As mentioned in this post, I have a ton of trivia items to share… so here’s today’s Amazing Trivia Bonanza:
– John Tyler (born March 29, 1790) was tenth president of the United States, holding the office from 1841–1845. Amazingly, Tyler has two living grandsons: Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., (born 1924), and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born 1928).
– One of the very last “Confederate widows” died in 2008. This one’s a bit of a trick, though: a girl named Maudie White Hopkins did the laundry and housekeeping chores for Civil War veteran William M. Cantrell. She was 19 and he was 86. Cantrell told Maudie that he would give her his land and house if she would marry and take care of him. Being one of ten children from a dirt-poor Ozark family, Maudie agreed. Cantrell, who enlisted in the Confederate Army at age 16 and served with the Virginia infantry, died in 1937 after the couple had been married for three years. Maudie lived on until August 17, 2008. Read more here.
– If you took a piece of paper .1 millimeter thick and folded it in half 100 times, the resulting stack of paper would be 13.4 billion light-years tall – almost as large as the entire observable universe! It sounds incredible, but it’s really basic math: .1mm (the height of the paper) * 2100 (the effect of doubling the height of the paper 100 times) / 1000 (to convert mm to m) / 9,460,536,000,000,000 (the number of meters in a light year) = 1026 meters, or 13.4 billion light years.
– William Moulton Marston was not only a psychologist, feminist theorist and inventor, he also wrote comic books, too! He’s mostly remembered for creating the systolic blood-pressure test, which detects deception and is still an important component of the modern polygraph machine. Oh, and he also created a comic book character known as Wonder Woman. Read more about him here.