Accomplishments

Emily Dickinson is considered one of history’s greatest poets. From the age of 24, she never left the walls of her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She completed her education at a woman’s seminary in 1848, and until 1854 her life was uneventful. After a visit to Philadelphia with her family in that year, she … Read more

Could you imagine hair more than five times as long as your body? Early this century, a holy man who lived in a monastery in India had hair that was measured to be 26 feet long! Then there was Jean Bunford, a woman born in England in 1895. Jean had hair that reached to her … Read more

The longest poem ever written by one man is the Shah Namah, or “Book of Kings,” written by a Persian poet named Firdausi in the 10th century. This poem, a complete history of Persia, contained almost 60,000 verses, occupied 2,084 pages, and filled nine big volumes. It took the poet 35 years to finish the … Read more

The average golf course in America is about 6,000 yards long. But no course, no matter how long it is, can compete in size with the Eldorado Golf Club in California. This club contains 15 full golf courses! You could say that the longest course ever played by a golfer is, the United States! In … Read more

The largest art museum in the world is in the city of Leningrad, in the Soviet Union. Most of the museum is in a building called the Winter Palace, but it also includes buildings nearby. The museum contains 322 galleries and about three million works of art. If you wanted to see every work of … Read more

The ancient Egyptians used a form of picture-writing known as hieroglyphics. Writing from Egyptian times has survived, but until a few centuries ago no one knew what it meant, because no one was able to translate these symbols. Then in 1799, French soldiers found a slab of stone near the Egyptian town of Rosetta. The … Read more

When canning was invented, no one knew why food that was packed and heated inside containers remained fresh for a long time. Then, in 1860, French scientist Louis Pasteur discovered that food spoilage was due to bacteria present in all fresh food and in the air. These organisms breaks down substances in the food and … Read more

Liquor and other drinks that contain alcohol wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for tiny, one-celled fungi called yeasts. These organisms like to live in foods with lots of sugar, such as fruit juice. As the yeasts multiply, they change sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. This process is called fermentation. Sometimes the … Read more

The Geiger counter, named after one of the men who invented it, is a device used to find out how much radioactivity is present in a substance or an area. It works somewhat the way a neon light works. In a neon light, an electrical current excites gas molecules inside the glass tube, causing them … Read more

All objects in space give off light, either their own light, as with a star, or reflected light, as with a planet. When we look through a telescope, we’re looking at light waves that have traveled great distances to reach earth. But objects in space give off other kinds of radiation in addition to light: … Read more

No, it’s not the pyramids, or the Great Wall of China, or any of the giant skyscrapers of modern times. The largest single construction project in all history is the United States Interstate Highway System, a network of super highways that crisscrosses America. When it is completed, during the 1980s, the project will include more … Read more

Before Columbus sailed for the New World, the Inca Indians had already built an empire in South America that stretched over 2,500 miles. And long before the first highways were built in the United States, the Incas had already built the first large road system ever constructed in the Americas. The Inca roads stretched from … Read more

A suspension bridge consists of a roadway held up by cables that are attached to two towers, and the distance between the two towers is called the span of the bridge. There are many suspension bridges in the world, but the bridge with the longest span is the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which crosses the entrance to … Read more

A causeway is a low bridge that consists of a roadway mounted on pillars set in the waters below. The longest causeway in the world, and the world’s longest bridge, crosses Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans, Louisiana. This bridge is almost 24 miles long! But the Lake Pontchartrain causeway crosses a shallow lake. The longest … Read more

When automobiles were first built, they were put together by small groups of workers, and may have taken weeks or even months to complete. Around the beginning of this century, Henry Ford and other car makers introduced the assembly line, where each worker fashioned only one part of the car. Soon an entire car could … Read more

A substance called fiberglass is used today for a whole range of things, boats, car bodies, skateboards, curtains, even yo-yos. You may have wondered why it’s called fiberglass, for it surely doesn’t look much like glass. But fiberglass is made from the same substances as ordinary glass. The glass is heated, and the molten material … Read more

When you put a piece of printed paper into a copying machine, a lens focuses the letters onto a drum or plate coated with a metal that is very sensitive to light. This metal has an electric charge, but the electric charge disappears from the areas of the drum that the printing isn’t focused on, … Read more

Computers don’t understand words, but they do understand numbers. So when a computer operator wants to tell a computer what to do, he or she has to translate any instructions into numbers. The number system that computer operators use to “talk” to computers is called the binary system. It is different from our number system, … Read more

