Interesting Facts

4th August  1914 - Germany declared war on Belgium 1914 - Britain declared war on Germany. 1914 - The US declared neutrality. A woman gives flowers to a German soldier leaving for the front, Berlin, August 1914  pic.twitter.com/AbpfIdFCN9 — History In Pictures (@HistoryInPics)  August 5, 2014 1944 - Anne Frank was arrested in Amsterdam by German Security Police (Grüne Polizei) following a tip-off from an informer who was never identified.1964 - FBI agents uncovered the bodies of three missing civil rights workers at a dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

25th July 1943 - Italian dictator Benito Mussolini stepped down as head of the armed forces and the government. 1969 - Senator Edward Kennedy plead guilty to leaving the scene of a crime following the Chappaquiddick car crash. 1978 - The first so called 'test tube baby' was born in Manchester, England. 1992 - The Olympic Games opened in Barcelona with all countries present for the first time in modern history. 2000 - 113 people died when Concorde crashed minutes after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris. Concorde was out of service for more than a year after the Paris crash, it struggled to attract enough passengers and was retired in October 2003 as it was no longer profitable.

10th July 988 – The city of Dublin was founded on the banks of the river Liffey in Ireland. 1040 - Lady Godiva stripped and rode round the streets of Coventry in her birthday suit, to protest the heavy taxation imposed by her husband, Lord Leofric, the Earl of Mercia. 1212 – The most severe of several early fires of London burnt most of the city to the ground. 1460 – Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick defeated the king's Lancastrian forces and took King Henry VI prisoner in the Battle of Northampton. 1553 – Lady Jane Grey took the throne of England for - nine days. Awww bless. 1778 – Louis XVI of France declared war on the Kingdom of Great Britain. 1856 – Nikola Tesla was born. 1913 – Temperatures in Death Valley, California hit 134 °F (~56.7 °C), which is the highest temperature recorded in the United States. 1938 – Howard Hughes set a new record by completing a 91 hour airplane flight around the world. 1940 - The German air force, the Luftwaffe, attacked ...

4th May 1493 – Pope Alexander VI divided the New World between Spain and Portugal along the Line of Demarcation. (No one told the New World.) 1494 – Christopher Columbus landed in Jamaica. 1675 – King Charles II of England ordered the construction of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. 1814 – Emperor Napoleon I of France arrived at Portoferraio on the island of Elba to begin his exile. 1904 – Charles Stewart Rolls met Frederick Henry Royce at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, England. (The rest as they say is history.) 1912 – Italy occupied the Greek island of Rhodes. 1932 – Mobster Al Capone began serving an eleven-year prison sentence for tax evasion. 1945 – British forces liberated Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. 1945 – The North Germany Army surrendered to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. 1949 – The entire Torino football team (except for one player who did not take the trip due to an injury) was killed in a plane crash at the Superga hill at the edg...

The Social Media site Friends Reunited is closing down as it is unable to cover its costs. (It launched in 2000 and was extremely popular in the UK, with over 12 million members in 2005, almost 50% of UK internet users back then.  Sadly, since then, rivals like Facebook have ensured its demise.)

According to the Indian Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, smartphone sales in India reached 100 million by the end of December, 2015. (India is growing at a phenomenal pace and the government is looking to expand rural development with broadband being laid out in rural India. According to data from analyst firm CyberMedia Research (CMR) 94% of feature-phones (as opposed to smartphones) sold in India were priced below 2,000 rupees  £21.)

15th August 1843 – Tivoli Gardens, one of the oldest amusement parks in the world, opened in Copenhagen, Denmark. 1914 – The Panama Canal opened to traffic. 1945 - Allied nations celebrated VJ Day marking the end of World War II. 1947 – India gained Independence from British rule after almost 190 years. 1952 – A flash flood in the town of Lynmouth, England, killed 34 people. 1963 – The last man was hanged in Scotland. 1971 – Bahrain gained independence from the United Kingdom. 1971 - horse rider Harvey Smith was stripped of £2,000 winnings and a major show jumping title for allegedly making a rude gesture, although he swore it was a V for victory sign. 1998 – 27 people were killed following a massive car bomb in the town of Omagh in Northern Ireland.

Over the last 50 years short-sightedness amongst children in the UK has doubled. ( In the 1960s just 10% of British 12 and 13-year-olds had myopia, today that is 23%. Experts are blaming this increase on our increasingly indoor lifestyles and use of computers.   And it's not just happening in the UK, in the US in the 1970s 25% of children were diagnosed myopic, by the year 2000 this had risen to over 40%.  In China The journal Nature reported that around 90% of China's teenage and young adult population are short-sighted, up from 10 to 20% of the total population 60 years ago. One Chinese city is so worried, they are experimenting with transparent classrooms to expose children to more sunlight. How about giving them more time and space to play outside?)

The highly successful travel website Trip Advisor was founded in February 2000 in a small office above a pizza shop called Kosta’s in Needham, Massachusetts, USA. (15 years later and the reviews on the site now have more than 10 billion words, that's nearly 12,000 times the number of words in the complete works of Shakespeare. The most reviewed city is London – with over 1.8 million reviews of the city’s hotels, restaurants and attractions.)

According to research commissioned by home insurance company More Than, the biggest hazard in the home is ... children. (By the age of 10 the average child in the UK will have caused more than £2,000 worth of damage around the house. The most common things kids do to destroy the house are:- 1. Drawing on walls 2. Permanent stains on the carpet 3. Breaking plates and crockery 4. Damaging furniture 5. Footprints/handprints on surfaces 6. Scratching upholstery 7. Blocking the toilet 8. Accidentally smashing a window 9. Scratching walls with bikes 10. Blocking the kitchen/bathroom sink 11. Breaking beds by jumping on them 12. Staining kitchen surfaces 13. Breaking door handles 14. Pulling up carpets 15. Splashing paint on everything 16. Gluing things to furniture and walls 17. Breaking the banister to the stairs 18. Breaking the TV 19. Setting things on fire 20. Putting toys in the microwave I'll always remember when a friend of mine found that her son had pu...

According to a survey run by Direct Line insurance, we need an extra 2 hours 45 minutes every day to do everything we want to do and have enough time to relax. (A basic need for most humans is to have seven hours of free time every day, but the average person nowadays (2013) only manages four hours, 14 minutes. In 1995, people had six hours and 57 minutes downtime, by 2000 that was reduced to six hours and 34 minutes. but nowadays it's a measly four hours, 14 minutes.  The culprit?  Technology.  So go on, switch off your computer and go and sit on the couch, or go and chill out in the garden, if you don't have a garden, take a walk in the park to feed the swans and get some fresh air.)