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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 435856" data-attributes="member: 6929">In antique times (antique meaning Roman and before), purple clothing extremely expensive because purple dye could only be obtained from certain small shellfish that were quite rare. (The Histories of Herodotus makes mention of many gifts to the Delphic Oracle: six jars of gold, a lifesize silver statue of Apollo, and a dozen purple tunics is a typical gift.)Mauve dye was invented in the 19th century and was based on coal. Before then, mauve did not exist.The ancient Romans used lead for their water pipes. They called lead plumbum, from which we get both lead's symbol Pb and the word 'plumbing' for piping.A group of crows is called a murder. (And do ravens have parliaments? I can't remember.)Actually, the African Masai are rumoured to be extraordinarily tall, although I have no exact figures. Taller even than the Dutch, though. (And I knew a dutch kid who was taller than I am now when he was in secondary school.)Now for some unrelated trivia:The Japanese use at least four alphabets. Hiragana characters spell out words; Katakana spell out words from foreign languages; Kanji are pictograms stolen from the Chinese; and Romaji is the roman alphabet. They also read from the top right corner of the page down in columns, and their books appear backwards to us Westerners.Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was delivered in 'a high, reedy voice' as an afternote to the much longer speech of another senator. He later said 'I failed' in reference to the Address, and everyone agreed.World War One was the scene of unusal aerial antics:Britain had reliable parachutes, but did not issue them to their pilots for fear that they would leap from their planes in fear of the enemy.And unconfirmed: A fighter crashed into a building, catapulting the pilot from his cockpit into a bed below. It was a hospital.Even before that, it's a little-known fact that a New Zealand farmer was flying an aeroplane before the Wright Brothers. There's debate as to whether he managed a controlled flight or not, but he is credited with inventing the aileron (an important part of maneuvering a plane).</blockquote>

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