You might guess that it’s the Great Wall of China, which is about 1,700 miles long. But other man-made things on earth are longer, yet much less noticed, because they’re not on earth, but under it! The longest objects on earth are actually fuel pipelines that carry oil and gas from oil fields to factories, … Read more

The size of a college or university is usually measured by the number of students enrolled at the school. By this standard, the largest university on earth is the State University of New York, which includes colleges in about 20 cities and has an enrollment of more than 320,000 students! The largest college building on … Read more

Can you imagine a fence long enough to stretch from New York City all the way to California? There is such a fence, and it’s in Queensland, a part of Australia. The Australians built this fence around their vast sheep-raising areas, to protect their flocks from wild dogs and other animals. The wire fence is … Read more

The library at Alexandria, Egypt, was once the largest library of the ancient world, with about 750,000 scrolls. Today, a public library like the one in New York City can contain as many as eight million books! But of all the libraries that ever existed, the largest is the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. … Read more

The longest tunnel in the world doesn’t carry the kind of traffic you might think it does. It’s not an automobile tunnel, as the world’s longest road tunnel, in Austria, is less than nine miles long. A railroad tunnel? No, the world’s longest railroad tunnel is only about 14 miles long. The longest tunnel in … Read more

The first lighthouse that we know about was built in ancient Egypt, and there were lighthouses in Europe before the time of Christ. The most famous lighthouse of ancient times was the lighthouse at Alexandria, Egypt, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This lighthouse was supposed to have been 600 feet tall, … Read more

If you really love riding roller coasters, you might like this one. In the 1980s, the biggest roller coaster was in an amusement park in Valencia, California. This park had the world’s highest roller coaster. At its peak, it reaches a height of 125 feet! The ride from beginning to end covered a distance of … Read more

Oatmeal comes from a grain called oats, one of the most important grain plants on earth. An oat plant grows from two to five feet high, and looks something like wheat. Its branches end in clusters of seeds, just as wheat does, and these seeds are called oat grains. The main use of oats today … Read more

The main ingredient in the dessert treat known as tapioca pudding comes from the roots of a shrub that once grew only in Brazil. That shrub is the cassava, or manioc. The roots of this plant, which contain a great deal of starch, may be three feet long and weigh 30 pounds each. To prepare … Read more

You’ve probably put pepper on your food thousands of times. But did you ever realize that it comes from a fruit? Black pepper comes from a shrub that grows in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. The shrub is a climbing plant that climbs up tree trunks the same way that ivy does. Workers pick the small … Read more

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and engineer whose family owned an explosives factory in Sweden. When Nobel’s brother was killed in an explosion at the plant, the chemist decided to find a way to make explosives that would be safer to handle. Nitroglycerin was a commonly used explosive at the time, but it is … Read more

When a pitcher in baseball doesn’t allow the opposing team a A single hit, then he’s pitched a no-hitter. But when the pitcher also C doesn’t allow any walks (bases on balls), and no batter reaches first base even on an error, then the pitcher has thrown a “perfect game.” A pitcher who hurls a … Read more

A person who is fluent in a language can easily speak and write in that tongue. Many people are fluent in ten or more languages, but very few have become fluent in more than 20. Perhaps the greatest master of language-learning of all time was Joseph Caspar, who was born in Italy in the 18th … Read more

Many legends arise about the deeds of famous historical figures, and these stories are often not true. For instance, the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac River are both legends, and the events they describe probably never happened. But most of the legends about … Read more

Aristotle was a philosopher who lived in Greece during the 4th century B.C. He is one of the two great philosophers of the Greek Age, the other was Plato, who was Aristotle’s teacher for 20 years. Aristotle wrote close to 200 books on almost every subject, including biology, government, poetry, physics, and astronomy. He was … Read more

The great general, Hannibal, was born in 247 B.C. in Carthage, an ancient city in North Africa that had been founded centuries earlier by traders from the Near East. At the age of 25, Hannibal became the leader of the Carthaginian army in Spain, just across the Mediterranean from Carthage. When Hannibal led his army … Read more

Many of the stories that have come down to us from the Middle Ages are merely legends. Some of these tales are based loosely on facts. For instance, there really was an English hero named Arthur, but most of the stories that grew up about him as king were legend. But the story of Joan … Read more

The word odyssey, which means a long journey, comes from the name of a long epic poem, written by the Greek poet Homer sometime between the seventh and ninth centuries B.C. Homer wrote two epics, telling the story of the Trojan War, which was fought between Greece and Troy a few centuries earlier. One poem, … Read more

