Impress your friends and family with fascinating trivia

The author of Eccentric Britain, Benedict, who used to live in Dundee, has compiled a new tome full of fascinating snippets.

The History Of Everyday Stuff, £8.95, is available from Amazon as a paperback or for a Kindle.

The standard 750ml wine bottle is set at that sometimes inconvenient measure because that is all a skilled glass-blower could make in one single puff.
Tea bags were invented by a mistake. Salesman Thomas Sullivan of New York City used them to send samples to his customers in 1904 instead of more expensive tins. They put the whole thing in the pot or cup, liked the convenience and the tea bag was born.
Jamie Lee Curtis patented a nappy with a pocket holding disposable wipes.
Harry Brearly was trying to make better rifle barrels in Sheffield, England in 1913 when he noticed that his new mixture, with added chromium, didn’t rust. He’d accidentally created stainless steel.
Starbucks Coffee is named after a character in the novel Moby Dick, the first mate Starbuck.
Marx Brother Zeppo was a great inventor. He invented the Marman clamp which was designed to hold down cargo during transport. They are still used as quick connectors for
wide-diameter fuel pipes, on space flights and supported the atomic bomb on Enola Gay.
Carlsberg Special Brew was created specifically for Sir Winston Churchill, as Denmark’s thank you for Britain’s fight for freedom in World War II.
The first patent in Britain was the ring binder invented in 1801 by the new Patent Office’s chairman Dr Ayfor – suitable for filing patents No 2 onwards.
Lemons contain more sugar than strawberries. Potatoes, raw, contain more vitamin C than oranges.
Thomas Edison did a deal with a New York prison and created the first electric chair. An unfortunate William Kemmler was selected as the first to use it on August 6, 1890. He had to be given a second shock and it wasn’t until two minutes into that he went limp.
Before Hewlett and Packard got it together with computers and printers, they invented an automatic urinal flusher.
By rights you should Spangler the carpet after a party, not Hoover it. The inventor of the electric vacuum cleaner was an American boffin, Murray Spangler – William H. Hoover was merely the canny businessman who really cleaned up.
Ice isn’t slippery, which is why ice skates need blades on the bottom to melt a thin layer of water which is slippery.
RAF engineer Ken Wood, thought up the first multitask food mixer in 1947, hence the Kenwood Chef. Early advertising slogan probably not used much nowadays: “The Kenwood Chef Does Everything But Cook – But That’s What Wives Are For!”
Each king in a pack of playing cards is said to show a great king or figure from history. Spades – King David; Clubs – Alexander the Great; Hearts – Charlemagne; Diamonds – Julius Caesar.
Tomato ketchup was originally sold as a medicine.
Inkjet printers were discovered by a careless engineer who put his hot soldering iron on a pen which then squirted a drop of ink out.
Grout, today used for the white gunge that goes between tiles, is the Anglo-Saxon word for a rough porridge, which it resembles.
It is impossible to break a full-length piece of spaghetti, by bending it from both ends, into two pieces. It always makes three because the shockwave travels down the shaft and makes a second break.
Until 1937 toothbrushes had been made with pig bristles. And until 1892 when Dr Washington Sheffield invented the collapsible tube, toothpaste came in jars.
Safety glass was discovered in 1903 French scientist Edouard Benedictus dropped a glass flask containing a filmy residue of plastic. This held all the broken glass together, and modern car windscreens are made on this principle.
Fluorescent lightbulbs, such as energy saving bulbs, when apparently on, are off almost as much as they are on. Because they flicker with alternating current, they are completely dark 50 times a second.
You will eat on average 23.4 tons of food in your lifetime.
Ole Evinrude, born 1877, was so incensed at having to row a boat two miles across a lake to a picnic in 1906 that he invented the outboard motor.
Bombay Duck is one of the world’s most misnamed products. An acquired taste from India, it contains no duck nor comes from Bombay, which is now Mumbai. It is a reeking dried fish.
The cracks in breaking glass travel at up to 3,000mph.
Danish pastries are called Viennese Bread in Denmark.
Jacob Schick of Iowa, invented the electric razor because he believed that you could extend your life expectancy to 120 years by shaving with great care. Within the first year he’d sold 3,000 but he didn’t reach his age of 120, dying aged just 59 in 1937. Clean shaven.
Jack Ryan who helped perfect the Barbie doll for the Mattel giant toy corporation, had previously worked for the Department of Defence creating lethal missiles.
Tomatoes, introduced from the New World to the Old in 1556, were once thought to be poisonous, as they are related to deadly nightshade. The tomato is the world’s most eaten fruit, with more than 10,000 known varieties.
On January 15, 1919, 21 people were killed, 150 injured and millions of dollars of damage done in the Great Molasses Flood in Boston, Massachusetts. A 50ft-high storage tank burst and sent a tidal wave of two million gallons of the sticky stuff travelling at over 30 miles per hour through the town.
Scotsman Donald McLean, born 1922, had the world’s largest private collection of 367 varieties of potato.
In the 1960s, Douglas Engelbart tried light pens and steering wheels before deciding on what we now call a mouse for use to guide the bug on a computer screen. By bug, he meant what we now call the cursor. The first mouse was wood, with two metal wheels which ran across a surface.
Kia-Ora is a Maori greeting from New Zealand meaning ‘Be healthy’. The juice company has never had anything to do with Maori or New Zealand. Its first product was chilli cordial.
In the early days of champagne making, it was hard to get the volatility right for the strength of the bottles. Workers in the cellars would wear iron masks or chain mail because from 20-90% of a particular vintage would explode. As bottles had to be turned an eighth of a turn each day, it was dangerous work.