101 Fun Facts You Never Knew, Guaranteed to Totally Blow Your Mind

Get ready for trivia night with a bunch of random fun facts that will make you question everything you ever knew about the world.

What’s useless info to some is, to others, cool, amazing fun facts that make the world a stimulating and awe-inspiring place. Are you one of those people who love collecting unexpected pieces of knowledge? If so, prepare to have your mind blown with these interesting fun facts that will amaze adults and kids alike.

101 Fun Facts

1. Three presidents, all Founding Fathers—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe—died on July 4. Presidents Adams and Jefferson also died the same year, 1826; President Monroe died in 1831. Coincidence? You decide. (constitutioncenter.org)

2. The Barbie doll’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts, from Willows, Wisconsin. Her birthday is March 9, 1959, when she was first displayed at the New York Toy Fair. (barbiemedia.com)

3. There actually aren’t “57 varieties” of Heinz ketchup, and never were. Company founder H.J. Heinz thought his product should have a number, and he liked 57. Hint: Hit the glass bottle on the “57,” not the bottom, to get the ketchup to flow. (heinz.com)

4. One of President John Tyler’s grandsons is still alive today—and he was born in 1790. How is this possible? President Tyler, the 10th US president, was 63 when his son Lyon Tyler was born in 1853; Lyon’s son was born when he was 75. President Tyler’s living grandson, Harrison Tyler is 94. Lyon's other son Lyon Jr. passed away in 2020 at the age of 95. The Tyler family still maintains the President’s home, Sherwood Forest Plantation in Virginia. (sherwoodforest.org)

5. The tallest man ever recorded was American giant Robert Wadlow (1918–1940), who stood 8 feet 11 inches. Wadlow's size was the result of an abnormally enlarged pituitary gland. (guinnessworldrecords.com)

6. The tallest living man is 39-year-old Sultan Kösen, from Turkey, who is 8 feet, 2.8 inches, who set the record in 2009. His growth is also due to a pituitary issue. (guinnessworldrecords.com)

7. The oldest person ever to have lived (whose age could be authenticated), a French woman named Jeanne Louise Calment, was 122 years old when she died in 1997. (guinnessworldrecord.com)

8. Sliced bread was first manufactured by machine and sold in the 1920s by the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. It was the greatest thing since…unsliced bread? (chllicothenews.com)

9. The Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, who lived in the 1700s, reportedly invented the sandwich so he wouldn’t have to leave his gambling table to eat. (pbs.org)

10. The first college football game was played on November 6, 1869, between Rutgers and Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey) in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers won. (ncaa.com)

11. Experiments in universities have actually been carried out to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, both with machine and human lickers (because this is important scientific knowledge!). The results ranged from 252 to 411. (tootsie.com)

12. The Four Corners is the only spot in the US where you can stand in four states at once: Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

13. Canada is south of Detroit (just look at a map).

14. The original name for the search engine Google was Backrub. It was renamed Google after the googol, which is the number one followed by 100 zeros. (about.google)

15. The oldest-known living land animal is a tortoise named Jonathan, who turned 190 years old in 2022. He was born in 1832 and has lived on the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean since 1882. (guinnessworldrecords.com)

16. Bats are the only mammal that can actually fly.

17. Wombats are the only animal whose poop is cube-shaped. This is due to how its intestines form the feces. The animals then stack the cubes to mark their territory. (bbc.com)

18. The most common wild bird in the world isn’t the sparrow or blue jay—it’s the red-billed quelea, which live in Africa and have an estimated population of 1.5 billion. (audubon.org)

19. The heart of the blue whale, the largest animal on earth, is five feet long and weighs 400 pounds. The whale in total weighs 40,000 pounds. (nationalgeographic.com)

20. For comparison, an elephant's heart weighs around 30 pounds. And a human heart? A mere 10 ounces.

21. Elephants can’t jump. (smithsonianmag.com)

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22. Octopuses have three hearts.

23. Cows don’t actually have four stomachs; they have one stomach with four compartments. (fda.gov)

24. The platypus doesn't have a stomach at all: Their esophagus goes straight to their intestines. (nationalgeographic.com)

25. This is one animal myth that's true: Eating parts of a pufferfish can kill you because, in a defense mechanism to ward off predators, it contains a deadly chemical called tetrodotoxin. There's enough in one pufferfish to kill 30 people—and there’s no antidote. Still, pufferfish, called fugu, is a highly-prized delicacy in Japan, but can only be prepared by well-trained chefs. (nationalgeographic.com)

26. Polar bears have black skin. And actually, their fur isn’t white—it’s see-through, so it appears white as it reflects light.

27. Tigers’ skin is actually striped, just like their fur. Also, no two fur patterns are alike.

28. Flamingoes are only pink because of chemicals called carotenoids in the algae and fish (which also eat the algae) they eat; their feathers are grayish-white when they're born.

29. Mosquitoes are the deadliest animal in the world: They kill more people than any other creature, due to the diseases they carry. (cdc.gov)

30. What do Miss Piggy and Yoda have in common? They were both voiced by the same person, puppeteer Frank Oz.

31. Psycho was the first movie to show a toilet flushing. (npr.com)

32. One of the most famous movie lines in history was never said. We often quote, “Play it again, Sam,” from Casablanca; but the real line is, “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’”

33. The green code in The Matrix was actually created from symbols in the code designer’s wife’s sushi cookbook. (cnet.com)

34. The wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles was watched by 750 million people worldwide in 1981; sadly, 2.5 billion watched her funeral in 1997. (bbc.com)

35. With 3.572 billion viewers, half the world’s population watched the 2018 FIFA World Cup of soccer (or football, as many international fans call it), which is held every four years. That number is on par with the 2016 Summer Olympics, but only a quarter of the world watched the less-popular Winter Olympics in 2018. (fifa.com)

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36. There are no muscles in your fingers: Their function is controlled by muscles in your palms and arms. (assh.org)

37. The hardest working muscle in your body is your heart—it pumps more than 2,000 gallons of blood a day and beats more than 2.5 billion times in a 70-year life span. (heart.org)

38. It’s impossible to hum while holding your nose (just try it!).

39. Skin is the body’s largest organ.

40. The earth’s circumference is 24,900 miles. (nasa.gov)

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41. All of an adult human’s blood vessels, if laid out end to end, would be about 100,000 miles, so they could encircle the earth four times. (fi.edu)

42. According to recent research, the human nose can distinguish at least a trillion different odors. (nature.com)

43. The longest fingernails ever were over 42 feet in total and belonged to American Diana Armstrong, recognized as the new record holder in March 2022. The previous record was held by American Lee Redmond, with fingernails over 28 feet in total. (guinnessworldrecords.com)

44. The origin of the word “sinister” reflects a historical bias against left-handed people. It comes from the Latin word for “left,” which was also seen to be unlucky or evil. (merriam-webster.com)

45. There is not one letter “q” in any US state name, the only letter in the alphabet to be missing. "J" and "Z" are only represented once each—in New Jersey and Arizona.

46. The word “strengths” is the longest word in the English language with only one vowel. (guinnessworldrecords.com)

47. Cartoonist Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey, came up with names for the things we often see in comics and cartoons: “briffit” is the dust cloud a character makes when he runs away quickly; “plewds” are the beads of sweat when a character is under duress; and “grawlix” are symbols such as “#@*%” that stand in for curse words. (merriam-webster.com)