Fun Facts – 13 November 2013

Fun Fact #1

Louis Vuitton originally established himself in Paris as a well-known box maker. In 19th-century Europe, box-making and packing was a highly respectable craft. A box-maker and packer custom-made all boxes to fit the goods they stored and personally loaded and unloaded the boxes.

It took Vuitton only a few years to stake out a reputation amongst Paris's fashionable class as one of the city's premier practitioners of his new craft. After Napoleon staged his coup and became Emperor Napoleon III, his wife hired Vuitton as her personal box-maker, which eventually turned into high-class luggage. He was tasked with "packing the most beautiful clothes in an exquisite way".

Fun Fact #2

The largest mountain range on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, was named after Mount Doom from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The range is named Doom Mons.

The name follows a convention by the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature that Titanian mountains are named after mountains in Tolkien's works.

Bonus Fact:

It has been suggested that life could exist in the lakes of liquid methane on Titan, just as organisms on Earth live in water. However instead of inhaling oxygen, metabolising it with glucose and exhaling carbon dioxide, it is hypothesised that organisms on Titan would inhale hydrogen, metabolise it with acetylene and exhale methane instead.