Facts to make you go“WOW!”
WORDS: DOUGLAS MCPHERSON PICTURES: SHUTTERSTOCK
WOW! Elvis Presley shared his first big screen kiss with Jana Lund in Loving You.
◆ The dolphin in Flipper was called Mitzie in real life.
◆ A redsmith works with copper.
◆ The London Tube train fleet travels 47.5 million miles (76,443,840 km) each year.
◆ In the poker scene in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig was the only actor at the table who couldn’t actually play the game.
◆ Anne Winter became British Rail’s first female train driver, 40 years ago in 1983.
◆ A pound today buys less than a fifth of what it would in 1980.
The Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) was created in 1918.
◆ The theme tune to the TV show Magpie was played by the Spencer Davis Group under the alias of The Murgatroyd Band.
◆ London’s Duke of Argyll Pub once had a secret tunnel to the home of the aristocrat it is named after.
◆ At its narrowest point, Norway is only 3.6 miles (5.8km) wide.
◆ The world’s tallest staircase stretches for 2 miles (3.4 km) – and 11,674 steps – up the side of Mount Niesen in Switzerland. And once a year there’s a race up it!
◆ The Hundred Dragons Elevator in China is the world’s tallest outdoor glass elevator, with a height of 1,070ft (326m).
◆ John Lennon was in a childhood gang called the Outlaws, named after the group in the Just William books.
◆ Las Vegas roughly translates as “The Meadows”, and was named by Rafael Rivera in 1821. It became a desert when its underground springs dried up.
Humans have 10 times as many sweat glands as a chimpanzee.
◆ The French drop is a sleight-of-hand illusion in which a magician pretends to pass an item from one