We celebrate Columbus Day to honor the man who “discovered” our country. But actually, Columbus never reached this nation. On his first two voyages to the New World, Columbus landed on a number of Caribbean islands. On his third voyage, he touched South America, and his fourth journey took him to Central America. But not … Read more

You probably know that the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor was given to the United States by France. But it wasn’t donated by the French government; instead, money for the statue was raised from contributions by French citizens, who wanted to give the United States a present to celebrate our country’s first 100-year … Read more

The retina is a kind of screen at the back of the eyeball. It is on the retina that the lens of the eye focuses the image of everything we see. But when a person is nearsighted, images are focused in front of the retina. The farther away an object is from the eye, the … Read more

A photoelectric cell is a device that releases electricity when it is struck by light. An electric eye, which automatically opens a door as you approach it, is a good example of a photoelectric cell at work. As you approach a door with an electric eye, you cut off a beam of light trained on … Read more

Not at all. The natural process that powers the atomic bomb, or A-bomb, is the opposite of the process that makes the hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb, work! In an atomic bomb, energy is produced by splitting uranium atoms. This releases some of the energy that held the atoms together. The process is called fission, which … Read more

Uranium is used in atomic weapons and in nuclear power plants because it is a radioactive element. The atoms of a radioactive element break down over a period of time, losing particles from their nucleus and releasing energy. Normally, this breakdown happens in only a few uranium atoms at a time. But in an atomic … Read more

Uranium is not a man-made substance, but a natural element, just like oxygen, iron, or gold. It is found in much of the earth’s crust, in sea water, and even in the tissues of living things. In fact, there’s more uranium in the earth’s crust than there is silver, mercury, or iodine! But uranium is … Read more

If you look at a container of milk, you’ll find that the milk is pasteurized. This process was named after French scientist Louis Pasteur, who invented it. Pasteurization kills any bacteria that might be present in milk, and assures that it will be wholesome. How is milk pasteurized? It’s simply heated. Pasteur found that if … Read more

There are game reserves in Africa that might be considered huge open-air zoos. The largest of these is Namibia, in Southwest Africa. This huge zoo covers 78,000 square miles, about the size of the state of Virginia! The zoo that attracts the most visitors, however, is in Mexico City, Mexico. More than five million people … Read more

Dice must be made very carefully, so that each cube is perfectly balanced on all six sides. Otherwise, certain sides of the cube will turn up more than others. Today, most dice are made of plastic, either by hand or by machine. After the cube is formed, the spots are drilled into the faces of … Read more

The door to your house or your apartment probably has a cylinder lock. This lock consists of two cylinders, one inside the other. When the door is locked, pins in the outer cylinder fit into holes in the inner cylinder, preventing anything but the correct key from turning the inner cylinder and opening the lock. … Read more

Locks have been around for thousands of years, but the kind of lock we use today is less than 200 years old. In 1817, the British government offered a prize to anyone who could design a lock that couldn’t be picked open by a thief. A man named Jeremiah Chubb presented a lock that he … Read more

The pyramids of Egypt had smooth, sloping sides, but not all pyramids built in ancient times looked like that. Some had sides that looked like a set of stairs, and these were called step pyramids, or ziggurats. The greatest ziggurat of the Ancient World was in the city of Ur, in Sumeria, which flourished in … Read more

Although the Suez Canal in Egypt is the longest big-ship canal in the world, covering a distance of over 100 miles, the world’s busiest canal and the only one that connects two oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific, is the Panama Canal. In some years, more than 14,000 ships pass through this waterway! In 1881, a … Read more

How can anyone paint all the scenery along a river as long as the Mississippi? An American artist named John Banvard tried it in 1846, producing a painting 12 feet wide and over three miles long. To show the painting, called Panorama of the Mississippi, Banvard rolled it around cylinders and slowly unrolled it before … Read more

There are now about 370 million television sets around the world, which means one person in every ten owns a TV set. The country with the most TV sets is the United States, which has about 120 million sets in 72 million homes. The Soviet Union ranks a distant second, with about 50 million sets, … Read more

The costliest film ever made comes, surprisingly, not from Hollywood, but from Russia! This film, a 1960s version of the novel War and Peace, took five years to make, was over six hours long, and cost over 96 million dollars. The most successful movie of all time, however, is Star Wars, which earned over $350 … Read more

Since the birth of the movie business at the beginning of this century, there have been a number of very strange films, but probably none stranger than two American movies that appeared around 20 years ago. Both films had not only pictures and sound, but smell too! The first to appear was Behind the Great … Read more

