Wearable eyeglasses have been around since 1284

Imagine that every time you needed to read something, you had to lift a piece of glass the size of a mirror to your face. That was the best solution that humankind had come up with for vision problems before the 13th century, when some enterprising folks in Italy shrank the glass and heavy frames enough that they could finally be worn on the nose. A while later, Spanish eyeglass makers came up with the idea of attaching ribbons to the frame so the glasses could remain on the wearer’s face. In the 1700s, these ribbons were replaced with the ‘arms’ that today’s glasses have, allowing them to rest comfortably on the nose and ears.

The apple tree that inspired Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity is still alive

Yes, the very tree from which an apple fell and caused Newton to ask the question: “Why do apples always fall straight down to the ground?” still exists. It started life as a grafted cutting, which was taken from Newton’s garden at his home Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. In the late summer of 1666, that very tree helped Isaac Newton to question the nature of gravitation.

More people have cell phones than toilets

Out of all the 7.7 billion people in the world, over six billion of those have access to a cell phone. Meanwhile, only 4.5 billion have access to working toilets!

There’s more gold than you think

We all know gold is valuable because it’s rare. It’s hard to get an exact value for how much gold we’ve mined in all of human history, but some estimates put it at 10 billion ounces — or a cube about a third of the size of the Washington Monument. And we only mine the equivalent of a 14-foot cube — about the size of a single room — of new gold each year. But the truth is, we’ve only mined about one percent of the gold in the Earth, because the rest is in the planet’s molten core.

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 13th, 2022