AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING XCII

1. Elisha Otis did not invent the elevator. He invented something perhaps more important - the elevator brake - which made skyscrapers a practical reality. In 1854 he dramatized his safety device on the floor of the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York. The inventor ascended in an elevator in an open-side shaft. Halfway up he had the hoisting cable cut with an axe. The platform held fast, and the elevator industry was on its way. 

2. The Hirshhorn  Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. has over 20 Rodin sculptures in its collection. The original "The Thinker"  is in the Musee Rodin in Paris.

3. The word Utopia, meaning an ideal state, was the name given by Sir Thomas More to the imaginary island in his 1516 book of the same name.

4. Camp Lejeune in North Carolina is the largest Marine Corps base in the world.

5. Nipper, the fox terrier with an ear cocked to an antique phonograph, has been used in RCA advertising since 1929.

6. Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii is the highest island mountain in the world, rising 32,000 feet from the Pacific Ocean floor.

7. "If music be the food of love, play on" is the first line of Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night.

8. An exacta is a type of bet, especially in horse races,  in which the bettor must select the first, second, and third finishers in exact order.

9. Ameslan is short for American Sign Language.

10. The Hebrew name of God consists of four (Hebrew) letters, usually transliterated as YHWH or JHVH, and articulated as YAHWEH or JEHOVAH. The name of God was considered too sacred to be spoken aloud. This form of the name is called the Tetragrammaton.