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Sunday 5 October 2014

Desk

Medieval scholars at Oxford University used to read leaning against high desks.

The Spanish conquistador Cortés always kept a chocolate pot on his desk.

The Market Drayton school which Clive of India attended still has his initials carved on a desk.

Between 1820 and 1840 the US Senate's desks were updated to make them more usable (i.e. a writing box and an extra drawer). Daniel Webster refused to update his desk, believing it to be a waste of taxpayer's money. The desk is still used as nobody wants to get rid of it since it belonged to Daniel Webster.

Searching for a cool place to work in the heat of Washington, Alexander Graham Bell once had his desk placed at the deep end of his swimming pool. (It had been drained first.)

Sigmund Freud had an orange chow called Jo-Fi who attended his analysis sessions sitting under his desk then came out at the end of his patient's session.

The President's desk in the Oval Office of the White House was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. It was carved from the HMS Resolute, a 19th century British Royal Navy ship that an American whaler recovered from the Arctic. The HMS Resolute was found empty and adrift in pack ice, then sent back to the UK as a sign of friendship between the two countries., Franklin D Roosevelt later added the front to hide his polio.

Lyndon B. Johnson used the same $80  mahogany partners desk as US Senator Vice President, and President of the United States.

Johnson sitting behind the desk while Lady Bird Johnson looks on

Richard Nixon chose the Wilson desk as his Oval Office desk because he believed it was used by Woodrow Wilson, but it was actually used by Henry Wilson, Vice President under Ulysses S. Grant.

Sting wrote the Police song "Every Breath You Take" at the same desk which Ian Fleming used to write his James Bond novels.

The average office desk has 400 times more bacteria than a toilet.

Albert Einstein: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"

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