The world’s largest grand piano was built by a 15-year-old in New Zealand. The piano is a little over 18 feet long and has 85 keys – 3 short of the standard 88.
100 Mind-Blowing Standard Facts
A standard 12oz jar of honey takes 864 bees to produce.
The inventor of the Internet regrets the URL setup. Tim Berners-Lee, who created the main software of the World Wide Web, admitted he regrets one thing: Adding “//” after “https:” in a web address. It was standard for programming but didn’t serve any real purpose, and when looking back in 2009, he said leaving it out would have saved time and space. We guess we can forgive him.
The largest grand piano in the world was built by a teenager. The piano is over 18 feet long and has 85 keys. This is 3 keys short of the standard 88. This grand piano can be found in New Zealand.
‘Metrophobia’ is the fear of poetry. If you don’t remember your literature classes as a good time, you may have had this phobia. The prefix metro- comes from the meter, which refers to the standard structure of a poem.
Lego bricks can be combined in nearly a billion ways. Six pieces of the standard eight-studded Lego bricks can be combined in 915,103,765 ways.
Standard CDs are always 74 minutes long. Sony and Philips set the standard CD length in 1980 as 74 minutes based on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The executives decided that the standard CD should be able to fit the Ninth Symphony, giving it a 74-minute length.
The average size of an axolotl is around 20-25 centimetres. That’s about the same length as a fully-grown guinea pig or a standard-sized envelope.
The United States, Burma, and Liberia are the only countries in the world that have not officially adopted the metric system as the standard of measurement.
Using a thinner font can save printer ink. To a standard user, this difference isn’t big enough to care about. But if you use a lighter font with thinner lines, you’ll use slightly less ink. This is all based on inkjet printers that use old-style cartridges. Overall, it will only save you about 10% of your ink by using a lighter font.
We can thank the railroad industry for standardising our time zones. Until the 19th century, towns and villages synchronised their clocks to the local solar noon. This created thousands of local times that all varied and made scheduling transportation a major headache. Train schedules in different cities had to list dozens of arrival and departure times for each train to account for all the mini-time zones. On November 18, 1883, railroad companies in the United States and Canada began using a system very similar to the standardised time zones we still use today. In the UK, the railroad companies began using a standard London-based time in 1840.
After an engineer named Sandford Fleming missed a train in 1876, he set out to change the way time worked. Fleming originally proposed a concept he called “Cosmic Time,” in which the world would run off an imaginary clock located at the planet’s centre, essentially a line from the centre of the planet to the sun. He then suggested splitting the world into 24 time zones labelled with a letter of the alphabet, with each zone spanning 15 degrees of longitude. His original plan to create a standard “Cosmic Time” was rejected, but it did lay the groundwork for a similar standardisation, so-called Universal Time. Nations present at the 1884 International Meridian Conference laid the groundwork for dividing the world into 24 time zones, with the Prime Meridian, also known as Longitude 0°, running through Greenwich, England.
Time zones can still be a bit complicated. Big countries like Canada and the United States have multiple time zones, whereas China, another large country, only has one. China adopted the Beijing Standard Time to foster unity, but the effect can feel a bit uncanny—two cities in the country can be at roughly the same latitude, but experience sunrise hours apart, according to their clocks. In some parts of China, for example, the sun doesn’t rise until nearly 10 a.m.