WRIGHT BROTHERS LIVED AT HOME

When the Wright brothers made their first flight, Wilbur was 36 and his brother, Orville, 32. Neither was married, and they still lived at home with their 74-year-old father, Milton, and 29-year-old sister, Katharine. Working as a high school teacher, Katharine also was unmarried.

While at sea, a navigator, standing on deck at five feet above sea level, has a view of 2.5 nautical miles in all directions. The curvature of the earth is such, however, that if that same navigator is elevated 15 feet above sea level, the horizon will be 4.44 miles away.

When growing up, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, inventor of the electromagnetic telegraph, didn’t go by his first name. His parents, Jedediah and Elizabeth, simply called their oldest child Finley.

The first microwave ovens, created by Percy LeBaron Spencer, stood 6 feet tall, weighed more than 770 pounds and cost about $5,000 each.

One of Spain’s national heroes, Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar (a.k.a. El Cid), affectionately named his horse babieca, which means dumbbell or idiot. According to legend, when Bivar chose this scraggly colt, his father called him a babieca. Bivar applied the term to his horse, claiming that it would be a reminder of his father’s doubts.