Thomas Edison's last breath was saved in a test tube.

The "last breath" of the inventor Thomas Edison can be seen on display in the Henry Ford Museum. According to legend, Thomas Edison's son, Charles, approached his father on his death bed and placed a test tube over his father's mouth as he breathed his last breath. He then sealed the test tube with a cork and sent it to Henry Ford, a good friend of his father. Ford kept the test tube, believing it to contain his friend's soul.

If this seems too good to be true, that's because it is. However, it was years before anyone found out what the mysterious test tube actually was.

The full name for Los Angeles is El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula

The name comes from a Spanish expedition in California back in 1769. An expedition led by Gaspar de Portola arrived at what is now the city of Los Angeles, which back then was fertile ground by a river. They decided that this would be a good place for a settlement.

One of the members of the expedition, Father Juan Crespi, named the river El Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reyna de Los Angeles de Porciúncula. (The river of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porciúncula). The community that was later established on that site was therefore named after the river. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reyna de Los Angeles de Porciúncula (The town of Our Lady the Queen of the angels of Porciúncula). We now just call it "Los Angeles" for short

There hasn't been a reported case of smallpox since 1978.

Smallpox is a deadly disease that used to be very widespread. It would kill 1 in 4 people that were infected. Most of the survivors of smallpox would be blind or scarred. In the 1950s there were 50 million cases of smallpox every year.

The World Health Organization intensified the effort to eradicate smallpox in 1967. The eradication effort worked! The last case of smallpox occurred in a laboratory in the United Kingdom in 1978. Before that, the last natural case of smallpox was in Somalia in 1977..

10 or 11 McNuggets???

On the 10-piece Chicken MgNugget box for McDonalds, there is a picture of 11 McNuggets!

The USA bought Alaska from Russia for 2 cents an acre!

Secretary of State William H. Seward agreed to purchase Alaska from Russia for only $7.2 million in 1867. At the time, critics referred to this as "Seward's folly", "Seward's Icebox" and "[President] Andrew Johnson's polar bear garden".

With approximately 365 million acres, that amounts to less than 2 cents per acre. Still, critics thought Seward was crazy, and the deal only passed the Senate by one vote. Of course, we later found out that Alaska has GOLD and OIL...

If Facebook were a country, it would be the THIRD LARGEST country in the WORLD!

If Facebook were a country, it would be the THIRD LARGEST country in the world, BIGGER than the U.S. and Indonesia.

In 2009, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had 200 million users, which (if Facebook was a country) would make it the fifth largest in the world.
That was back then. Now, Facebook's statistics page claims that there are more than 400 million active users (twice as many as last year!). This means that there are more Facebook users than people living in the United States (309 million) or Indonesia (231 million). The only countries with bigger populations than Facebook are China and India.

87 Hours movie!

The longest movie ever made is The Cure for Insomnia, lasting 5220 minutes (that's 87 hours long!)

It doesn't have much of a plot, either. The film consists of poet L.D. Groban reading a 4080 page poem, some X-Rated film footage, and some rock music videos. Despite its extreme length (87 hours is over 3 and a half days) it still was played continuously at its premier at the The School Of The Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois.

All MONOPOLY Facts!

The longest MONOPOLY game in history lasted 70 straight days.

Of course, you might recall that the longest underwater game of Monopoly lasted for 45 days (link).
More fun facts: The longest Monopoly game in a bathtub lasted 99 hours. The longest game in a tree-house lasted 286 hours. The longest game played underground was 100 hours, and the longest one played UPSIDE-DOWN was 36 hours. Also: Fidel Castro ordered all the copies of Monopoly in Cuba to be destroyed.

The average Google visitor on the May 22nd spent 36 seconds playing Google Pac-Man. That's 4.8 MILLION HOURS wasted for that day!

We've all seen the "doodles" that Google puts up on special occasions to replace the usual "Google" logo. On May 22, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, Google put up an interactive doodle: an actual playable Pac-Man game in the shape of the Google logo.

The Rescue Time Blog calculated the difference between the amount of time the average user spends per day on Google and the amount of time the average user spent on Google on May 22, 2010. The average user spent 36 extra seconds on Google that day. Multiply that by 504,703,000 unique visitors and you get 4,819,352 hours of time spent playing Pac-Man around the world!

Assuming that the average Google user is worth about $25/hour, Google cost the world about $120,483,800 in wasted time. That's enough money to pay the salary of every Google employee for 6 weeks of work!

The Pac-Man doodle is gone from the main Google page, but if you still want to waste time, you can play it here.

First Bar Code!

The first product to have a bar code was a Wrigley's Gum!