Inch: At first, an inch was the width of a man's thumb. In the 14th century, King Edward II of England ruled that 1 inch equaled 3 grains of barley placed end to end lengthwise.

A yard was originally the length of a man's belt or girdle, as it was called. In the 12th century, King Henry I of England fixed the yard as the distance from his nose to the thumb of his out-stretched arm. Today it is 36 inches.
The McCormick Place Complex building have a combined total of more than 2.2 million square feet of exhibit space, 1.6 million square feet all on one level, making it the nation's largest convention center.

The U.S. government did not issue paper money, per se, until 1861. Instead, it chartered 1,600 private banks to print and circulate their own bills. There were eventually 7,000 varieties of "state bank notes" in circulation, each with a different design.

"Star Trek" conventions are held every weekend of every year, in at least three different cities, attracting millions of fans.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days, and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait to see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."
England is old and small, and the local folk started running out of places to bury people. They would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."
Every time we hear of still another desperado biting the dust in Western films, we are hearing an almost literal translation of a line found in Homer's “Iliad”, written thousands of years ago. American poet William Cullen Bryant translated the words in 1870: "...his fellow warriors may a one, fall round him to the earth and bite the dust."

S.O.S. doesn't stand for "Save Our Ship" or "Save Our Souls" -- It was just chosen by an 1908 international conference on Morse Code because the letters S and O were easy to remember and just about anyone could key it and read it, S = dot dot dot, O = dash dash dash..

Approximately 97.35618329% of all statistics are made up...

(You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider)

For a short time in 1967, the American Typers Association made a new punctuation mark that was a combination of the question mark and an exclamation point called an interrobang. It was rarely used and hasn't been seen since.

Over 4,149 conventions are held every year in Las Vegas and almost $5 billion is lost to the casinos from convention goers a year.
The smallest unit of time is the yoctosecond

Each unit on the Richter scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5. Though it goes to 10, 9 is estimated to be the point of total tectonic destruction (2 is the smallest unit that can be felt unaided.)

In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. That's where the phrase, "good night, sleep tight" came from.

The term “flying on cloud 9” originates from military flights. Cloud types are classified as numbers, with “cloud 9” being a very tall thunderstorm. Jets have to climb to an extremely high altitude in order to fly over cloud 9 .