FUN FACTS

 Reading Left to Right!!! No Reason

English doesn't have to be read or written from left to right. It just is.

Many other languages, among them Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew, are written right to left or even bottom to top. Why, then, is English left to right?

Well, the best explanation is that the ancient Greeks said so.

Seriously, the scholars of ancient Greece experimented with the various methods of putting words on tablets and such and then reading those words. The Greeks decided that going from left to right was the easiest thing to do, the one that made the most sense. So that's what they did. And when the Romans conquered the Greeks, they kept this practice, applying it to Latin.

Most Western languages have their roots in Greek and Latin, so that's why most of those Western languages have words and sentences that progress from left to right.

Galileo Did Not Invent the Telescope

Galileo Galilei, the famous Italian scientist who discovered Jupiter's four closest moons, did not invent the telescope that he used to see those moons. In fact, he just made the telescope better.

Hans Lippershey, a man from the Netherlands who made eyeglasses, invented the telescope in 1608. He wanted to see things far away--on land--so he put existing technology and his imagination together and came up with the telescope.

The Dutch government tried to keep the invention a secret, but it didn't work out that way. Galileo heard about it and built his own. Galileo's telescope was three times more powerful than Lippershey's, and Galileo had the idea to turn it into the night sky. And in 1611, he saw Ganymede, Io, Europe, and Callisto--proof that Jupiter had moons and that Earth wasn't the center of the universe (or even the solar system).

Galileo is often thought to have invented the telescope because he made so many important discoveries with it. Galilei invented many other things, including the microscope but the credit for inventing the telescope goes to Holland's Hans Lippershey.

Writing Words
The words we use to describe writing have different origins. We get the word write from writan, originally in Old English. This word meant to scratch. Primitive writing was scratching with stones on bark or scratching with quills on parchment.

Speaking of parchment, we get the word paper from papyrus, the plant that gave us the pulp on which ancient peoples wrote.

Those ancient people used quill pens to do their writing. The Latin word penna gave us the English word pen. Penna meant feather, and quill pens were really just feathers.

Today, we write much of time using pencils. The word pencil comes from Latin as well. This word is penicillum, which meant "little tail." Writers of old used tiny brushes, which looked like little tails.

Liquid Paper Was Invented by a Monkee's Mother
Liquid Paper was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham, whose son Michael Nesmith was a member of the American rock group The Monkees.

Bette Graham was 17 when she got a job at a Texas bank as a secretary, even though she didn't know how to type. She was young and energetic, and she worked. The company she worked for sent her to secretary school, and she was typing in no time at all.

The 1950s had seen the widespread of the electric typewriter, which typed faster but also allowed for more mistakes. Also, the ribbon in the electric typewriter made it harder to erase mistakes than the ribbons in the manual typewriters.

One holiday season, Bette Graham was a bank window and, in a flash of brilliance, decided to create a paint to cover up typewriting mistakes.

It worked! In 1956, she sold her first bottles of her new product, which she called "Mistake Out." She made it in her kitchen, and her son Michael and his friends bottled it in the family garage.

By 1957, she was selling 100 bottles a month and had gotten a patent for her product, which she now called "Liquid Paper." Sales continued to grow, as more and more people heard about Liquid Paper, through word-of-mouth and by reading about it in magazines.

In the 1960s, Bette Graham bought a machine to help her manufacture Liquid Paper. In 1971, she sold 2 million bottles. Michael, in the meantime, had moved to Los Angeles and formed The Monkees, who went on to have many popular hits, including a TV show.

In 1979, Bette Graham sold the company for $47.5 million dollars and royalties on every bottle until the year 2000. She didn't live to see the end of the contract, dying in 1980.

Her invention continues to be used everyday by secretaries and other people in the office and wherever typewriters are used.

April Fool's Day: A Date in History
April Fool's Day wasn't such a joke for people in the 16th Century. In fact, many people didn't even know about it.

For hundreds of years, people had celebrated the New Year for eight days, beginning on March 25 and ending on April 1. In 1582, Pope Gregory changed all that. He introduced a new calendar, which all people in the Christian world were supposed to follow. On this new calendar, the year began on January 1.

Some people who hadn't heard about the new calendar or didn't really believe or care still celebrated on April 1. Other people called these people "April Fools" and played tricks on them.

This was the beginning of April Fool's Day.

The Chocolate Chip Cookie: An Accident
The Toll House Cookie, one of the most famous inventions ever, was an accident.

Ruth Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, owned the Toll House Inn near Whitman, Massachusetts, in the 1930s. Ruth made homemade food for her guests.

One evening in 1937, she was making butter cookies and thought she would make them all chocolate instead. She cut a bar of chocolate into tiny pieces and added them to the cookie dough. She thought that the chocolate would melt completely and she would have chocolate cookies. When the cookies came out of the oven, the chocolate hadn't melted at all! Instead, the "chocolate chips" had kept their form.

The guests loved the cookies, and people began to come to the inn just to eat the famous cookies.

How did Nestle get involved? Well, Ruth Wakefield cut up a bar of Nestle chocolate when she made the Toll House cookies. So Ruth went to Nestle with her recipe for "Chocolate Crunch Cookies." Nestle liked the idea, and they got permission from Ruth to put her recipe on the back of their chocolate bars. In return, she got all the chocolate she wanted to keep on baking those cookies.

Nestle tried to make it easy for people to make these cookies. They even included a small chopper in the package. Finally, in 1939, the Chocolate Morsels that we know today were introduced.

Saint Patrick Wasn't Really Irish
St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, wasn't really Irish. He was Scottish. Patrick was born in Kilpatrick, Scotland, in 387, to important Roman parents. He was kidnapped and taken to Ireland as a slave when he was 16. He escaped after six years and returned to Scotland. Many years later, he returned to Ireland, this time bringing with him the message of the Christian Church. He converted many people in Ireland to Christianity. He founded churches and abbeys and other places for people to worship and study. It was not always easy for Patrick. Many times, he was arrested and held by Irish druids, who didn't exactly like this new religion. But Patrick held to his faith.