HISTORY FACTS

• The 16th century Escorial palace of King Phillip II of Spain had 1,200 doors.
• The world’s first travel agencies were Cox & Kings, founded in 1758, and Thomas Cook, founded in 1850.
• A dog was the first in space and a sheep, a duck and a rooster the first to fly in a hot air balloon.
• Music was sent down a telephone line for the first time in 1876, the year the phone was invented.
• Beer was the first trademarked product – British beer Bass Pale Ale received its trademark in 1876.
• Playing-cards were known in Persia and India as far back as the 12th century. A pack then consisted of 48 instead of 52 cards.
• Excavations from Egyptian tombs dating to 5,000 BC show that the ancient Egyptian kids played with toy hedgehogs.
• Accounts from Holland and Spain suggest that during the 1500s and 1600s urine was commonly used as a tooth-cleaning agent.
• Julius Caesar was the first to encode communications, using what has become known as the Caesar Cipher.
• The first mention of soap was on Sumerian clay tablets dating about 2,500 BC. The soap was made of water, alkali and cassia oil.
• The first animal in space was the female Samoyed husky named Laika, launched by the Soviets in 1957.
• In 1958, the US sent two mice called Laska and Benjy into space.
• In 1961. the US launched a male chimpanzee called Ham into space.
• In 1963, the French launched a cat called Feliette into space.
• Great Britain was the first county to issue postage stamps, on 1 May 1840. Hence, UK stamps are the only stamps in the world not to bear the name of the country of origin.
• Napoleon‘s christening name was Italian: Napoleone Buonaparte. He was born on the island of Corsica one year after it became French property. As a boy, Napoleon hated the French.
• John Rolfe married Pocahontas the Red Indian Princess in 1613.
• Only one of the Seven Wonders of the World still survives: the Great Pyramid of Giza.
• The first parachute jump from an airplane was made by Captain Berry at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1912.
• On 21 June 1913, over Los Angeles, Georgia Broadwick became the first women to parachute from an airplane.
• The first written account of the Loch Ness Monster, or Nessie, was made in 565AD.
• The world’s first skyscraper was the 10-storey Home Insurance office, built in Chicago in 1885. (During Roman times buildings were up to 8 stories high.)