Want to prove yourself the king of strange trivia when you’re down the pub? Every day (well, most days), we’ll be regaling you with an odd fact about the world – each one of them guaranteed 100% absolutely probably true, and not just taken from Wikipedia*.

You can also look through our archive of previous Weird Facts: Current Weird Fact of the Day Weird Fact of the Day August to September 2009 Weird Fact of the Day July 2009 Weird Fact of the Day March to April 2009 Weird Fact of the Day January to February 2009 Weird Fact of the Day November to December 2008 Weird Fact of the Day September to October 2008



Thursday, June 25:It only takes eight minutes for sunlight to travel from the sun to the earth, which also means that if you see the sun go out, it actually went out eight minutes ago and if the sun stopped shining it would take eight minutes for us to realise.

Wednesday, June 24:King Charles VI of France – also, rather aptly it seems, known as Charles the Mad – suffered from the delusion that he was made of glass. He had protective iron bars sewn into his clothing to prevent him from shattering if he fell.


Tuesday, June 23:The inventor of the light bulb, Thomas Edison, is said to have been afraid of the dark.

Monday, June 22:In space, no one can hear you cry. Because you can’t. Astronauts are unable to cry properly because there is no gravity and tears cannot flow properly as they would on Earth. It is possible to produce tears in space – but they would leave the eye and float around.

Friday, June 19:The first modern dishwashing machine was invented by wealthy American socialite Josephine Cochrane in 1886 – not to reduce the amount of kitchenwork she had to do, because she never did any, but because she was annoyed with her servants chipping her china.

Thursday, June 18:In addition to achieving fame with his tales of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also helped to introduce skiing to Switzerland in 1894. ‘I am convinced that the time will come when hundreds of Englishmen will come to Switzerland for the skiing season,’ he wrote.

Wednesday, June 17:Charles Dickens always slept facing north, in an effort to battle insomnia – when he travelled, he would carry a compass with him and move his bed around so it was correctly aligned. He also liked to face north while writing, believing it aided his creativity.

Tuesday, June 16:From the bizarre experiments file: in 1960, sleep researcher Ian Oswald of the University of Edinburgh performed an experiment to see if volunteers would be able to fall asleep even if he tape their eyelids open. The answer, it turned out, was yes.

Monday, June 15:The first ever blood transfusion in a human was performed on June 15, 1667 – when French physician Jean-Baptiste Denis treated a feverish young man by giving him about 340ml of lamb’s blood. The patient apparently recovered well.



Friday, June 12:At the party to celebrate the drafting of the United States constitution in September 1787, the bar bill included 60 bottles of claret, 54 of Madeira, 22 of porter, 12 of beer, 8 of cider, 8 of whiskey and 7 large bowls of punch. That was for 55 people. Hardcore.

Thursday, June 11:The earliest known chain letter in history spread around America in 1888 – asking for people to donate a dime to the education of poor children in the Cumberlands region of Tennessee, and asking the recipient to forward the letter to four friends.

Wednesday, June 10:Le Bateau, a piece by the great French artist Henri Matisse, was accidentally hung upside down when displayed in the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1961. Nobody noticed the error for forty-seven days.

Tuesday, June 9:The first picture anybody ever clicked on the web was a promotional photograph of Les Horribles Cernettes, a girl group formed at particle physics research centre CERN, who sing about high energy physics. They had an office next door to web creator Tim Berners-Lee.

Monday, June 8:Nicotine gum was invented in Sweden in the late 1960s, after the Swedish government asked a pharmaceutical company to investigate ways of preventing sailors in their navy becoming grumpy after spending days at sea on their smoke-free ships.

Friday, June 5:King Charles II is said to have had a fondness for collecting the dust that fell from the skin of Egyptian mummies, and rubbing it on his own skin – under the belief that the greatness of the ancients would rub off on him.


Wednesday, June 3:When an iceberg melts, it makes a loud fizzing noise, caused by all the trapped high-pressure air bubbles in the ice being released. This noise has the rather wonderful name of ‘Bergy Seltzer.’

