The oldest daily newspaper
The oldest surviving daily newspaper is the Wiener Zeitung of Austria. It was first printed in 1703.
First Color Photograph
The first color photograph was made in 1861 by James Maxwell. He photographed a tartan ribbon.
More Miscellaneous Facts
The origin of the dollar
The $ sign was designed in 1788 by Oliver Pollock, a New Orleans businessman, using a combination of Spanish money symbols.
The $ sign is used in many countries other than the United States, including the use for the Argentine peso, Brazilian real, Cape Verde escudo, Chilean peso, Colombian peso, Cuban peso, Dominican peso, Mexican peso, Tongan pa'anga and Uruguayan peso. Other countries that trade in their currency as dollars are Australia, Bahamas, Canada, Liberia and others
If you stack one million US$1 bills, it would be 110m (361 ft) high and weight exactly 1 ton. A million dollars' worth of $100 bills weighs only 10 kg (22 lb). One million dollars' worth of once-cent coins (100 million coins) weigh 246 tons.
English Novel Without Using the letter 'E'
Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby has 50,110 words, none of which contains the letter e.
Don't believe that a novel could be without any e's? Here's an excerpt from page one of Wright's Gadsby:
"If youth, throughout all history, had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn't constantly run across folks today who claim that "a child don't know anything." A child's brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adults act, and figuring out its purport."
- Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright. Published 1939