250 Fun Facts
250 Fun Facts: Technology, Sports, Music, Art & Famous Places
Every gadget in your pocket, every game you play and every famous building you've seen has a story behind it, and many of those stories are stranger than you'd expect. The first computer bug was a real moth, bubble wrap was meant to be wallpaper, and the inventor of the safety pin sold his idea for just $400.
This collection brings together 250 fun facts about technology, sports, music, art, famous places and the natural world. Every fact has been written by the WebFunFacts team and checked against trusted sources, so you can enjoy them, share them and maybe win your next quiz night.
Technology & Inventions Facts
The first computer "bug" was a real moth. In 1947, engineers found it trapped inside the Harvard Mark II computer and taped it into their logbook.
The world's first webcam was set up at Cambridge University in 1991 to let researchers check whether the office coffee pot was empty.
The world's first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, went online in 1991.
The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, in 2005, was an 18-second clip called "Me at the zoo."
In 1980, IBM's first hard drive that could store a gigabyte was about the size of a refrigerator and weighed around 250 kilograms.
ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose electronic computers, built in 1945, weighed about 27 tonnes.
"Wi-Fi" doesn't actually stand for anything. It was a catchy brand name created by a marketing company.
Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century Danish king, Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, and its logo combines his initials in ancient runes.
The first mobile phone call was made in 1973 by Martin Cooper, using a phone that weighed more than a kilogram.
Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program
In the 1840s, English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote notes on Charles Babbage's planned Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer that was never completed. Her notes included a method for calculating a series of numbers, now widely recognised as the first computer program, written about a century before modern computers existed.
Google's original name was "BackRub."
Amazon started out in the 1990s as an online bookstore run from Jeff Bezos's garage.
Apple's very first logo showed Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree.
The first .com domain name ever registered, in 1985, was symbolics.com.
CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."
The first set of emoji was created in Japan in 1999 by designer Shigetaka Kurita, and included 176 simple icons.
The "Save" icon on many computer programs is still a picture of a floppy disk, even though most people today have never used one.
One of the first computer viruses for PCs, called "Brain," was created in 1986 by two brothers in Pakistan.
Nintendo was founded in 1889, originally making hand-made playing cards.
India leads the world in real-time digital payments
The Unified Payments Interface, better known as UPI, was launched in India in 2016. It lets people send money instantly using just a mobile phone, and it now handles billions of transactions every month, from big shopping bills to a cup of tea at a roadside stall.
Thomas Edison didn't invent the first light bulb. Other inventors made earlier versions, but Edison created a practical, long-lasting bulb in 1879.
One of the world's first speeding tickets was given in England in 1896 to a driver going about 13 km/h.
The first traffic light was installed outside the Houses of Parliament in London in 1868. It was gas-powered and exploded a few weeks later.
One of the earliest escalators was installed as a ride at Coney Island in New York in 1896.
Bubble wrap was invented in 1957 as textured wallpaper.
Play-Doh was originally sold as a wallpaper cleaner.
Post-it Notes came from a "failed" glue that was supposed to be super strong but turned out to be weak and reusable.
The Frisbee is named after the Frisbie Pie Company, whose empty pie tins students used to throw around.
Walter Hunt invented the safety pin in 1849 and sold the rights for just $400.
John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television
In 1926, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird showed moving images on a screen to a group of scientists in London. His early mechanical system was soon replaced by electronic television, but his demonstration was a key step toward the screens we watch today.
The zipper existed for years before it got its name in the 1920s, from a company that used it on rubber boots.
Windscreen wipers were invented by American Mary Anderson in 1903.
Josephine Cochrane invented the first commercially successful dishwasher in 1886.
The ballpoint pen was popularised by Hungarian journalist László Bíró in the late 1930s.
Indian-born physicist Narinder Singh Kapany is known as the "father of fibre optics," the technology that carries internet data around the world.
Indian-born engineer Vinod Dham is often called the "father of the Pentium chip."
The USB connector was co-invented by Indian-born engineer Ajay Bhatt.
TIFRAC, one of India's first computers, was built at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and became fully operational in 1960.
Hotmail, one of the first free web-based email services, was co-founded by Indian-born entrepreneur Sabeer Bhatia in 1996.
Your smartphone is more powerful than old supercomputers
In the 1980s, the world's fastest supercomputers filled whole rooms and cost millions of dollars. Today, an ordinary smartphone can perform far more calculations per second than many of those machines, while fitting in your pocket and running on a battery.
Electric cars aren't a new idea. Some of the first cars, back in the late 1800s, were electric.
The distress signal SOS was chosen because its pattern of three dots, three dashes and three dots is easy to send and recognise in Morse code.
Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone in 1876.
More than 5 billion people around the world now use the internet.
The word "robot" comes from the Czech word "robota," meaning forced labour, and was first used in a 1920 play.
The first 3D printer was invented in the 1980s by American engineer Chuck Hull.
A GPS receiver needs signals from at least four satellites to work out your exact position.
The first product ever scanned with a barcode at a shop checkout, in 1974, was a packet of chewing gum.
Instant noodles were invented in Japan in 1958 by Momofuku Ando.
"Computer" used to be a job title
Before electronic machines took over, a "computer" was a person, often a woman, who carried out long mathematical calculations by hand. Human computers worked on everything from astronomy to wartime codebreaking, and some went on to help NASA send astronauts into space.
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