Fascinating Facts You Probably Didn’t Know

By Eric Hammer

Here are some fascinating facts about our country and our world that you probably didn't know:

Hebrew Was Widely Spoken in the American Colonies Around the Time of the Revolutionary War

Yes, Hebrew, the language which was "revived" more than half a century later by Eliezer Ben Yehuda as the official language of the Jewish people in Israel was much loved by our founding fathers. In fact, at Harvard until the year 1807, the commencement required an intonation of a Hebrew prayer and often was given entirely in Hebrew.

There is also some evidence that some of the founding fathers of the United States even wanted to adopt Hebrew as the official language of the United States, though this cannot be confirmed. The reasoning behind this was that the Bible had been written in Hebrew originally and the early Americans rooted their thinking in the bible.

M&Ms Used to Be Colored With Beetle Shells

No, you're no longer eating an insect when you eat an M&Ms candy. However, until the early 1980s, the colored candy shell was made using a ground up shell of a beetle in order to give it that extra shine. The super shiny beetle grindings were dropped in order to make the product kosher, however there are still some other candies that do use the beetle shell to give their products more of a gleam.

The Wild Turkey as National Bird

Here's another freaky and fascinating fact you probably never knew: There is some evidence that Benjamin Franklin wanted the wild turkey to become the national bird of the United States. While there is no evidence that it was actually mentioned during congressional debates on the subject, a letter exists where Mr. Franklin suggested that he didn't like the idea of the Bald Eagle as national bird and he suggested that the wild turkey would have made a better choice.

Benjamin Franklin Represented Several of the Original Colonies at Once

Speaking of Benjamin Franklin and fascinating facts, he is the only American founding to represent four different colonies all at one time. How did that happen? Simple - Mr. Franklin was appointed during colonial times to represent a number of colonies to the British Crown, including Massachusetts (where the revolution started), Georgia, New Jersey and his home colony of Pennsylvania. By the way, Franklin is also the only person on dollar bills aside from Alexander Hamilton who never held a national elected office in the United States (Franklin was ambassador to France and Hamilton was the first Secretary of the Treasury, though neither was elected to those posts).

Thomas Edison Didn't Create the Electric Light

Forget what your science teacher told you back in elementary school. Thomas Edison did not create the world's first electric light. Rather, he might be thought of as being the Steve Jobs of his day. As you may know, Steve Jobs didn't invent the MP3 player with the creation of the iPod. He simply improved on an idea that others had come up with and made it something popular and ubiquitous.

Similarly, in our final fascinating fact, Thomas Edison wasn't the first person to create an electric light bulb. That honor belongs to a man named Humphrey Davy, an Englishman, who demonstrated the world's first electric light in 1806. However, Davy's light wasn't very practical to use because it produced a very glaring light (similar to a welding torch) which didn't last long. Edison's great invention was a practical electric light - one which produced a reasonably soft light which was useful to read and see by and which would last for a significant amount of time, kind of like Steve Jobs, who took a geeky product and turned into something everyone would want to use.

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