12704. History Facts

Until 1868, criminals could be transported from England – sent to Australia for seven or fourteen years – for even petty crimes. The youngest victim was a boy of nine, transported for stealing.

12705. History Facts

King Henry VIII of England, employed the death penalty more than any other English king in history.

12706. History Facts

A punishment used in China in the old days was for a prisoner to be kept in an iron cage with his head sticking out the top.The cage was too tall to sit in, and too short to stand up. Some prisoners were left to starve to death inside.

12707. History Facts

A common test for the guilt of a person accused of witchcraft was to throw them in a pond. If they floated, they were guilty and were executed. If they sank, they were innocent – but probably drowned.

12708. History Facts

At banquets, the Gauls used to award the legs of roast animals to the bravest warriors. Sometimes fights to the death resulted from the squabbles over who should get them.

12709. History Facts

Long ago, criminals would be hanged in a metal cage called a gibbet, or in chains, near the scene of their crime ‘until their bones rotted to nothing'.

12710. History Facts

In 1577, an outbreak of typhus in an Oxford jail killed 300 people – the judges, jury, witnesses and spectators at criminal trials.The prisoners, used to living in filthy conditions, all survived.

12711. History Facts

Vlad the Impaler used to entertain guests to dinner surrounded by the bodies of people he had executed, impaled on spikes.

12712. History Facts

During the French Revolution, large crowds watched public executions by guillotine and people would rush forward to try to collect blood dripping from the heads lifted to show the crowd. They would keep bloody handkerchieves as souvenirs of the outing.

12713. History Facts

In 1857, a group of Indian people who rebelled against the ruling British were strapped across the mouths of live cannons and blown to bits when cannon balls were shot through them.

12714. History Facts

People who killed themselves used to be buried at a cross-roads with a stake through their heart. It was thought that they couldn't go to heaven, and the cross-roads would confuse their ghost so that it couldn't find the way home to haunt anyone.

12715. History Facts

A trusted servant of William of Orange, a Dutch king of England, spent money the king had given him for clothes on pistols, which he used to shoot the king. As punishment, he had his flesh pulled off with red-hot pincers, his guts pulled out and his body cut into pieces.

12716. History Facts

In 1685, a wolf that terrorized a village near Ansbach in Germany was sentenced to be dressed in human clothing and hanged.

12717. History Facts

The first person to be found guilty of a crime on the basis of finger print evidence was an Argentinian woman who murdered her children in 1892. Her fingerprints were found in blood on a door frame.

12718. History Facts

In Ancient Babylon, a doctor who accidentally killed a patient had his hands cut off.

12719. History Facts

A punishment for an English woman who nagged her husband or gossiped too much was to wear a metal cage over her head called a ‘scold's bridle'. It had a spiked plate inside her mouth that would cut her tongue if she moved it to speak.

12720. History Facts

Inca women washed their hair in week-old urine, braided it, and then used more old urine to keep it in place.

12721. History Facts

The Chinchorro people of Chile mummified their dead 8,000 years ago.They cut off the arms and legs, removed and smoked the skin, strapped sticks to the bones and replaced all the soft parts with grass and ashes, then put the whole body back together and painted it.

12722. History Facts

During excavations at a circle of standing stones in Avebury, England, in 1938, archaeologists found the body of a man who had been crushed under a falling stone in the 1320s when villagers tried to bury the stones.

12723. History Facts

Over 100,000 people have been tried for witchcraft in Europe since 1100, most of them tortured and eventually executed.

Element
Element : americium
Symbol : am
Atomic no. : 95
Melting Point (deg c) : 1176
Boiling Point (deg c) : 2011
Discoverer : seaborg et al. (1944)      .. More >>