David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

After high school, he attended Texarkana Junior College for a year before obtaining an appointment to the US Naval Academy in 1949. Although Perot loved the navy, he was less than enamoured of the promotion and seniority systems, and so decided not to sign on for another hitch. While serving aboard the aircraft carrier Leyte , Perot had been invited by an IBM executive to look him up after his discharge. Perot did so, and got a job selling computers. During his fifth year at IBM, he sold his entire quota for the year before January was over, and was promoted to a desk job at the corporation’s Dallas office. While there, Perot became convinced that there was a market for a company that would design, instal and operate processing systems on a contract basis. He left his IBM job to strike out on his own, and, on his 32nd birthday, used $1,000 of savings to found Electronic Data Systems. Perot’s net worth is now $3.8 billion.

After graduating from the University of Missouri with a BA in economics in 1940, Walton took his first job in retailing — as a JC Penny sales trainee. A few years later, Sam and his brother James became franchisees of the Ben Franklin variety store chain. As franchisees (the brother eventually ran 15 stores in Arkansas and Missouri), Sam Walton travelled throughout the eastern and midwestern United States and noticed that the large retail chains always placed their stores in or near large cities. Walton felt that smaller towns could successfully support a large retailer, but he received no encouragement from Ben Franklin’s management when he brought up the idea. Undaunted, Walton launched the project himself, and in 1962 opened the first Wal-Mart in Rogers, Arkansas. Although the chain struggled early on — David Glass, who later became Wal-Mart’s CEO, called the second Wal-Mart ‘the worst retail store I had ever seen’ — by 1991, Wal-Mart had passed Sears as America’s largest retailer and Walton was worth more that $8 billion.

It was a kiss from God that infused the ‘spirit of life’ into man, according to the account of Genesis (2:7). God is said to have formed Adam from slime and dust and then breathed a rational soul into him. This concept of divine insufflation, which surfaces frequently in religious teachings, is often viewed through the kiss metaphor.

As told in the New Testament, Judas Iscariot used the kiss as a tool of betrayal around AD29, when he embraced Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jewish leaders under the high priest Caiaphas had paid Judas 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus. With a kiss, Judas singled him out. Jesus was arrested; charged with blasphemy and condemned to death.

In the classic fairy tale ‘Sleeping Beauty’, it is with a kiss that the handsome prince awakens the enchanted princess. This kiss first appeared in Charles Perrault’s version of 1697, ‘La Belle au bois dormant’. But in fact, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ dates back to two earlier romances. ‘Perceforest’ and ‘Pentamerone’. In those stories, the handsome prince finds the sleeping beauty, falls in love with her, rapes her and leaves.

In 1837, at the dawn of the Victorian era in Great Britain, Thomas Saverland attempted to kiss Caroline Newton in a light-hearted manner. Rejecting Saverland’s pass, Miss Newton not so lightheartedly bit off part of his nose. Saverland took Newton to court, but she was acquitted. ‘When a man kisses a woman against her will,’ ruled the judge, ‘she is fully entitled to bite his nose, if she so pleases.’ ‘And eat it up,’ added a barrister.

One of the most renowned sculptures in the Western world is The Kiss, sculpted by French artist François Auguste Rodin in 1886. Inspired by Dante, the figure of two nude lovers kissing brought the era of classical art to an end. Rodin described The Kiss as ‘complete in itself and artificially set apart from the surrounding world’.

The first kiss ever to be recorded in a film occurred in Thomas Edison’s The Kiss , between John C. Rice and May Irwin in April 1896. Adapted from a short scene in the Broadway comedy The Widow Jones, The Kiss was filmed by Raff and Gammon for nickelodeon audiences. Its running time was less than 30 seconds.

The figure of Guidarello Guidarelli, a fearless sixteenth-century Italian soldier, was sculpted in marble by Tullio Lombardo (c. 1455–1532) and displayed at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, Italy. During the late 1800s a rumour started that any woman who kissed the reclining, armour-clad statue would marry a wonderful gentleman. More than five million superstitious women have since kissed Guidarelli’s cold marble lips. Consequently, the soldier’s mouth has acquired a faint reddish glow.

In 1926 Warner Brothers Studios starred John Barrymore in Don Juan . During the course of the film (2 hours, 47 minutes), the amorous adventurer bestows a total of 191 kisses on a number of beautiful señoritas — an average of one every 53 seconds.

The longest kiss in movie history is between Jane Wyman and Regis Toomey in the 1941 production of You’re in the Army Now . The Lewis Seiler comedy about two vacuum-cleaner salesmen features a scene in which Toomey and Wyman hold a single kiss for 3 minutes and 5 seconds (or 4% of the film’s running time).

When the news of Japan’s surrender was announced in New York City’s Times Square on August 14, 1945, Life photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed a jubilant sailor clutching a nurse in a back-bending passionate kiss to vent his joy. The picture became an icon of the cathartic celebration that erupted over the end of the war. Over the years, at least three nurses and ten sailors claimed to be the people in the photo. Since Eisenstaedt had lost his notes and negatives by the time the claimants came forward, he was never able to say definitively who was in the photo.

A famous 1950 photograph of a young couple kissing on the streets of Paris — ‘Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville’ — found itself under an international media spotlight when, four decades after the picture was taken, the photo became a commercial success, drawing out of the woodwork dozens of people who claimed to have been the photo’s unidentified kissers. The black-and-white snapshot — originally taken for Life magazine by Robert Doisneau as part of his series on the Parisian working class — made Doisneau wealthy when, between 1986 and 1992, it became a bestseller through poster and postcard reprints. Among those who subsequently identified themselves as the kissers were Denise and Jean-Louis Lavergne, who sued Doisneau for $100,000 after he rejected their claim. They lost their case when it was determined, in 1993, that the kissers were actually two professional models (and real-life lovers), Françoise Bornet and Jacques Cartaud.