Amazing feats

In 1997, at Sydney airport, Australia, David Huzley pulled a 187-tonne Boeing 747-400 a distance of 91m. He had previously hauled a Boeing 737 and a Concorde.
In the annual Empire State Building Run-up, runners race up the famous skyscraper’s 1,576 steps. In 2006 Andrea Mayr of Austria set a new women’s record of 11 minutes 23 seconds. The overall record-holder is Australian athlete Paul Crake. In 2003, he got to the top in 9 minutes 33 seconds. He also holds the record for the Australian Sydney Tower Run-up.
In 2005, US arm-wrestler Ed Shelton ripped up 55 telephone directories, each 1,044 pages thick. It took him three minutes.
Australian Arulanantham Suresh Joachim holds many endurance records, including a drumming marathon (84 hours), the longest time standing still (76 hours 40 minutes), running 100 miles/ 161km on a treadmill (42 minutes 33 seconds) and crawling one mile/1.6km (37 minutes 17 seconds). In 2006 he announced his intention to run a mega-marathon through 54 countries in 181 days, a distance of over 6,000 km.

Body records

Longest nails
Shridhar Chillai of pune, india (1937-) has not cut the nails on his left hand since 1952. By 2000 the total length of his nails on that hand was over 600cm.

Longest beard
Hans Langseth (1846-1927) had a beard that measured 5.33m. It has been in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA, since 1967.

Longest Moustache
Kalyan Ramji Sain of Sundargath, India, holds the record. His moustache measures 3.29m form tip to tip.

Longest hair
Swami Pandarasanndhi was the head of a monastery in madras, India. When his hair was measured in 1949 it was 7.9m long.

Longest sneezing bout
Donna Griffiths of Pershore, Worcestershire, started sneezing on 13 January 1981 and continued for 978 days.
Longest hiccupping
Charles Osborne of Anthon, Iowa, USA, hiccupped from 1922 to 1990.

Maths genius
When he was only eight years old, American Zerah Colburn (1804-40) worked out how many seconds had elapsed since the birth of Christ. He did this in his head within seconds. When zerah was asked whether 4,294,967,297 was a prime number (one that cannot be divided evenly by another number), he instantly replied that it was not – it is equal to 641 times 6,700,417.

The improvements

Technical improvements and the demand for faster communications encouraged companies to try laying cables over even greater distances. Several attempts to lay cables across the Atlantic failed when the cables snapped, but one was completed in 1858. To mark the occasion, Queen Victoria sent a telegraph message to President Buchanan in the USA. It took almost 18 hours to transmit her 99-word message! Attempts were made to increase the pace by raising the voltage, but this quickly burned out the cable. In 1865 the world’s largest ship at the time, the Great Eastern, laid the first continuous cable across the Atlantic. It was the only ship to carry a cable long enough. During the 20th century, telegraph cables which transmitted Morse code were steadily replaced by telephone cables, which could transmit voices. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers of underwater cables were laid across the world’s oceans and seas. These have now been replaced by fiber-optic cables, which offer faster transmission and many more connections.

Internet milestones

In little over 10 years, the internet has become a global phenomenon. In 1995 it was used by about 45 million people around the world. By 2006, the figure had more than doubled to 1,018,057,386. By the time you read this, the figures will have increased again.
During the 1960s scientists in the USA began trying to work out how organizations could keep in touch with one another after a nuclear attack. In 1965 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) suggested linking computers. In 1969 computers at four US universities were connected and were able to ‘talk’ to each other for the first time.
The network was extended and in 1973 computers were connected between London and Norway. At the same time, electronic mail (e-mail) was being used more and more to send messages between computers. In 1976 Queen Elizabeth II became the first monarch to send an e-mail message. In 1979 the first Usenet newsgroups (online discussion groups) began.

Plucking up Mangoes

Mangoes are plucked when they are yet hard and green. Generally when a few semi-ripe fruits begin to fall naturally from the tree, others are plucked with a bamboo harvester without bruising their skin. After keeping them in the open for a day, mangoes are placed in single layers of straw or grass. Within a week, they are ready to be eaten. It is believed; artificially ripened mangoes taste better and have a better flavor than those ripened on trees.

Weighty words

Acre

An acre describes an area of land and comes for the old English word aecar, meaning a ploughed field. It was the area a team of oxen could plough in one day. In the UK in 1824, an acre was set as 4,840 square yards.

Celsius
A temperature scale invented in 1742by Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius. A Celsius degree is 1/100th of the difference between the freezing and boiling points of water (0 degree and 100 degree).

Fahrenheit
This temperature scale was devised by German physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit. On this scale the freezing point of water is 32 degree.

Foot
Foot originally meant the average length of an adult foot, and has been used since ancient times. Before France invented the metric system, the French foot was based on the length of the Emperor Charlemagne’s foot.

Gram/kilogram
Gram comes from the same ancient Greek word that gave us grammar, and means a marked-off division. A kilogram is 1,000 grams; kilo comes from the Greek chilioi, meaning one thousand