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Most Interesting Notes from Volume “H”

  1. Hailstones fall at 22 MPH. The largest weighed 1-2/3  pounds and was 17 ½  inches around.
  2. The human scalp contains 100,000 hairs. We shed 70-100 per day.
  3. Hares and rabbits are different animals. Hares bear fur-covered young.  Baby rabbits are naked. Rabbits dig burrows.  Hares never do.  Jack rabbits and snowshoe rabbits are actually hares. Hares can have seven litters a year.
  4. James Hargreaves, in the 1700s, invented the spinning jenny, which was the first machine to spin many threads at a time. It replaced the spinning wheel.  The thanks he received for making this labor-saving, efficient machine was to have his machine burned, and to be run out of town by the local spinners who thought the machine would cost them their jobs.
  5. Harness racing is where a horse pulls a sulky and its driver. The horses are either trotters or pacers.  Trotters move the front leg and the opposite hind leg at the same time.  Pacers move both legs on the same side at the same time.  (Are they trained to do that, or does it come naturally?)  About 80% of harness racers are pacers.  Pacers are generally faster than trotters.  Harness horses are standardbreds, a breed that developed from thoroughbreds.  Almost all standardbreds trace their lineage back to Hambletonian, a stud born in 1849.  He sired 1,331 foals.
  6. Hawaii consists of 132 islands. 124 of them are little more than uninhabitable small rocks.  One of the world's rainiest spots is on the island of Kauai where the rainfall averages 460 inches per year.
  7. There are 260 species of hawks in the world, but only 17 in North America above the Mexican border.
  8. Our bodies contain 100,000 miles of veins and arteries.
  9. The right side of the heart receives oxygen-depleted, carbon dioxide-carrying blood from the body and pumps it to the lungs where the carbon dioxide is removed and fresh oxygen is added. That blood is then delivered to the left side of the heart which pumps the oxygenated blood to the rest of the body. Thus, the right side of the heart only feeds the lungs, and the left side of the heart feeds the body.
  10. The sum of the interior angles of a heptagon is always 900-degrees.
  11. In 1781 Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus, the first planet discovered since prehistoric times. He found that Uranus and its two moons rotated in a backward direction.
  12. The sum of a hexagon's interior angles is always 720-degrees.
  13. Nighthawks and swifts hibernate.
  14. Dick Fosbury, a high jumper at Oregon State University, developed a new way to clear the bar. His technique is called the Fosbury flop. He went over the bar with his back to the bar.  He set an Olympic high jump record at the 1968 Olympic Summer Games of 7 feet 4-1/4 inches using this method.
  15. Homing pigeons have been known to fly more than 1,000 miles in two days. They can fly up to 60 MPH.  During the Franco-Prussian War the French used homing pigeons, and the Germans trained hawks to catch them.  During WWI one bird carried a message 24 miles in 25 minutes. It arrived with one leg shot off and its breast injured by a bullet.
  16. Hong Kong is one of the world's most crowded places. On average about 14,500 people live on each square mile.
  17. Horses have larger eyes than any other land animal except ostriches.
  18. A walking horse moves about 4 MPH.
  19. The first European colonists found no horses in North America. This is strange since we know that the Book of Mormon people used them.
  20. In the U.S. more people attend horse races than any other type of sports event.
  21. Thoroughbred horses trace their ancestry back to three Arabian studs.
  22. Most jockeys weigh 110 pounds.
  23. 15% of Americans become hospital patients each year.
  24. Harry Houdini was an escape artist who could free himself from escape-proof devices, including leg irons, 10 pairs of handcuffs, jail cells, nailed crates, and an airtight tank filled with water.
  25. Days were not divided into hours until the 1300s. Prior to that, days were divided into periods, and nights were divided into watches which marked the times when guards reported for duty. Mechanical clocks were invented in the 1300s.
  26. Houston, Texas lies 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico but is one of the world's busiest seaports. Only New York City and New Orleans have busier seaports in the U.S. Houston is the largest oil refining center in the U.S., and 30 major oil companies are headquartered there.
  27. There are more than 300 species of hummingbirds. They only live in the Western Hemisphere. The United States has 19 species, and only one, the ruby-throated hummingbird, lives east of the Mississippi River.
  28. In 1918 Alexander Graham Bell launched a hydrofoil that set a speed record that lasted until 1963. His hydrofoil zoomed across the water at 61.6 knots (75.8 MPH).  (1 knot equals 1.15 MPH).  Hydrofoils can now go up to 92 MPH.  We rode a hydrofoil from Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar when we went to Spain.
  29. Hydrogen is the 9th most common element on earth. It is mostly found combined with other elements, but sometimes there are pockets of uncombined hydrogen in coal mines that have caused violent explosions.  The sun is mostly hydrogen.