Traffic jams of New York, San Francisco and Paris are well known – beaten only by those in Seattle where a driver annually spends 59 hours stuck in traffic.

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

In 1620, Dutch inventor Cornelius van Drebbel launched the world’s first submarine in the Thames.

Manhattan traffic crawls at an average of 6.2 miles an hour on midtown city streets.

In 1893 J. Frank and Charles E. Duryea produced the first successful gasoline-powered automobile in the United States. They began production of their Duryea in 1896, the same year Henry Ford started operations of his first successful car in Detroit.

The world’s most expensive jam (jelly) is Confiture de groselles. It is a redcurrant jam (jelly) from a 14th century recipe made in the tiny French town of Bar-Le-Duc.

Over 90% of all fish caught are caught in the northern hemisphere.

The first cola-flavoured beverage was introduced in 1881.

Chocolate is the number one foodstuff flavour in the world, beating vanilla and banana by 3-to-1.

In September 1999 Dustin Philips of the US set a Guinness World Record by drinking a 400 ml (14-oz) bottle of tomato sauce through a straw in 33 seconds.

A green diamond is the rarest diamond.

Hurricanes, tornadoes and bigger bodies of water always go clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. This directional spinning has to do with the rotation of the earth and is called the Coriolis force.

All the planets in the solar system rotate anticlockwise, except Venus. It is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

The magnetic north pole is near Ellef Ringes Island in northern Canada.

There is no record of a person being killed by a meteorite but animals are occasionally hit.

The first movie to use sound was “The Jazz Singer,” released in 1927: the first words, spoken by Al Jolson, were: “Wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet.”

The video recording machine was invented by the Ampex corporation of California in 1956. The first video recorder, the Ampex VR1000, stood 1,1 m (3 ft 3 in) high and weighed as much as a small car: 665 kg (1,466 lb).

In 1937 Disney won a special Oscar for the first full-length animation: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” More Oscar fast facts

The first daily broadcast was started by the BBC in November 1936.

The first porn movie was the 1908 Fench film al’Ecu d’or oula bonne auberge.

About 2,4 billion CDs are sold annually. The number of recorded CDs and blank CDs sold has been about equal.

In August 1983, Peter Stewart of Birmingham, UK set a world record by disco dancing for 408 hours.

Klezmer music is derived from two Hebrew words, clay and zimmer, meaning “vessel of music.”

The Beatles song “Martha My Dear” was written by Paul McCartney about his sheepdog Martha.

Since its launch in 1981 the song Memory of the musical Cats has been played on radio more than a million times.

A grand piano can be played faster than an upright (spinet) piano.