History -- you either love it or you hate it. I, for one, love history and especially United States history. This makes the Nick Cage classic, "National Treasure," one of my favorite guilty pleasures. A great thing about this movie besides, uh, I don't know... everything, is the fact that you can learn so much about the history of our country in an enjoyable two-hour time frame with some popcorn and a comfy couch. It's nothing like sitting at an uncomfortable desk with a monotone teacher blabbing information left and right. Here are13 historical facts you can learn just by watching "National Treasure." Oh, and just so we're clear… it truly is impossible to steal the Declaration of Independence.
1. The last living signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll, died in 1832.
2. There were 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence.
3. Timothy Matlack was the official scribe of the Continental Congress.
4. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world.
5. Thomas Edison tried and failed nearly 2,000 times to develop the carbonized cotton-thread filament for the incandescent light bulb.
6. When Ben Franklin was only a teenager, he secretly wrote 14 letters to he brother's newspaper pretending to be a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood.
7.An ottendorf cipher is a cipher in a key text, usually a book or a random newspaper article -- in the case of the movie, the Silence Dogood letters.
8. John Pass and John Stowe cast the Liberty Bell.
9. Daylight Savings Time wasn't established until World War I.
10. The Liberty Bell tolled the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776.
11. It was in 1846 on George Washington's birthday that the final expansion of the crack occurred, retiring the Liberty Bell completely.
12. Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals.
13. In the historic story of Paul Revere's midnight ride, two lanterns were hung in the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston. One lantern was to be be hung if the British were coming by land and two were to be hung if they were coming by sea.
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