Refresh for new random facts
1. Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller would be worth upwards of $300 Billion in today's dollars, adjusted for inflation.
2. Bank of America was originally called "The Bank of Italy." It was founded by Amadeo Giannini in 1904 to cater to Italian immigrants in San Francisco.
3. The Mall, the biggest departmental store in Washington, D. C. is 1.4 times bigger than the Vatican City.
4. Citibank adopted its cable address as its official name. It was originally known as the "City Bank of New York."
5. The word Yahoo comes from Jonathan Swift's 1726 book Gulliver's Travels. The Yahoos were vile, repulsive, and materialistic creatures, an allegory for British society that Swift witnessed at the time.
6. Con Edison is the longest tenured listing on the New York Stock Exchange, first listed in 1824 as the New York Gas Light Company.
7. Iceland consumes more Coca-Cola per capita than any other nation.
8. Secure, high-yielding stocks came to be known as "blue chips," because in poker blue chips are more valuable than red or white.
9. Pierre Omidyar had formed a web consulting firm called Echo Bay Technology Group in 1995. When he tried to register EchoBay.com, though, he found that Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, had gotten it first. Ebay was born.
10. Henry Ford invented the charcoal briquettes that are commonly used by the grilling enthusiasts of today, to make use of scrap wood left over in the manufacture of the Model T.
When me and old Abe used to sit by the fire he would tell me the darndest tales about this great land of ours.
