AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING CI

1. You share your birthday with 9 million other people.

2. The dot over a small (i) is called a tittle.

3. Charles Darwin had 10 children.

4. The gestation period for an elephant is 22 months.

5. The earth is tilted on its axis at 23.5 degrees.  

6. In an era when fortunes were being made by barbed wire magnates and sewing machine tycoons, Charles Diaper, an ambitious yard goods peddler, knew that he could make his million if he could only create the right product. In 1873 he walked the streets of New York until one day, the story goes, while watching naked infants playing on a tenement stoop, his own million-dollar idea struck him. Advertisements for "Diaper's Sanitary Garment for Babies" convinced a new generation of mothers that their babies' very lives would be in peril unless their behinds were swaddled in the triangular cloth forever linked with Diaper's name.

7. The Eiffel Tower is taller than the combined height of the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument.

8. It is illegal in New Jersey to pump your own gas. There are no self-serve stations. Only "trained technicians" may pump gas - to protect public safety

9. The original (Hostess) Twinkies of the 1930s were made with real banana cream - real bananas and real cream. When bananas were rationed in WWII, the company, then called Continental Baking Company, switched to vanilla cream filling - and never switched  back.

10. The Taser was first developed in the mid 1970's by American inventor Jack Cover. Taser (TASER) is an acronym for Tom A. Swift Electric Rifle, named after the 1911 novel Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. The Tom Swift books about an inventor of amazing gadgets were a childhood favorite of now NASA researcher Cover.