Who are the world’s greatest philanthropists? The makers of Cracker Jacks have given away fifteen billion prizes.
Category: Feats
Longest Holding of Breath
Don’t try to beat this record: 13 minutes, 42 seconds is the longest anyone has been known to stay underwater without breathing apparatus.
Johann Hurlinger
A man named Johann Hurlinger walked from Vienna to Paris. This would not qualify as one of the world’s amazing feats except he walked the whole way on his hands.
Grasshopper Jumps
If you could jump as high as a grasshopper, relative to its size, you could jump more than one-half mile (804 meters) straight up.
Eye Acuity
How good are human eyes? On a clear night you can see the flame of a match up to fifty miles (80 kilometers) away.
One extraordinary South American Native teenage girl said she could see four of Jupiter’s moons without a telescope. When scientists asked her to draw the moon’s positions, she was accurate.
Whereas the human eye has much greater acuity near the center of the field of vision, a digital camera has uniform acuity. However, the human eye has been compared to a 137-megapixel camera. At the current rate of technological growth, your phone will be able to see better than you within eight years.
Do you wish your phone already had that capability? In a way it does: On iPhones, and most Androids, tap the main button three times, and your camera becomes a very good magnifying glass, even in low light conditions.
Centenarians
There was a fellow in Japan, Mr. Izumi, who made it to the age of 120 or 121. His grey hair was starting to turn black again.
A woman who made it to 115 years old spent 75 years of her life in a mental institution.
Most Prolific Mother
A woman in Russia had 69 children. (16 were quadruplets, 21 were triplets and 32 were twins.)
Multiplication
There is a woman in India who can multiply a 13-digit number by another 13-digit number in her head in less than a minute and come up with the right answer.
Swedish Polyglot
Sweden once had a supreme court justice who was nineteen years old. When he was ten, he could speak fluently in 12 languages.
Young Librarian
At the age of ten, Francois Auguste de Thou was appointed Chief Librarian of France.