Apple paid a couple of 1.7 million dollars for their plot of land, which was only worth $181,700. While Apple was building a huge data centre in the middle of North Carolina, they wanted to occupy the area of a couple that had lived there for 34 years. When the couple refused to leave, Apple paid them 1.7 million dollars for their land.
100 Mind-Blowing Building Facts
Times Square was originally called Longacre Square until it was renamed in 1904 after The New York Times moved its headquarters to the newly built Times Building.
In the 1830s, the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, wanted to disassemble the Giza Pyramids and use them as pre-cut building materials. Thankfully, the Quantity Surveyor for the project fudged the figures and made it look like it would cost too much to save them.
A woman once tried to commit suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building. She jumped from the 86th floor but was blown back onto the 85th floor by a gust of wind.
The Empire State Building only took a little over a year to build (410) days, and it was 12 days ahead of schedule when completed.
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the world’s tallest building.
Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, was designed by female architect Julia Morgan. In 1919, she was hired by publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst to design a main building and guest houses for his ranch, but she ended up purchasing everything from Spanish antiquities to Icelandic moss to reindeer for the Castle’s zoo, which was once the world’s largest private zoo.
The building One Times Square was built in 1904 as the headquarters for the New York Times. It’s been home to the New Year’s Eve Ball Drop Celebration since 1907, when the first New Year’s Eve ball was made of iron and wood, one hundred 25-watt bulbs and weighed 700 pounds. Today’s ball is 12 feet in diameter and weighs almost six tons with 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles bolted to 672 LED modules attached to the aluminium frame.
One World Trade Centre in Manhattan is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, at 1,776 feet.
The Empire State Building has its own ZIP code. It’s home to 10118.
The world’s quietest room is located at Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington state. In Building 87 of Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington lies the quietest room in the world. With a record-breaking background noise of -20.35 dBA, this room is 20 decibels below the minimum of human hearing. It is so silent that if you stay in it for long enough, you’ll start to hear your heartbeat, a deafening ringing in your ears, and the grinding of your bones. To achieve absolute silence, the room was constructed with an onion-like structure made of six layers of concrete and steel.
A Boeing 747 airliner is made of over 6,000,000 separate parts. The Boeing 747-8 is known as the world’s longest aircraft. It takes four months to finish building.
The red-billed quelea is the most common bird on Earth. You may have never seen one in your community, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t building a legion. These birds are native to sub-Saharan Africa, where they’re considered “agricultural pests” because their flocks can destroy entire crops. Their population fluctuates between 1 to 10 billion queleas, which makes scientists conclude that they are the most abundant birds on Earth.
The Pokemon Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan are based on Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Pokemon is an RPG known for its world-building, which includes creating Pokemon inspired by animals, objects, space, and – turns out – even renowned martial artists. Generation 1’s Fighting type Pokemon Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan were made as homages to the great kung fu masters.
Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13. This is mainly connected to the belief that the number 13 is unlucky and can bring about misfortune. This is why you won’t see the number 13 on most building elevators.
The Arizona capitol building roof holds around 5 million pennies. The amount of copper on this rooftop found in Pheonix is equivalent to around 4,800,000 pennies. This is around 50,000 dollars.
Fleas can jump 200 times its height. The fleas are claimed to be the best jumpers in the world due to their size and the lengths they can jump. The height of a flea jump is equivalent to a human being jumping to the top of the Empire State Building from the ground.
The Indiana University library is constantly sinking. It sinks over half an inch annually. This is because engineers failed to calculate and include the estimated weight of all the books that would be placed inside the building.
The Titanic was made in Belfast. Here’s one of our best you-know facts about the famous Titanic ship. The ship was designed by Eric Kuhne who died from a suspected heart attack. Building the ship took almost 3 years to complete.
The name ‘Adidas’ comes from Adolf (Adi) Dassler (Das). Building off of a shoe business that he started with his brother, Adolf “Adi” Dassler established his own company upon their separation in 1949. The founder named his brand Adidas as a contraction of his name. More interesting facts about shoes? Adi’s brother, Rudolf Dassler was the founder of Puma.
