The great thing about crosswords and quizzes is that they trigger all sorts of quests to find unknown answers, and sometimes to find what the answers actually mean. For example I didn’t know that the longest inland river in China is the River Tarim, nor did I even know there was a constellation the Square and Rule, otherwise known as Norma. I didn’t know the person who named ‘ecology’, ‘ecology’ was a German scientist called Ernst Haecke and I certainly never gave the inventor of the pogo stick a thought – he was George B. Hansburg who patented it in 1957, which was sixty-six years after a man in Wichita, another George, George H. Herrington had patented a sort of spring device attached to feet with which you could leap in the air, balancing with a pole. It was also thirty years after a patent had been issued in Germany (I don’t understand how a thing could be patented twice – I thought that was the point of a patent?) to Herr Max Pohlig and Herr Ernst Gottschall who had created a device they called a “spring end hopping stilt”. Pohlig and Gottschall are supposed to have created the name of the ‘hopping stilt’ Po-Go…
Back to crosswords and puzzles… I didn’t know that Richard Chamberlain sang Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’…
http://https://youtu.be/nPYMUrs-jXI
Lois Elsden 