The Oscar statue’s real name is the “Academy Award of Merit.” It is 13.5 inches tall, weighs 8.5 pounds and is made of gold-plated Britannia, an alloy of tin, antimony and copper.
The controversial 1915 silent film blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (which sympathetically portrayed the Ku Klux Klan) contained the first use of such now-ubiquitous film techniques as deep focus, jump-cuts and facial close ups.
There isn’t one agreed-upon theory about the origin of the traditional heart shape (?) known worldwide. It is said to depict either the seed of the silphium plant, which is an ancient herbal contraceptive or a woman’s buttocks or genital region.
The first movie to be released on DVD came out in 1997. It was the 1996 action/drama flick Twister.
Black History Month began as “Negro History Week” in 1926 by historian Carter G. Woodson. February was chosen to commemorate the birth month of President Abraham Lincoln and iconic abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Neurologically speaking, love comes from a complex mix of brain chemicals. Feelings of attachment stem from hormones oxytocin and vasopressin while feelings of attraction stem from the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin, and the hormone/neurotransmitter norepinephrine.
One of the first surviving color films is known as Anna Belle Serpentine Dance (among other names) created by Thomas Edison in 1895. It was a hand-painted short less than a minute long colored frame-by-frame, making the dancer’s dress change colors. It was intended for Edison’s Kinetoscope, a single-viewer projector.
Mickey Mouse’s debut was a 1928 short silent film called Plane Crazy. It features comic misadventures by him and Minnie Mouse (her debut as well) as Mickey imitates the famous flight of Charles Lindbergh.
Some scientists claim to have pinpointed the source for human male pheromones—the armpit.
The first movie released in the VHS format was the 1972 South Korean family drama Cheongchun gyosa or The Young Teacher. It came out in 1976, the same year that VHS players were first sold in Asia and Europe.
Although Rosa Parks gets the lion’s share of recognition for opposing Jim Crow laws, by not giving up her seat on a bus, she was preceded by 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her seat 9 months earlier. But because Colvin became pregnant soon after, the NAACP saw her as tainted from a PR standpoint.
While CDs, DVDs and CD-ROMs were first released in the 80s and 90s, the optical disc was first created in 1958 by inventor David Paul Gregg.
Ancient Greek poet Hesiod declared that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was born in the sea from a combination of sea foam and the cast-off genitals of sky god Uranus, who was castrated with a sickle by Cronus the Titan.