On New Year’s Day, 1907, Theodore Roosevelt shook hands with 8,513 people.

On 5th October 1974, four years, three months and sixteen days after Dave Kunste set out from Minnesota, he became the first man to walk around the world, having taken more than 20 million steps.

Queen Isabella of Castile, who dispatched Christopher Columbus to find the Americas, boasted that she had only two baths in her life – at her birth and before she got married.

Thomas Jefferson wrote his own epitaph without mentioning that he was US President.

In the 18th century Dr Monsey of Chelsea, England tied a piece of catgut around a patient’s tooth, threaded the other through a hole drilled in a bullet, loaded the bullet into his revolver and pulled the trigger.

Theodore Roosevelt was the only U.S. president to deliver an inaugural address without using the word “I”.

The first and only president to name his son George Washington was John Quincy Adams.

Franklin Pierce was the first United States’ president to decorate an official White House Christmas tree.

Herbert Hoover was the first president to have a telephone on his desk.

President William Taft kept a cow on the White House lawn to supply him with fresh milk. He was the last president to do so.

Elizabeth Ballou Garfield was the first mother of a president to witness her son’s, James Garfield, inauguration. His first act after inauguration was to kiss her.

Half the world’s population earns about 5% of the world’s wealth.

Almost 1,2 billion people are underfed – the same number of people that are overweight to the point of obesity.

In the developed countries, the proportion of adults married has declined from 72% in 1970 to 60% in 1996. The chance of a first marriage ending in divorce is between 50% and 67%. The chance that a second marriage will end in divorce is about 10% higher than for the first marriage.

In 1998, US states spent $30 billion in funds on correctional services and $24 billion on social welfare.

The opposite sides of a dice cube always add up to seven.

The world’s longest nonfiction work is The Yongle Dadian, a 10,000-volume encyclopaedia produced by 5,000 scholars during the Ming Dynasty in China 500 years ago.

When Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1912, 6 replicas were sold as the original, each at a huge price, in the 3 years before the original was recovered.

The Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, stores 18 million books on approximately 850 km (530 miles) of bookshelves. The collections include 119 million items, 2 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4 million maps and 53 million manuscripts.

Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote Meteorologica in 350 BC – it remained the standard textbook on weather for 2,000 years.

The first Oxford English Dictionary was published in April 1928, 50 years after it was started. It consisted of 400,000 words and phrases in 10 volumes. The latest edition fills 22,000 pages, includes 33,000 Shakespeare quotations, and is bound in 20 volumes. All of which is available on a single CD.

Usher holds the Star Search record for the longest note by a child: 12.1 seconds

Paris Hilton has size 11 feet! “All those super cute shoes like Guccis and Monolos look like clown shoes on me”

Colin Farrell says that Marilyn Monroe was the first woman he fell in love with. “I used to leave Smarties, the Irish equivalent of M&Ms, under my pillow with a little note saying, “I know you’re dead but these are very tasty and you should come and have a few. i wont tell anyone”

Brittany Murphy claims she started speaking at 4 and a half months. She also says she was a very “energetic child, really bubbly…extremely precocious”

In a high school talent show, Matt Damon performed the talking heads’ “Burning Down the House”