Interesting Facts

27th April 1124 – David I became King of Scotland. 1296 – The Scots were defeated by Edward I of England at the Battle of Dunbar. 1667 – The blind and impoverished John Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10. 1773 – The Parliament of Great Britain passed the Tea Act, designed to save the British East India Company by granting it a monopoly on the North American tea trade. They were not a Fair Trade company. 1791 - Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the Morse code, was born. 1840 – The foundation stone for new Palace of Westminster, London, was laid. 1992 – Betty Boothroyd became the first woman to be elected Speaker of the British House of Commons in its 700-year history.

Misao Okawa celebrates her 116th birthday.   Happy Birthday! She was born in Osaka, Japan, in the year 1898, when Queen Victoria was still on the British throne, the Spanish American War was raging and Horatio Kitchener triumphed in the Battle of Omdurman. Her advice is to eat three large meals a day and make sure you sleep eight hours a night. (It's not often that you get to use large ordinal numbers.)

In the early part of the 19th century, dentures were made of a variety of materials, from wood and ivory, to real human teeth. (Following the battle of Waterloo there was a plethora of spare teeth which had been extracted from the mouths of fallen soldiers.  They became known as Waterloo teeth. "Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained." The Duke of Wellington ) Source: H2G2  "