Life is mostly about the pursuit of knowledge and, therefore, the collection of fun facts. All my fun facts were harvested personally … They started as a physical book purchase from Amazon, then moved to a Kindle download where I bookmarked them by hand; at the conclusion of a book they were transcribed into a Snoopy Moleskine, and finally, they appear here for your personal wonderment.
Daniel Boone sold deerskins called buckskins for varying amounts of English pounds and then American dollars. In America, the costs of these skins eventually were simply called a buck.
George Washington distilled Whiskey at Mount Vernon because he needed cash. In 1799 he distilled 11,000 gallons for a profit that would have been worth $142,000 in today’s dollars. He liked sweet wine, rum punch and whiskey.
JD Rockefellers’s kids earned money for chores: two cents for killing flies, ten cents for sharpening pencils, five cents for practicing music, two cents per day for abstaining from candy and a dime bonus for each consecutive day of abstinence.
Edsel Ford got his first Ford when he was ten years old and drove himself to school. When he turned twenty-one his father, Henry Ford, took him to the bank, saying, “I have a million dollars in gold here, I want Edsel to have it.”
The Tonight Show on New Year’s Day 1971 was the last television show to carry a commercial for cigarettes.
The Texas Company of the 1930s became Texaco.
In 1968 Bell System led an effort to create a national number to be used in emergencies. It needed to be easy to dial and remember and the resulting “911” was especially easy to dial on rotary phones.
By 1920, the Great Atlantic & Pacific (the A&P) was the largest retailer in the world with 4,588 stores and $235 million in sales. It was the largest retailer in the world for forty-three years.
Clarence Sanders opened the first self-service grocery store in 1916, he called it Piggly Wiggly.
The first credit card was the Diner’s Club Card in 1950
When Edison launched his first power station in 1882, no school was training electrical engineers, so he trained his own.
America established the world’s first patent office in 1836.
Al Capp created and drew the Li’l Abner comic strip for forty-three years, at one point reaching ninety million people daily.
Andrew Carnegie divided his life into three stages: 1) education, 2) making money, 3) giving all the money away.
King Camp Gillette created the disposable razor in 1903, selling fifty-one razors and 168 blades. Business would pick up, as the next year he sold 90,884 razors and 123,648 blades.
Dow Chemical during World War II invented a plastic sheeting to protect munitions, tanks and planes – Saran Wrap.
Americans consumed thirty-six million gallons of beer in 1850 and 855 million gallons in 1890. Irish and Germans marketed beer as “liquid bread.”
When it became clear that FDR would win the 1932 presidential election and end prohibition, the Anheuser-Busch board authorized $15,000 to buy a team of Clydesdales for promotional purposes.
By 1980 “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” had sold 130 million copies and was netting its author, Johnny Marks, $600,000 a year.
George Washington was a land developer and the richest of his generation controlling 60,000 acres much of it in the promising West.
One of Rockefeller’s early partners was a man named Sam Andrews who at one point told JD, “I wish I was out of this business.” JD said: “What will you take for your holdings?” Andrews said $1 million. JD called his bluff and the next day he had a check ready for Mr. Andrews. The following day he sold those holdings/shares to Cornelius Vanderbilt for $1.3 million. Had Andrews kept his stock it would have been worth $900 million by the 1930s.
Ten years after the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 the assets of the new individual companies quintupled in value and new oil companies were born including, ARCO, CONOCO, Mobil, Exxon, Amoco, Chevron and Sun.
GM invented the concept of the “model year” and the idea of brands that were targeted to specific socioeconomic groups. Those brands, targeted from to the relatively poor to the rich were Chevy, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadilac.
Pioneering house builder Bill Levitt: “The job of the union could be reduced to a simple idea: the protection of the slowest and least efficient worker.”