If you were making a movie and wanted to have a sound track to go along with it, you’d probably use a tape recorder especially made to work along with movie cameras. You could simply tape the sounds while you filmed the action. Or you could connect the movie camera with the tape recorder by … Read more

Today, a truly large city has over five million people. But the great cities of the ancient world, even those that were the largest cities of their times, were small compared to modern cities. The cities of Babylon in Babylonia, Athens in Greece, Carthage in North Africa, and Alexandria in Egypt all probably had a … Read more

Huang Erh-nan was a well-known painter who lived in Peking, China, during the 1920s. Most of his work consisted of ink paintings of butterflies and flowers. But what made Erh-nan’s paintings so amazing was that he painted them not with a brush, but with his tongue! The Chinese artist filled his mouth with black ink, … Read more

Emperor Sutoku ruled Japan during the 12th century. When he was removed from office and sent into exile, he began to copy a Buddhist religious work, hoping that Buddha would reward him by returning him to the throne. He wrote out the entire 10,000 word book using his own blood as ink! Shortly after finishing … Read more

One of the most sacred and famous buildings in the world is in the city of Jerusalem. It is the Mosque of Omar, which is also known as the Dome of the Rock. This religious shrine, with a dome 100 feet high, was built in the 7th century, on the site of a number of … Read more

The city of Peking, China, is surrounded by walls, and within this city is another city, also surrounded by walls, the Imperial City. And inside this city-within-a-city is a palace so large that it’s almost a city in itself! Most of the palace was built between the 15th and the 18th centuries. The Imperial Palace, … Read more

The nation of Kampuchea, which used to be known as Cambodia, is the home of the Khmer people. About a thousand years ago, the Khmers built an empire in Southeast Asia, with their capital at Angkor, the largest and most magnificent city in all the Orient. Then in the 15th century, the city was conquered … Read more

In the first century, a Roman emperor built an amphitheater on the banks of the Tiber River in Rome. In this arena, many early Christians were put to death, including Saint Peter, the first pope of the Catholic Church. Centuries later, a church was built on the site of the amphitheater, over the supposed site … Read more

The Cathedral of Florence, Italy, was designed in 1420 by a great architect named Brunelleschi. Since the cathedral was to be built on a swampy site, Brunelleschi feared that it might someday begin to sink into the soft earth, and he wanted the people of Florence to always have advance warning. So he designed the … Read more

Can you imagine a church so small that it can hold only three people? Well, there is such a church, near the city of Covington, Kentucky. Built in 1850, the church has walls only eight feet high, and contains just a small altar and three wooden benches, each big enough for one person! Yet even … Read more

Of all the car races ever held, it’s tough to pick out one as the most important. But there was one race that probably had a great effect on the cars driven today. In 1895, when cars were still just a few years old, a newspaper in Chicago sponsored an auto race over a 55-mile … Read more

During the 1890s, a group of showman toured Europe and America with a giant bicycle that they claimed was the biggest ever built. This bike was 23 feet long and had ten seats! But about 20 years earlier, a bicycle maker in Denmark had built what was truly the biggest bicycle of all time: 72 … Read more

If you have a sweet tooth, you should have been in Baltimore, Maryland, during the 1976 celebration of America’s Bicentennial. In honor of the event, bakers put together a cake that weighed more than 70,000 pounds. The huge dessert, the largest cake ever baked, contained some 120,000 eggs and more than 20,000 pounds of sugar! … Read more

When you have a stomach ache, you might take an antacid tablet for relief. An antacid is not really a drug, but a common chemical substance, most often the same sodium bicarbonate that we find in baking powder. Stomach pains are often the result of too much acid in the stomach. Your stomach has acid … Read more

The very tip of a ballpoint pen’s point is really a tiny metal ball set in a socket, so that it’s free to spin as the pen point moves over the paper. You can’t feel the ball turning around when you write with the pen, but it does. One half of the ball, the half … Read more

At one time, the only way a blind person could read was to run his fingers over wooden blocks on which letters had been carved, and try to “read” the letters with his fingers. Then, in 1829, a Frenchman named Louis Braille invented a better system, one which permitted blind people to write as well … Read more

More copies of the Bible have been printed than any other book in the world. But of all the books written by a single author, the one that has been printed the greatest number of times is Quotations from the Works of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, written by the former leader of China who died in … Read more

