Florence Nightingale is known world wide for her work as an untiring and unselfish nurse as well as her reform of nursing practices.  She is famous for her work in the field of battle and for traveling wherever she was needed.  Everywhere that she went, even as far as the Crimea, she carried her pet owl in her pocket.

The Winchester House, near San Jose, California is a product of the eccentricities of it’s owner Sara Winchester.  She was convinced that if she stopped adding to the house she would die.  As a result, the house was under construction every day for thirty seven consecutive years.  The eight story house ended up with 2,000 doors and 10,000 windows, many of which opened onto blank walls, and stairways that lead nowhere.  The house, which sits on six acres of ground, also had forty eight fireplaces, miles of secret passages and hallways and a total of 160 rooms.

Isaac Newton is best remembered for his experiments concerning the laws of gravity.  However, he was also a member of Parliament.  His only recorded utterance in a Parliament was a request to open a window.

Henry Ford was crazy about soybeans.  He was so convinced that a commercial value could be found in them that he actually appeared at a convention in attire that was made except for his shoes, from soybeans.

Dr. James Barry, a woman posing as a man, became a general in the army of Queen Victoria.  Barry entered the medical corps, served forty years as a surgeon, then rose to the rank of Inspector General of hospitals.  It was only after Barry’s death in 1865, that it was discovered that “he” was actually a woman.

English anthropologist Francis Galton was the first cousin of Charles Darwin and was the first to devise a method for using fingerprints for identification purposes.  He was also a fiend for statistics.  In fact he was so obsessed with them that he tried to use statistical methods to work out the distribution of good looks and to determine what percentage of prayers get answered.

Robert Moses was responsible for the design of many of New York’s bridges, tunnels and parkway.  Although he created these efficient high traffic roadways and interchanges, he never learned to drive an automobile.

William Randolph Hearst’s mother claimed that he was a compullsive spender.  Whenever he felt down in the dumps, he would go out and buy something.  Once he bought a tenth century Spanish cloister in Segovia for $40,000, sight unseen.  In order to move it, the entire cloister had to be dismantled, stone by stone.  A sawmill and to cut the wood for the 10,700 crates that had to be built for the stones and twenty one miles of railway had to be constructed in order to transport it to the nearest railroad line.