Resumo de Book Of Facts - Reader's Digest

BEND OF HUMILITY
Many Gothic Cathedrals, including Notre Dame in Paris, have a slight kink in their main axis so that the nave does not exactly line up with the center of the altar. According to some scholars, medieval cathedral architects built the kink in deliberately as a humble expression of a man?s imperfections, and as a reminder to the worshippers that God alone was perfect. Other researchers, however, believe that the kinks may simply be the result of the mistakes by the builders.
GHOST TRAP
Sarah Winchester, 19th century heiress of the USA?s Winchester rifle company, built an enormous house- as a ghost trap. Doors opened onto blank walls and the staircases led nowhere. All were designed to confuse the ghosts that she believed were haunting her. Her obsession began after the deaths of her husband- the son of the company?s founder, Oliver Winchester -in 1881, and of her month old baby daughter, Annie. Sarah visited a spiritualist with the aim of trying to make contact with her lost family- and was told that she was being haunted by the ghosts of countless rifle victims.
In 1884 she began to extend her mansion in San Jose, California, adding a wild profusion of rooms, doors, windows and staircases in the belief that the ghosts would get lost in the building?s maze. By the time she died- in 1922, the house had spread over 2.5 hectares and contained a total of some 160 rooms, 2000 doors and 10,000 windows.
BEAUTY AND THE TARTAR BEAST
The exquisite dome that crowns The Taj Mahal in India owes its shape to one of the most blood-soaked leaders in history. In 1401 Tamerlane, a 14th century Tatar warlord who was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, burnt the great mosque in Damascus, Syria, to the ground. Inside it at the time, according to a contemporary historian, were 30,000 women, children, priests and refugees.
Far from wishing to forget this act of carnage, he had the unique building dome of the mosque copied at Samarkand for his own magnificent tomb, the Gur Amir, parts of which still stand.
From there the style spread northwards (where it eventually became the onion shape characteristic of the domes on Russian Churches as well as on the palace of the Kremlin) and southwards across the Himalayas. It caught on in India after one of Tamerlane?s descendants, Babar, overthrew the Sultan of Delhi in 1526 and founded the Mughal Empire. It was one of Babar?s dynasty, Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal. The shape of the glittering white dome, completed in 1648, derives directly from the mosque that Shah Jahan?s ancestor had reduced to a blackened heap nearly 250 years before.
GOING UP
Modern cities owe their characteristic skyline, bristling with skyscrapers, to the invention of the lift, in 1854, at the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York, Elisha Otis, a mechanic, demonstrated his new invention ? a safe lift. Otis had himself hauled up with some freight and as a stunned crowd watched the lift rope was cut. Otis and the freight remained motionless- protected by an automatic locking system. Not until three years later was the first passenger lift installed in a five-storey Broadway china shop.
From then on, tall blocks sprouted where, before, people?s reluctance to climb stairs had restricted most buildings to fewer than six storeys. Modern lifts, which work fast enough to make passengers? ears pop with the changing air pressure, can reach the top of even the tallest building in less than a minute. The world?s fastest passenger lift is in Tokyo. Installed in a sixty storey block in 1978, it operates at speed of up to 36km/h (22mph)

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