250 Surprising Facts: Animals, Science, Space, History & Everyday Life

Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire. Teaching there began by 1096, more than 200 years before the Aztecs founded their capital, Tenochtitlan, in 1325.

Woolly mammoths were still alive on a remote Arctic island when the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built.

The first Olympic Games, held in Greece in 776 BC, had just one event: a short running race.

Chess began in India around the 6th century as a game called chaturanga.

Snakes and ladders also comes from India. It began as a game called Moksha Patam, which taught that good deeds lead upward and bad deeds lead down.

In early chess, the queen was one of the weakest pieces and could move only one square diagonally. Her powerful moves were added in Europe in the 1400s.

The English words "shampoo" and "pyjamas" both come from India. "Shampoo" comes from the Hindi word chāmpo, meaning to press or massage.

Cleopatra was born in Egypt, but her family was Macedonian Greek. She was the first ruler of her dynasty known to have learned the Egyptian language.

Vikings almost certainly did not wear horned helmets. That image comes mostly from costumes designed for 19th-century operas.

The shortest war in history lasted about 38 minutes

On 27 August 1896, Britain and the Sultanate of Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa, went to war after a new sultan took power without British approval. British warships opened fire on the palace at 9:02 in the morning, and by around 9:40 the fighting was over and a ceasefire was declared. The Anglo-Zanzibar War is generally recognised as the shortest war ever recorded, lasting somewhere between 38 and 45 minutes.

Napoleon was not unusually short. He was about 1.69 metres tall, average for a Frenchman of his time. British cartoons helped spread the myth.

According to a well-known story, in 1807 Napoleon organised a rabbit hunt that went wrong when hundreds of tame rabbits charged at him instead of running away.

Before becoming president, Abraham Lincoln co-owned a store in Illinois that was licensed to sell alcohol.

Lincoln was also a skilled wrestler and has been honoured by the US National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

The Great Wall of China is not visible to the naked eye from space. It is long, but far too narrow.

The Eiffel Tower can grow up to about 15 centimetres taller in summer, as heat makes its iron expand.

The Statue of Liberty was originally a shiny copper-brown. It turned green over about 20 to 30 years as the copper reacted with the air.

The oldest surviving photograph was taken in France around 1826 or 1827, and the exposure took many hours, possibly days.

The fax machine was invented in 1843, more than 30 years before the telephone.

Painting and poetry were once Olympic sports

Between 1912 and 1948, the Olympic Games awarded medals not only for running and swimming but also for art. Painters, sculptors, architects, writers and composers competed for gold, silver and bronze, as long as their work was inspired by sport. These art competitions were dropped after 1948, partly because most entrants were professional artists while the Games were meant for amateurs.

Tug of war was an official Olympic event from 1900 to 1920.

Olympic gold medals are mostly silver. The last medals made of solid gold were awarded in 1912.

The Mona Lisa became world-famous partly because it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911. It was missing for two years before being recovered.

The world's first scheduled commercial airline flight took place in Florida in 1914. It lasted 23 minutes and carried one passenger.

In 1971, astronaut Alan Shepard hit two golf balls on the Moon, making golf the first sport played on another world.

Ray Tomlinson sent the first email between two computers in 1971. He chose the @ symbol to separate the user's name from the computer's name.

The first person to pass through the Ellis Island immigration station in New York, in 1892, was Annie Moore, a teenager from Ireland.

The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed for typewriters in the 1870s.

Shakespeare's plays contain the earliest recorded uses of many English words, including "lonely" and "bedroom".

Jennifer Lopez's green dress inspired Google Images

At the 2000 Grammy Awards, Jennifer Lopez wore a plunging green Versace dress that became an instant talking point. So many people searched online for pictures of it that Google noticed it couldn't give them what they wanted, because its search showed only text links. Google co-founder Eric Schmidt later said this led directly to the launch of Google Image Search in 2001.

The small pocket on the front of jeans was originally designed to hold a pocket watch.

Coco Chanel is credited with making the "little black dress" fashionable in 1926.

Bubble wrap was invented in 1957 as a textured wallpaper. It only later became popular as packaging.

The ice lolly was invented by accident in 1905, when an 11-year-old boy left a cup of soda with a stirring stick outside on a freezing night.

The name LEGO comes from the Danish words "leg godt", which mean "play well".

Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Japan, where it began by making playing cards.

Basketball was invented in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891, and volleyball was invented in Holyoke, Massachusetts, just four years later.

The Kentucky Derby horse race has run every year since 1875, making it the oldest continuous sporting event in the United States.

"Ferret-legging" was a strange endurance contest from Yorkshire, England, in which competitors kept live ferrets inside their trousers for as long as possible.

Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid

The Great Pyramid of Giza was finished around 2560 BC. Cleopatra, the last active ruler of ancient Egypt, lived from 69 to 30 BC, about 2,500 years later. The first Moon landing in 1969 came about 2,000 years after her death. So Cleopatra lived closer in time to astronauts walking on the Moon than to the workers who built Egypt's most famous pyramid.

India's first full-length feature film, Raja Harishchandra, was made by Dadasaheb Phalke and released in 1913.

Walt Disney won 26 Academy Awards, more than any other person in history, and he was also the original voice of Mickey Mouse.

Chewbacca from Star Wars was inspired by George Lucas's Alaskan Malamute dog, Indiana. The same dog also gave Indiana Jones his name.

Director James Cameron sold the rights to his script for The Terminator for just $1, on the condition that he would direct the film.

In the film Jaws, the famous line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" is said to have been ad-libbed by actor Roy Scheider.

In early versions of Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear was nearly called "Lunar Larry".

The Beatles song "Yesterday" is one of the most covered songs in history, recorded by thousands of different artists.

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, in 2005, was a 19-second clip of one of the site's co-founders at a zoo.

The tunnels of the Paris Catacombs hold the remains of more than six million people.

The Hollywood sign originally said "Hollywoodland"

The famous white letters in the hills above Los Angeles went up in 1923 as a giant advertisement for a new housing development called Hollywoodland. The sign was only meant to stand for about a year and a half, but as the film industry boomed it became a symbol of the whole region. In 1949, the last four letters were removed, leaving the word Hollywood that is known around the world.