By Terese Kreuzer
*Automobiles didn't have radios until 1923.
*After English and Spanish, Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the United States.
*The word 'wedding,' when people 'pledge' to marry each other stems from the same Germanic root as the modern word 'wager,' meaning 'a gamble.'
*Americans eat 1.2 billion pounds of potato chips a year - more than any other snack food.
* Fairview is the most common place name in the United States.
*Skiing isn't new. A four-thousand-year-old rock found in Norway far north of the Arctic Circle depicts a hunter on skis.
*The first practical, mechanical cash register, invented in 1883, was nicknamed the “Incorruptible Cashier.”
*Kool-Aid is Nebraska's official soft drink.
*In 1894, Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a school for deaf people, originated the football huddle to keep opposing teams from reading their hand signals.
*Tobacco smoke contains more than four thousand chemicals.
* An average of nine million people share the same birthday.
*The character Mother Goose was inspired by the mother of Charlemagne, the 8th Century Queen Goosefoot.
*Ahead of its time: in 1968, Canada Dry produced the flop caffeine-free soda Sport-Cola.
*The name of the mad computer HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey is one letter down from IBM.
*When it was discovered that Dr. Bunting’s Remedy “knocked eczema,” it was renamed Noxema.
*Despite the success of the Harry Potter series and The Da Vinci Code, the best-selling author of all time is still mystery writer Agatha Christie, with over two billion novels sold.
*The best-selling single record of all-time is “White Christmas.” The Bing Crosby recording has sold fifty million copies.
*Though thought to have been inspired by the German word for ‘water’ -- wasser -- the name Vaseline comes from the number of vases used to store the ingredients used in its development.
*Superstar Barry Manilow began his career writing jingles for McDonald’s and State Farm Insurance.
*In pop culture mythology, the Green Hornet – Britt Reid – is the son of Dan Reid who is the nephew of John Reid – the Lone Ranger.
*Though he is usually played by an Englishman, the character Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is actually the son of an Indian rajah.
*The man traditionally referred to as Buddha was actually named Siddhartha Guatama (circa 563 – 410 B.C.).
*Norman Rockwell was just nineteen when he became the art editor of Boy’s Life Magazine.
*By profession, author Arthur Conan Doyle – creator of Sherlock Holmes – was originally an ophthalmologist.