Could you imagine a person weighing more than a half a ton? Such a person did indeed live. His name was Robert Earl Hughes, and he was the heaviest person ever weighed. When Hughes was born in Illinois in 1926, he weighed 11 1/2 pounds. By the time he was six years old, he weighed … Read more

When three children are born to a woman at the same time, we call them triplets, and when the number of children is four, we call them quadruplets. You won’t see the word decaplets too often, that’s ten children born at the same time! But it has happened, three times! The most recent case occurred … Read more

Incredible as it seems, the greatest number of children born to a woman is 69. And there have been two women who claimed that number of births! Mrs. Fyodor Vassilet was born in Russia in 1707. During her lifetime, she gave birth to 16 sets of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of … Read more

Throughout history, many people have claimed to be 150 years old, or even older. But all of these claims, when investigated, turned out to be false. The oldest proven lifespan of any human being was that of a Japanese man named Izumi, who was 114 years old when he died in 1979. Izumi was born … Read more

There have been many claims about men who were more than eight feet tall, but very few of them are true. The tallest man who was ever reliably measured was Robert Wadlow, who was born in Illinois in 1918. By the age of five, he stood over 5 feet tall and at ten, he was … Read more

Of the almost 400 million telephones on earth today, the United States, with almost 40 percent of them, is the country with the most phones. There are now about 155 million phones in this country, or two out of every five phones in the world. Each year, more than 200 billion telephone calls are made … Read more

The Chinese used homing pigeons to deliver some of their mail as long ago as 1000 B.C. But the only large-scale use of pigeons to deliver mail in modern times occurred in Paris during the 1870s. At the time, France and Prussia were at war, and the Prussians had surrounded the city of Paris. For … Read more

Aluminum is all around us, in almost every rock, plant, and animal. It is the third most plentiful element in the earth’s surface, after oxygen and silicon, and its compounds make up about 15 percent of the weight of the earth’s crust. But nowhere in nature is aluminum found in a pure form, it’s always … Read more

Think of what our world would be without concrete. Look around and see how many homes, offices, schools, roads, bridges, dams, and other structures are made from this material. Did you realize that concrete is made from ordinary sand, gravel, water, and cement? In concrete, the cement and water mix together and form a paste. … Read more

In earlier times, ice cream makers had to pack ice by hand around a tub of liquid ice cream in order to freeze it. But today, ice cream is made by machine. First, cream, milk, and sweeteners are whipped together and partially frozen. Flavorings, such as vanilla or chocolate, are added next, and the mixture … Read more

The margarine that many people use instead of butter is made out of vegetable and animal fats, along with skim milk and salt. The fats account for about four-fifths of the margarine, and the milk and salt for the rest. Margarine was invented by a French chemist during the 1860s. Most margarine sold in the … Read more

The coffee plant is a tropical shrub that grows about 30 feet high and contains a number of small red fruits that look something like berries. Each berry contains two seeds, which are called “beans.” The coffee berries are picked and then washed. They are then left in the sun to dry for a few … Read more

Lhasa is the capital city of Tibet, which is now a part of China. Like much of Tibet, Lhasa is in the Himalaya Mountains, the highest mountains on earth, and the city is over 12,000 feet above sea level! The largest building in Lhasa, and one of the largest religious structures in the world, is … Read more

During the Middle Ages, the Moors from North Africa conquered most of Spain and Portugal, and set up a kingdom there. They chose as their capital the city of Granada, where they built a magnificent palace and fortress surrounded by red brick walls. The fortress became known as the Alhambra, from the Arabic word for … Read more

The first building materials used by man were wood and stone. But the use of bricks followed soon after, even before written history, and today bricks remain one of man’s most important building materials. What is this vital building material made from? Simple earth! Many forces such as weather, glaciers, volcanoes, and chemical reactions, break … Read more

California was once a great gold-mining area, but today the largest gold- producing region on earth is in South Africa, near the city of Johannesburg. This area now produces about half of the world’s supply of gold, and production in some years has been over 1,000 tons! The largest single group of mines in South … Read more

Today, engineers use machines of many kinds to dig holes for oil pick and shovel to dig holes in the wells and mines. But before the invention of these machines, man had to use his own hands and a pick and shovel to dig holes in the ground. The world’s deepest hole of this kind … Read more

Sara Winchester moved into an ordinary house in San Jose, California, late in the 19th century. For some reason, the wealthy woman began adding an extra room to the house every year. By the time she died in 1922, the house contained 160 rooms, and covered more than six acres! Most of the rooms in … Read more