Dan Blaskowitz once trained a cat to steal Snickers bars out of a neighbour’s kitchen. Since then he’s broken seventeen bones (all his own), watched a windmill burn down by moonlight, spent a night in an abandoned tin mine and got to know the owner of the world’s largest collection of dead mice. He likes reading books while doing other things at the same time, and lives in Preston with a tortoise called Thundercats.
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Facts are truly amazing. They can change your life. They can be horrible and disgusting and can sneak up on you and give you a bite when you don’t expect it. They can sit around in your brain for decades and then surface unexpectedly, like some deep- sea creature made of gunge and poison. But every single one teaches you something.
I love them. And if you don’t yet, you soon will. Guess who won 1,808 events at a single Olympic Games? Which warrior was chewed to death by the skull of his defeated rival? How much water falls to Earth, every minute?
Read on and I’ll tell you.*
I truly hope that you love this collection of crazy facts, and that it starts you on your own weird- fact- finding journey. Which I hope proves to last nearly as long as a year on Neptune (165 Earth years) and far more pleasant than a debilitating case of taphophobia (see page 62).
Dan Blaskowitz
* On pages 112, 80 and 65.
When space travel was in its early and entirely experimental days, the Soviet authorities decided to send a dog into space before a human. Which meant that the mongrel Laika, a stray (probably part terrier and perhaps part husky) who was plucked from the streets of Moscow, experienced space flight before any person.
Laika became famous for her flight in 1957 on Sputnik 2, which was ordered by Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev to mark the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Laika sadly died on the mission, but it proved crucial to the future of space exploration: scientists previously had no knowledge whether humans could survive, or for how long, at certain heights and without gravity. Laika’s mission gave them invaluable insight. The first dogs to survive space flight were Laika’s Soviet comrades Belka and Strelka aboard Sputnik 5 in 1960.
After Laika came Ham, a chimpanzee who was sent into space by the US space agency NASA to see if humans
kept the strength to operate machinery when in zero gravity – Ham was trained to pull levers in response to lights going on. The flight was very testing but Ham performed all tasks as requested and landed safely, living to the age of twenty-six.
However, Laika was certainly not the first animal in space.
Fruit flies were the very first Earth creatures to go into space, doing so in a 1946 flight by the United States, on board a V-2 rocket – and returned safely. Other animals followed, including mice, rats, tortoises, frogs, fish and spiders. On the Mir space station in 1990 some quail eggs hatched, marking the first Earth creatures to be born off-planet.
The first creatures to orbit the Moon were two tortoises and some plants in 1968 in the Soviet Zond 5 mission, months before humans ever did so – and they returned safely, too.
The last earthlings in lunar orbit were five mice aboard Apollo 17 in 1972. They were called Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum and Phooey, and they circled the moon seventy- five times.
The monkey’s bite that cost a ‘quarter of a million’ lives
King Alexander of Greece was walking in a private park outside Athens one day in 1920 with his dog (a German shepherd called Fritz) when a Barbary macaque in the
Anim A ls th A t Ch A nged the World grounds leapt down and attacked the dog. The 27-yearold king defended his dog but a second monkey attacked him, biting him on the leg and upper body. The wounds grew gangrenous and he died three weeks later. The more deadly result was that Alexander’s father (who had previously been removed from the throne) was made king again – and led Greece into the disastrous Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22.
‘It is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite,’ said Winston Churchill later. Well, it is rather an exaggeration as only about 9,000 people lost their lives in that conflict. (Although it may possibly be true if you consider all the more complicated ramifications that followed, which Churchill may have been referring to.)
All of the members of the Seal Team 6 who performed in Operation Neptune Spear, in which Osama bin Laden was ‘neutralised’, are protected by operational secrecy. Nevertheless, we do know that one member of the team was a dog called Cairo, who was thought to patrol the outside of the compound in Abbottabad to prevent anyone escaping. He is thought to be a Belgian Malinois, a breed similar to the German shepherd popular with the military because of its sensitive sense of smell, strong jaws, speed and intelligence. During the operation Cairo
wore night- vision goggles and a bulletproof vest and afterwards was said to have been thanked by President Barack Obama.
In the Korean War (1950–53), one chestnut mare called Reckless served in multiple combat arenas, bringing ammunition to soldiers and transporting the wounded away – sometimes making as many as fifty journeys during a single battle, unaccompanied by a human. She was purchased by an American for $250 from a young lad in Seoul, who wanted the money to pay for his sister to receive a prosthetic leg after she had trodden on a landmine.
Reckless loved to eat anything, including pancakes, beer, scrambled eggs, Coca-Cola and even a pile of poker chips worth $30. Twice wounded on the battlefield, she was promoted to corporal and then sergeant, and received two Purple Hearts, among many other military medals.
The cat who was a scientist
Professor Jack H. Hetherington had completed a paper on ‘the behaviour of atoms at various temperatures’ when he realised that he’d completed the experiment himself,
but thoughtlessly referred to ‘us’ and ‘we’ during the paper, as he was so used to co-writing papers with colleagues. As this was the 1970s and before word processors, he was unwilling to rewrite the whole document and instead invented a co-author, which he named after his cat: F. D. C. Willard (from Felis domesticus – the Latin name for the house cat; Chester, the cat’s name; and Willard because that had been Chester’s father’s name).
The paper did well and eventually F. D. C. Willard published a solo article in a magazine in France, becoming the only authority on atomic science who’s also a cat.
In the 1880s a railway signalman in South Africa called Edin Wide had lost both his legs, so he trained a baboon named Jack to push him around in a trolley. He also trained the baboon to tidy his house. At last he trained Jack to run the little rural station all on his own. The signalling was pretty simple at the time: the signal box was at a point where the line split in three, and so an approaching train announced which line it wanted to go on to by blasting its horn once, twice or three times. Jack was perfectly capable of pulling the correct lever and ended up running the signal box without incident for ten years. He was paid twenty cents a day and half a bottle of beer per week.
The carrier pigeon that saved a battalion
Cher Ami, meaning ‘dear friend’ in French, was a carrier pigeon in the First World War trenches, who delivered a message that saved the lives of the ‘Lost Battalion’, an American division that was trapped in the Argonne Forest east of Reims out of communication and under heavy fire, including from their own side, and without ammunition or food.
The first two birds sent with messages were shot out of the sky – as was Cher Ami. In fact the pigeon was shot in the chest, lost an eye and nearly a leg too. But he still managed to fly back to his coop and deliver the message of the division’s location and help save the 194 men remaining.
Cher Ami died from his wounds in retirement in New Jersey in 1919.
In recognition of this – and many important messages he delivered at the Battle of Verdun – Cher Ami was awarded the French military honour the Croix de Guerre, and for decades after the First World War was as famous as any of the human combatants who fought in it.
In 1996, the birth of Dolly the Sheep at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh was a major breakthrough in the