Fun Fact of The Week!
Now the time has come for the final Fun Fact of the Week of 2024. I’m more or less out of ideas, so let’s go for an easy theme this week, endings!
The Last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is the Pyramid of Giza. The others (look on Wikipedia for a full list, their names are too long to list here) all were destroyed or simply crumbled over time. Additionally, the Final Pyramid Built in Egypt was in the 1520’s B.C. It is suspected that pyramids stopped being built because robbers plundered them too often, and the kings felt that it was unnecessary to expend so much energy on something that didn’t do its job very well.
The Last Person Born in the 1800s to be Alive was named Emma Morano who was born on Nov. 29th, 1899. She died in April 2007, at the age of 117 in Italy. She was alive from the reign of Queen Victoria to the release of the Wii.
The Last Soldier to Surrender in World War II went by the name of Teruo Nakamura. He was a native Amis soldier in Taiwan, who joined the Imperial Japanese Army in 1943. He was sent to Morotai Island, Indonesia, where he remained with other holdouts until 1956 when he struck out on his own. As the others surrendered or were captured. He remained completely forgotten about in the jungles of Indonesia until December of 1974, when he was finally accidentally found, and repatriated to Taiwan.
The famous Hiroo Onoda was another Japanese soldier who refused to surrender well into the 1970s. He got more media attention because he was ethnically Japanese, and so his story is more widely circulated.
Last person to die of smallpox (at least, the last documented case) was surprisingly in Birmingham, Britain. The monumental effort to eradicate smallpox was believed to have eliminated the disease in Britain for the previous five years. However, Mrs. Janet Parker contracted it and died mysteriously in 1978. It is believed that she contracted it from the air vents of a Smallpox research facility. The WHO jumped on the case immediately, as there was mass panic that the disease would rise once again. Luckily, no one else connected to her contracted it after a huge quarantine, and the last known case of smallpox was concluded. The worldwide eradication of smallpox, one of humanity's oldest and most formidable enemies, was celebrated around the world and showed that humanity can work together to improve the state of the world.
The Last full Solar Eclipse will occur approximately 620 million years from now. As the Earth and Moon slowly drift farther apart, there will one day be a time when the moon no longer covers the entirety of the solar disc during an eclipse, and a full solar eclipse will no longer occur.