A dog was the first in space and a sheep, a duck and a rooster the first to fly in a hot air balloon.

The first mention of soap was on Sumerian clay tablets dating about 2,500 BC. The soap was made of water, alkali and cassia oil.

Only one of the Seven Wonders of the World still survives: the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The world’s first skyscraper was the 10-storey Home Insurance office, built in Chicago in 1885. (During Roman times buildings were up to 8 storeys high.)

Napoleon’s christening name was Italian: Napoleone Buonaparte. He was born on the island of Corsica one year after it became French property. As a boy, Napoleon hated the French.

Excavations from Egyptian tombs dating to 5,000 BC show that the ancient Egyptian kids played with toy hedgehogs.

John Quincy Adams married for money.

James Abram Garfield was the last president to be born in a log cabin.

Eleven years after Abraham Lincoln’s burial, grave robbers broke into his tomb and dragged the casket partially out before they were caught. The men were convicted merely of breaking and entering and served a year in prison as there was no law in America then against body snatching.

John F. Kennedy was the first U.S. president who had formally been a Boy Scout.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first President to make a hole-in-one in golf.

When William McKinley’s wife Ida McKinley became first lady of the White House, she hated the color yellow so much that she made it a White House yellow-free zone. She even ordered the gardeners to yank every yellow flower out of the garden grounds.

Rutherford Birchard Hayes won lots of spelling contests when he was in elementary school.

Theodore Roosevelt found his favorite dog, Skip, wandering around the Grand Canyon. While Roosevelt had many dogs, Skip was the only one permitted to sleep in the presidential bed.

Millard Fillmore’s wife, Abigail Powers, was his former teacher and was the first First Lady to have a job after marriage.

President Grover Cleveland used his veto powers 584 times during his two terms in office. This is the highest record for any resident that served for two terms. For all the presidents, this is the second highest. First highest came from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who died on his fourth term.

Ulysses Simpson Grant thought Venice would be a nice city if it were drained.

The only time in American history that the president and vice president were members of different political parties occurred in 1797, when Thomas Jefferson, Republican, became vice president under John Adams, a Federalist.

The first and only vice president to be drunk at his inauguration was Andrew Johnson. His doctor had prescribed an alcoholic drink to relieve pain.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was so obsessed with secrecy that he often wrote “burn this” on personal letters. This was so personal that no one on Earth including me knew about this.

The first wife of a president to have a college degree Lucy Webb Hayes, wife of Rutherford Hayes. She had a degree in geology, which was rare for a woman to have degrees at that time.

Music was sent down a telephone line for the first time in 1876, the year the phone was invented.

Accounts from Holland and Spain suggest that during the 1500s and 1600s urine was commonly used as a tooth-cleaning agent.

In 1958 the US sent two mice called Laska and Benjy into space.

In 1961 the US launched a male chimpanzee called Ham into space.

Great Britain was the first county to issue postage stamps, on 1 May 1840. Hence, UK stamps are the only stamps in the world not to bear the name of the country of origin.

The first parachute jump from an airplane was made by Captain Berry at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1912.