Singapore has a 15-story car vending machine. Inspired by diecast toy cars, Autobahn Motors unveiled a building that “dispenses” luxury cars in 2017. The building is located in Bukit Merah and can hold up to 60 luxury cars inside.
You can see two sunsets from the Burj Khalifa in one day. Standing at 2,731 feet tall, the Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world. It is so tall that you can see two sunsets from it: one at the bottom, and one at the peak.
Mammoths were still alive when the Egyptians were building the Great Pyramids. Woolly mammoths were alive until 2550 to 2490 B.C.
Ants can’t die from falling. Because of their body proportions and tough exoskeleton, an ant’s terminal velocity isn’t enough to kill or hurt it on impact. They can survive being dropped from the Empire State Building and walk away unharmed.
The Empire State Building has a ZIP code of its own. The Empire State Building’s ZIP code is 10118.
The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
The tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is 828 metres tall with 163 floors.
You can see four states from Chicago’s Willis Tower. Head to the top of the building formerly known as the Sears Tower and you can see Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin.
In their sales pitch, the inventors of silly string sprayed their interviewer with an entire can. The inventors were attempting to pitch to the children’s toy giant Wham-O, but the interview went south when they emptied the can of silly string all over the interviewer. The Wham-O representative got incredibly upset and promptly asked the inventors to leave the building. The next day, they received a telegram from Wham-O to send over 24 cans of the stuff for market testing.
The tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
The tallest building in the world is the Burg Khalifa in Dubai, standing at over 2,700 feet.
The tallest building in the US is One World Trade Centre in New York, which comes in at number six on the worldwide list. It stands at exactly 1,776 feet as a nod to the date of the Declaration of Independence.
The Empire State Building in New York was the tallest in the world from 1931 until 1971 and was the first building with over 100 floors.
The First Television Station. General Electric broadcast the first television station from a building in Schenectady, NY. Viewers watched W2XB, better known as WGY Television, in amazement. During each broadcast, various forms of content were played over the airwaves. The televisions and television stations of 1928 looked and worked quite differently than they do nowadays.
Although the TV show “Friends” is based around life in New York City, the entire show was filmed in California. Whether you love it or hate it, Friends was one of the most iconic TV shows to come out of the nineties and early 2000s. One of the most surprising facts about Friends is that it wasn’t filmed in Manhattan, where it’s set, but at the Warner Brothers Ranch just outside of Los Angeles. That being said, there are a small handful of locations where filming took place outside of LA. One of these is, of course, Monica and Rachel’s apartment building at 90 Bedford St in New York. Several other locations filmed in New York for the serious include the places where the friends all work.
World’s first skyscraper. The story of skyscrapers often begins in New York and Chicago from around 1884 with increasingly tall buildings. However, what is technically the world’s first skyscraper was built in Shropshire in 1796–7. Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings may not look like a skyscraper, but its Main Mill was the first building in the world to have an iron frame supporting the weight of the structure, the formula for every skyscraper ever built so that it has been dubbed the ‘Grandparent of Skyscrapers’.
Tallest tsunami. In July 1958 the tallest tsunami ever recorded crashed through the quiet fjord of Lituya Bay in Alaska. At 1,720 feet, the megatsunami was higher than the Empire State Building.
Largest palace ever built. In 200 BC, Emperor Gaozu of Han requested the building of the Weiyang Palace complex north of modern Xi’an. Weiyang Palace has a claim to being the largest palace ever built on Earth: it covered 4.8 km2 (1,200 acres), which is nearly seven times the size of the current Forbidden City in Beijing or eleven times the size of the Vatican City, though little remains today.
Linux 1.0 launched in 1994, three years after Linus started creating the operating system’s first building blocks.
The Shard is the tallest building in the UK and it has 11,000 glass panels.
The Pentagon office is still recorded to be the largest building in the world.
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