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.

In ancient China, the nose of a criminal who attacked travellers was cut off.

There are more than 16,400 parking metres in Manhatten, New York.

The first motorcycle speedway race was held in Maitland, Australia, in 1925.

Traffic lights were used before the advent of the motorcar.

The fewest aeroplane passengers killed in one year was 1 in 1993 and the most was 583 in 1977 when two Boeing 747s collided on the runway at Los Rodeos airport, Tenerife, the Canary Islands.