow the city of London. Mauna Kea is the highest point on the island of Hawaii; the inactive volcano is 4,206 meters if measured above sea level, if not, it is 10,200 meters high. Mauna Kea is three quarters of a mile taller than Mount Everest. Of course, there are some technicalities. Being the highest mountain, it means to be measured from sea level to summit; being the tallest mountain, it means to be measured from the bottom of the mountain to the top. Mount Everest is the highest mountain on earth but it is not the tallest.

Are there any man-made artefacts that can be seen from the moon? This might be a hit of clarity for you but all of those viral posts on Facebook saying that the Great Wall of China can be seen from the moon, that’s a hoax. No man-made artefact can be seen from the moon. The moon is easily confused with the word “space”; space is only 100 km away from the earth’s surface. From that distance, many things are visible. Railways, cities, fields, buildings, you could see the Titanic from space before it hit the iceberg. The distance of the earth from the moon is 400,000 km away; it is so far away that you can’t even see the continents, let alone the Great Wall of China.

Do you remember the look of joy on your face when your science teacher asked the class who invented the telephone? Well, wipe that smug smile off because it is not Alexander Graham Bell. A Florentine inventor, Antonio Meucci, first demonstrated a working model of a device he called teletrofono. He filed a caveat in 1871, 5 years before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent. In that same year, Meucci fell ill, unable to speak much English and unable to send the ten dollars required to renew his caveat. Meucci sued when he found out of Bell’s recently registered patent in 1876. He had sent his original sketches and working models to the lab but by extraordinary coincidence, Bell worked in the very same lab and the models have mysteriously disappeared. Meucci died in 1889and Bell got credit for the invention of the telephone.

If you had read The Fault in our Stars, you know that it was the French who invented champagne. Wrong. Champagne is an English invention. They had developed a craving for fizzy wine in the 16th century, so they demanded a second fermentation process of the flat wine from Champagne (the wine region) to create the carbonated wine. It was the French who added finesse and the flair of marketing. The UK is France’s largest customer of Champagne, almost a third of the entire export market and twice as much as the USA. Dom Perignon, a Benedictine monk, did not invent champagne but he did however say this famous exclamation: “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!” It was later devised for an advertisement in the late 19th century.

It was not Marie Antoinette who said “Let them eat cake!” Nobody said that, it was only used as an illustration of aristocratic decadence. Let’s take a recap; it was during the year 1789, the underway of the French Revolution. The poor of Paris were rioting because they have no bread and the Queen Marie Antoinette, trying to be funny, she gives them cake. She gave them something very different from cake, what she had distributed among the poor was brioche (bread enriched with butter and eggs).

Do you remember centipedes in grade school? How their hundred feet used to give you shivers? Well, look again. Do you even know how many legs does a centipede have? Not a hundred, even if the Latin translation for that is “a hundred feet”, centipedes do not have the exact number of legs. Even though these creatures have been studied for over a hundred years, nobody has ever found one centipede that has an exact one hundred legs. All centipedes have odd numbered pairs of legs, ranging to 15-191 legs. The closest centipede to have almost 100 legs was found during 1999, it had 96 legs.

 Sorry to ruin your happily ever after but have you ever wondered what Cinderella’s slippers were made from? If it were glass, those things would have smashed when she was trying to run away when midnight struck. The actual material made to make those legendary slippers is squirrel fur. Apparently the author who wrote the familiar story, Charles Perrault, misheard the word vair (squirrel fur) in the medieval tale he updated for the similar-sounding word verre (glass).