A miscellany of successful lives

The following text is originally lifted from the trivia section of The Jakarta Post.

~Compiled from various sources~

• Attila the Hun was suspected of suffocating from a bloody nose after passing out from alcohol at his bachelor party.
• The biography of Thomas Crapper, the British sanitary engineer who invented the modern flush toilet in 1878, was called Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper.
• After being killed during the celebrated Battle of Trafalgar, British Admiral Horatio Nelson was put into a large barrel of brandy to preserve his body during the voyage back to England. When the ship arrived back home Lord Nelson was removed from the barrel and the crew celebrated his achievements by drinking the remaining brandy.
• Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but he declined.
• Albert Einstein said of nuclear bombs: "If I had known, I would have become a watchmaker."
• Albert Einstein's last words were not understood because his nurse did not speak German.
• After the death of Albert Einstein, his brain was removed by a pathologist and put in jar for future study.
• Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never telephoned his wife or mother because they were both deaf.
• Alexander Graham Bell refused to have a phone in his study - the ringing drove him nuts.
• Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the man who designed the Eiffel Tower, also designed the inner structure of the Statue of Liberty.
• Astronaut Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was "Moon". Buzz was the second man to step onto the Moon in 1969.
• Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns.
• Napoleon constructed his battle plans in a sandbox.
• Ivan the Terrible began earning his bad reputation in 1540 as a 10-year-old by throwing puppies off the Kremlin walls.
• Karl Marx's socialist writer's last words were: "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."
• Four million prisoners died mining for gold in Stalin's Kolyma forced labour camp.
• Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano published the laws of chance governing card and dice games. But he became most famous for his accurate horoscope predictions. He even predicted his own death in 1576 - even down to the exact hour. When the time came he was still healthy, so he killed himself rather than being proved wrong.