By: Lucas Wantuck Welcome to another edition of “Ten Interesting Facts Around the World!” This edition will cover the wonderful world of technology! I hope you enjoy it! 1. The world’s most famous video game company didn’t start with video games! Though Nintendo, the popular Japanese company, is most famous for its consoles and games, they originally sold Japanese card games back in 1889! They made the switch to video games 90 years after they started making card games! 2. Nokia didn’t start off selling phones. The Finnish phone-making company known for its practically indestructible devices didn’t originally make phones. They started with making, believe it or not, toilet paper! While this might seem crazy to think about, it actually makes sense if you know their origins. You see, Nokia started as a paper mill company in 1865, and, after producing toilet paper, tires, televisions, and rubber boots, they finally created their famous, durable, Nokia phones! 3. The first photograph took eight hours to make. Taken from Niépce’s estate in the Burgundy region of France, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took a picture using one of the first cameras ever made, and it took him over eight hours just to take one picture! 4. A man accidentally threw away over 226 million dollars! In 2009, James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive with 8,000 bitcoins. In today’s money, that would be about 226 million dollars, but back then it was only 30 thousand. James was a computer programmer and a crypto miner. When he was getting rid of some old computer parts in a metal recycling facility in Wales, he accidentally threw away the hard drive that had the money. 5. The Gameboy actually went to space. In 1993, Soviet cosmonaut Aleksandr A. Serebrov brought his Nintendo Game Boy and a copy of Tetris with him to his space mission. When it was brought back, it sold at an auction for $1,220! Along with that, it was also said to have orbited the Earth over 3 thousand times. 6. The name for spam mail didn’t come from where you’d think. "Spam mail" was named after the processed meat brand Spam, but its origins can be traced back to a Monty Python sketch. The sketch features a restaurant where customers realize that everything contains Spam, leading to a group of Vikings singing about Spam. The repetitive nature of Spam in the sketch led many people to call the messages they got constantly "Spam mail." 7. You can still access the oldest website in the world. Created by Tim Berners-Lee in the United Kingdom in 1989, the CERN, or European Council for Nuclear Research, was the first website in the world. The purpose of the website was to work on the World Wide Web project, which served as the backbone of the Internet. The coolest part is that you can still access it and see how it looked back when it was first created! 8. The first electronic device was made over 100 years ago. Created by the father of electronics, Sir John Fleming, the vacuum tube was created in the United Kingdom as a way to control the flow of electrons in a vacuum. This device led to many breakthroughs and new technologies such as digital computations, radios, televisions, radar equipment, and even telephones. 9. The first search engine wasn’t Google. Though Google is the most popular search engine, it wasn’t the first. Archie was the first search engine, and it was created by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The search engine was a lot like Google and was just as simple, though the Internet wasn’t nearly as good back then. 10. Someone accidentally cut off the internet in two countries. Back in 2011, a Georgian woman was scavenging for copper, and she accidentally sliced through a cable running to Armenia. Because of this, both countries suffered major power outages and couldn’t use the internet! It is crazy to think that one cable is responsible for maintaining the internet in two countries! Sources:
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