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there.”
    On his daughter Princess Anne: “If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she isn’t interested.”
    Remark to the Queen on seeing a picture once owned by King Charles I of England in the Louvre in Paris: “Shall we take it back?”
Instant classic: Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in six days.

RANDOM ORIGINS
    You know what these are…but do you know where they came from?
    W OOD-BURNING STOVES
If you wanted to heat your home in the mid-18th century, there was only one way: your fireplace. But because they were usually built into an exterior wall, fireplaces were inefficient—much of the heat was lost to the outside air. In 1742 Benjamin Franklin invented a freestanding metal stove that could be placed in the middle of the room, so all the heat radiated into the room. The “Franklin stove,” as it came to be known, remains one of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous inventions. One problem: it didn’t work. Smoke rises , which means you have to put the chimney outlet at the top of the stove. Franklin connected his at the base, and because of that the fire would not stay lit. His stove didn’t become practical until another inventor, David Rittenhouse, connected the chimney above the fire.
    MAIL-ORDER CATALOGS
    In September 1871, a British major named F.B. McCrea founded the Army & Navy Cooperative in London to supply goods to military personnel at the lowest possible price. Its first catalog was issued in February 1872…six months before an American named Aaron Montgomery Ward put his first catalog in the mail.
    ALUMINUM
    The Earth’s crust contains more aluminum than any other metallic element, yet it was not discovered or extracted until the mid-1820s—when it was so expensive to extract that it was actually considered a precious metal. Then, in 1886, two different inventors—Charles Hall, an American, and Paul Héroult, a Frenchman—discovered a process by which aluminum could be extracted much more cheaply using electricity. The Hall-Héroult process reduced the price of aluminum to less than 1% of its previous cost. But it wasn’t until World War I, when German designer Hugo Junkers started building airplanes out of metal instead of the traditional wood and fabric, that aluminum came into its own. Today the world uses more aluminum than any other metal except iron and steel.
Electric eels must surface to breathe every five minutes or they will drown.

THE CHEW-CHEW MAN
    Where did the low-calorie diet come from? It started with a guy known as the “Chew-Chew Man” to critics and the “Great Masticator” to fans .
    T HE BIRTH OF “FLETCHERISM” In 1895, 44-year-old Horace Fletcher was turned down for life insurance because he weighed 217 pounds (at 5'6" tall), and he drank excessively. “I was an old man at forty, and on the way to a rapid decline,” he recalled years later.
    In 1898 Fletcher performed an experiment on himself. He began chewing each bite of food 30 to 70 times—even milk and soup, which he swished in his mouth—and never ate when he was upset or wasn’t hungry. After five months of “Fletcherizing” each morsel of food, he lost 60 pounds and regained his health. He also found that he could live happily on 1,600 calories a day, far less than the 3,500 to 4,500 calories recommended at the turn of the century.
    THE GREAT MASTICATOR
The experience helped Fletcher find a new calling—pitching his chewing habits to the masses. His slogan: “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.” Fletcher’s lecture tours and bestselling books attracted tens of thousands of followers, including John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison. Adherents formed “Fletcher clubs,” where they met to eat slowly and chant ditties like:
I choose to chew, Because I wish to do, The sort of thing that Nature had in view, Before bad cooks invented sav’ry stew; When the only way to eat was to chew! chew! chew!
    Fletcher died from bronchitis in 1919 at the age of 69, and his