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.

Andrew Jackson was the first president to ride in a railroad train.

Martin Van Buren was the eighth president, the eighth vice president and lived to see the election of eight different presidents from eight different states.

The first president to be photographed while in office was President James K. Polk, in 1849.

The first telephone was installed in the White House when Rutherford Birchard Hayes was president.

Elizabeth Wallace, Harry Truman’s wife, was the longest living First Lady.