Henry Ford told a visitor to the Ford Motor Company that there were exactly 4,719 parts in a finished car.
Impressed, the visitor asked the supervising engineer if this were true.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the engineer. “I can’t think of a more useless piece of information.”
Note from poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich to zoologist Edward S. Morse:
My dear Morse:
It was very pleasant to receive a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don’t think I mastered anything beyond the date, which I knew, and the signature, at which I guessed.
There is a singular and perpetual charm in a letter of yours — it never grows old, and it never loses its novelty. One can say every morning, as one looks at it, ‘Here’s a letter of Morse’s I haven’t read yet. I think I shall take another shy at it to-day, and maybe I shall be able in the course of a few years to make out what he means by those t’s that look like w’s and those i’s that haven’t any eyebrows.’
Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever–unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.
Admiringly yours,
T.B. Aldrich
42263001 is a perfect square, and so is its reversal, 10036224.
Most graves in Massachusetts’ Stockbridge Cemetery are oriented with the feet facing east, so that on Resurrection Day the dead will rise facing Jerusalem.
Not so the Sedgwick family — patriarch Theodore Sedgwick ordered that his family’s graves form a circle with their feet toward the center. This way, on Judgment Day, Sedgwicks will see only other Sedgwicks.
It’s been called “the laughingstock of the entire Eastern seaboard.”
Playing go requires tremendous concentration, and Hashimoto Utaro and Iwamoto Kaoru shut out all distractions as they resumed an adjourned game in Japan’s Honinbo championship on Aug. 6, 1945.
Unfortunately, they were three miles from downtown Hiroshima.
The explosion damaged the building and injured spectators — but play resumed after lunch.
“There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.” — Alfred North Whitehead
Three-legged pantyhose, patented by Annette Pappas in 1998.
The third leg is folded into a pocket until you get a run; then you rotate it in.
Or you can use the whole thing as a bagpipe warmer.
Paul Armand-Delille was angry at the damage that rabbits were doing to his French estate, so on June 14, 1952, he inoculated two of them with a virus, Myxomatosis cuniculi, that he knew had curbed rabbit populations in Australia.
It, um, worked. Within 6 weeks, 98 percent of his rabbits were dead — and by the end of 1954, so were 90 percent of the rabbits in France.
Armand-Delille was charged one franc for illegally spreading an animal disease, then given a medal for services to agriculture. The medal depicts Armand-Delille on one side and a dead rabbit on the other.
Sixty years earlier, essentially the reverse had happened in the United States.
acnestis
n. that part of an animal’s skin that it cannot reach to scratch
Excerpts from concert reviews in London’s Harmonicon:
June 1823:
Opinions are much divided concerning the merits of the Pastoral symphony of Beethoven, though very few venture to deny that it is much too long.
July 1825:
[Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony] is a composition in which the author has indulged a great deal of disagreeable eccentricity. Often as we now have heard it performed, we cannot yet discover any design in it, neither can we trace any connexion in its parts. Altogether it seems to have been intended as a kind of enigma — we had almost said a hoax.
June 1827:
[Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony] depends wholly on its last movement for what applause it obtains; the rest is eccentric without being amusing, and laborious without effect.
April 1825:
We now find [the length of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony] to be precisely one hour and five minutes; a fearful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band, and the patience of the audience to a severe trial.
“But how did you get to understand Beethoven?” wrote John Ruskin to John Brown in 1881. “He always sounds to me like the upsetting of bags of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.”