Tuesday, June 2:In 1970, baseball pitcher Dock Ellis played an entire match while high on LSD, following a mix-up about when he was playing. Despite having difficulty feeling the ball or seeing the batter, he threw a ‘no-hitter’ (preventing the opposition from ever hitting the ball) and his team won.

Friday, May 29:King Otto of Bavaria – who ‘ruled’ from 1886 to 1913, and was quite mad – is reputed to have exercised his right to shoot one peasant every day. Luckily for Bavaria’s peasants, his attendants gave him pistols loaded with blanks and dressed up as peasants, playing dead whenever he ‘shot’ them.

Thursday, May 28:Bacteria have an impressive, if unfortunate, tendency to get everywhere – last year, Japanese scientists discovered a new species of bacteria, Microbacterium hatanonis, which lives in hairspray. It’s not yet known if it could infect humans.

Wednesday, May 27:The city of Richmond, Virginia is a historic one in the world of beer cans. The very first canned beer was sold there in 1935 (a can of Krueger’s Finest Beer), while the ‘stay-on tab’ ring pull was invented there by Dan Cudzik of Reynolds Metals in 1975.

Tuesday, May 26:The equals sign was invented by a Welshman – physician and mathematician Robert Recorde, who created the = sign in 1557, on the grounds that writing ‘is equal to’ repeatedly was ‘tedious’. He chose two parallel lines because ‘noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle’.


Thursday, May 21:The first lighter was invented before the first friction-based match. The lighter, known as ‘Döbereiner’s lamp’, was created by German chemist Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner in 1823 – three years before English chemist John Walker invented the friction match.

Wednesday, May 20:The small town of Codell in Kansas was hit by a deadly tornado on May 20th, 1918. Not especially remarkable – except it had also been hit by tornados at around the same time in the evening, on the same day, in 1917 and 1916 as well.

Monday, May 18:It is reputed that when John Hetherington, the inventor of the top hat, first wore his creation in London, it caused a riot in which a child’s arm was broken. He was prosecuted for his hat crime, on the grounds that the design was ‘calculated to frighten timid people’.

Friday, May 15:The microscopic parasite Toxoplasma gondii has an interesting effect when it infects rats and mice – it makes become unafraid of cats. This is pretty helpful to the Toxoplasma, which can only sexually reproduce if its host is eaten by a cat.

Thursday, May 14:When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris in 1911, one of the people arrested on suspicion of its theft was Pablo Picasso. He’d been implicated by his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire; both men were questioned, and eventually released.

Tuesday, May 12:The ‘Sinner’s Bible’ is a version of the Bible printed in 1631 which, thanks to a typesetting error in the Ten Commandments, said ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’ instead of ‘Thous shalt not commit adultery.’ The printers were fined £300, and almost all the copies were destroyed.

Monday, May 11:In 1809, a rise in ticket prices at the newly rebuilt Covent Garden Theatre caused such outrage among theatre-goers that it sparked an ongoing series of riots – the ‘Old Price Riots’ – which lasted for almost three months.

Friday, May 08:Prompted by Atlanta’s 1886 prohibition of alcohol, chemist John S. Pemberton decided to market a non-alcoholic version of his popular medicinal wine, which also included kola nut and coca leaves. As a result, on May 8 that year, the first Coca-Cola in the world was sold.

Thursday, May 07:The oldest condoms ever discovered by archaeologists date back to the 1640s. They were found in a former toilet in Dudley Castle in the West Midlands. They are thought to have been made from fish bladders or animal intestines.

Wednesday, May 06:King Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad, suffered from the delusion he was made of glass. He even had protective iron bars sewn into his clothes to prevent him from shattering if he fell.

Tuesday, May 05:In 1988, Tiáo, a bad-tempered chimpanzee at Rio de Janeiro Zoo, who had a habit of flinging excrement at visitors, was nominated by a satirical magazine to stand in Rio’s Mayoral election. He got over 400,000 votes, coming third out of twelve candidates.

Friday, May 01:On May 1st 1978, the first spam email was written by a man named Gary Thuerk. Sent out two days later to around 600 unwilling recipients, it advertised open houses on America’s west coast for computer company Digital Equipment Corp. And so a phenomenon was born.

* Okay, some of them might be from Wikipedia. But we’ll make sure there’s a citation.