Cracked Egg Trivia

1. Not all paper is made from wood. Cai Lun is thought to be the inventor of paper, and his was made out of scraps of cloth and pieces of hemp material. Nowadays some paper is still made from cloth. For instance, banknotes are made out of cotton fibre, and they are more durable than paper made out of wood. 2. Swiss cheese doesn't always have holes. Swiss cheese without holes is referred to as a "blind" cheese since the holes of swiss cheese are called "eyes". It does taste better if there are holes though, and the bigger the better. You see, the eyes get bigger if the cheese has more time and heat to form. 3. Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway. Okay so not the Anne Hathaway we know (I'm a big fan of the Princess Diaries), but that was her name and she was a farmers daughter. They got married when he was 18 and she was 26. It all happened very fast because she was already 3 months pregnant. 4. Jupiter has the shortest days of any of the eight ...

Childbirth is a dangerous business, but it used to be even more so before Ignaz Semmelweis came up with a precautionary measure that would save mothers from succumbing to puerperal fever ("childbed fever"). The Hungarian physician suggested that simply washing your hands before assisting with birth would cut down on mortality rates. So in 1847 he proposed that obstetrical clinics should have higher hand washing standards. Unfortunately, his theory wasn't accepted by the medical community until after his death. But thanks to his work many lives have been saved since. Semmelweis was born on July 1, 1818, in Buda, Hungary (which would later become Budapest). He was the fifth child in a family of ten, and his parents were wealthy grocers. He began to study law in the fall of 1837 at the University of Vienna, but he switched to medicine the next year. He received his doctorate in 1844. He was then became assistant at the obstetric clinic in Vienna. At the time most women ...