26Alcatraz
Alcatraz was the only federal prison at the time to offer hot-water showers for its inmates because the prison staff felt the inmates would find the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay almost impossible to withstand during an escape attempt.
27. Iceland is extremely protective of their language. Instead of loaning words from other languages, they repurpose old ones. The telephone is 'Simi', meaning thread, a jet plane is 'Thota', meaning to zoom and the word for computer, 'tölva' translates to number priestess or numbers witch.
28. A Roman Mile was defined as 1,000 paces. Armies would leave mile markers every 1,000 steps as they marched. As a result, well-fed armies marching at a fast pace marked longer miles.
29. The Walt Disney Company is the largest consumer of fireworks in the world and the second largest purchaser of explosive devices, right behind the U.S. military.
30. NES games like Battletoads were made so hard because Nintendo was losing money on video game rentals. If they took a long time to beat, people would have to buy the games instead.
Latest FactRepublic Video:
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
31HAL 9000
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 incorrectly predicts a 'mate in two' in a chess game with the astronaut. Fans have speculated whether this was a filmmaking error, a test by HAL of the human’s reliability, or an early sign that HAL is malfunctioning. Kubrick died without revealing the answer.
32. A man named Jonathan Fleming was imprisoned for 25 years before a hotel receipt finally proved he could not have been at the scene of the crime he had been falsely convicted for.
33. There are hypothesized planets better suited for life than Earth, or Superhabitable Planets.
34. The Miami zoo put 30 flamingos in the bathroom during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 to ride out the storm. An image of them huddled inside became one of the most iconic from that hurricane.
35. In 1981, a man named Marcus Sarjeant fired blanks at Queen Elizabeth II, said he did it for fame, showed no mental issues, spent 3 years in jail, then changed his name and continued on with his life at age 20 once released.
