40 Fun Facts About Yellow

Tennis balls turned optic yellow in 1972 for television viewers, but which Grand Slam kept white ones until 1986?

Wimbledon stuck with white balls for 14 years after optic yellow arrived. In one poll, a slight majority of people said the ball actually looks green, not yellow.

English referee Ken Aston based football's yellow and red cards on which everyday colour-coded system?

Traffic lights gave Aston the idea after a confusing incident at the 1966 World Cup, where he was in charge of the referees. The cards first appeared at the 1970 tournament in Mexico.

Which small yellow songbird did coal miners once carry underground to warn them of carbon monoxide?

Canary cages went down the pits from 1896, a year after John Scott Haldane proposed using a warm-blooded animal as a living gas alarm.

Which office staple got its yellow colour by chance, from the scrap paper a neighbouring lab had to spare?

Post-it Note glue was an accident too: in 1968, 3M scientist Spencer Silver was trying to make a super-strong adhesive and ended up with a weak, reusable one.

Which yellow fruit, botanically a berry, reaches Western supermarkets mostly as one variety called the Cavendish?

Banana plants are giant herbs rather than trees. Cavendish fruit is the main kind eaten in the West, but diseases such as black sigatoka threaten the crop.

Which member of the Beatles sang lead on Yellow Submarine, written as a children's song for the album Revolver?

Ringo Starr, the band's drummer, had the track as his vocal spot on the 1966 album. He has gone on singing it for decades at concerts with his All Starr Band.

Graphic artist Harvey Ball earned just $45 in 1963 for drawing which yellow icon in about ten minutes?

Smiley face pins made Ball no fortune: he never trademarked the design, and when he tried in 1971 he was told it was already in the public domain.

In American slang, a new car that keeps breaking down is nicknamed after which sour yellow fruit?

Lemon laws in the United States exist to make carmakers buy back or exchange vehicles that stay faulty after repeated repair attempts.

In which cycling race does the overall leader wear a yellow jersey, officially first worn by Eugène Christophe in 1919?

Tour de France leaders may wear yellow because the organising newspaper, L'Auto, was printed on yellow paper. A rival story says it was the only colour a maker could supply at short notice.

Which British band scored its first UK top-five hit in 2000 with Yellow, from the debut album Parachutes?

Coldplay saw the single climb to number four on the UK chart. In the United States it was held back until November 2000 and released as the album's lead single.

Which author sent Dorothy down a road of yellow brick in the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?

L. Frank Baum laid the road from Munchkin Country to the Emerald City, which sits at the exact centre of Oz. W. W. Denslow illustrated the book.

Yellow fever, which can turn a patient's skin yellow through liver damage, is spread by the bite of which insect?

Mosquito bites carry the virus, and in cities the main culprit is the species Aedes aegypti. Only about 15 percent of patients enter the toxic phase that brings jaundice.

Which yellow Pokémon's name blends the Japanese sounds for an electric sparkle and a mouse's squeak?

Pikachu became the franchise mascot largely through the anime, where it travels as the companion of Ash Ketchum. In the games a Thunder Stone evolves it into Raichu.

Which Hogwarts house in the Harry Potter books wears yellow and black and has a badger as its mascot?

Hufflepuff prizes hard work, patience, justice and loyalty. J. K. Rowling has said the house corresponds roughly to the element of earth.

Which bright yellow element, known in older writing as brimstone, gives Jupiter's volcanic moon Io its colours?

Sulfur was long called brimstone, a word meaning 'burning stone'. In Genesis, fire and brimstone rain down on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Which painter rented rooms in the Yellow House in Arles, where Paul Gauguin joined him for nine weeks in 1888?

Vincent van Gogh took four rooms there in May 1888 and made the building the subject of an oil painting, which he first titled The House and its environment.

Which yellow spice, a member of the ginger family, gets its colour from a chemical called curcumin?

Turmeric yields curcumin, a bright yellow chemical approved as a food additive in the European Union and the United States. Botanists know the plant as Curcuma longa.

Uma Thurman's yellow tracksuit in Kill Bill echoes the outfit which martial arts star wore in Game of Death?

Bruce Lee's outfit is not the only borrowing: the Bride's helmet and motorcycle in Quentin Tarantino's film resemble his as well.

On the traditional painter's colour wheel of red, yellow and blue, which colour is the complement of yellow?

Purple is mixed from red and blue, so setting it beside yellow brings all three painter's primaries together. In the RGB model used for screens, yellow's opposite is blue instead.

In the CMYK model used by colour printers, the Y stands for yellow; which ink does the C stand for?

Cyan joins magenta, yellow and black, whose K stands for the 'key' plate that prints crisp outlines and text. Adding black also cuts the amount of coloured ink needed.

Which metallic element gives low-pressure street lamps a yellow-orange glow so pure that colours cannot be told apart?

Sodium atoms pour about 90 percent of the lamp's visible output into one narrow yellow band, the D-line. That makes the lamps highly efficient but hopeless for judging colour.

Saffron, the costly spice that gives rice dishes a golden-yellow hue, comes from the dried threads of which flower?

Crocus sativus yields the spice from its crimson stigmas and styles, which are collected and dried. The colour that reaches the plate comes from a pigment called crocin.

Which yellow-flowered lawn weed takes its English name from a French phrase describing its jagged leaves?

Dandelion is a contraction of the Old French dent de lion, itself a translation of the Medieval Latin dens leonis. The teeth in question are the jagged edges of the leaves.

Yellow journalism got its name in an 1890s circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and whose Journal?

William Randolph Hearst lured away the World's cartoonist Richard Outcault, whose popular Yellow Kid strip then ran in the Journal. The comic gave the sensational style its name.

Which national football team gave up its white kit after a home World Cup defeat in 1950 and switched to yellow shirts?

Brazil lost 2–1 to Uruguay in the match remembered as the Maracanazo. A newspaper competition for a new kit was won by the teenager Aldyr Schlee, and the yellow shirts were first worn in 1954.

The Yellow Wall, a south terrace with room for 25,000 fans, belongs to the stadium of which German football club?

Borussia Dortmund fans fill what is the largest free-standing grandstand in Europe. Asked whether he feared the team's players or manager more, Bastian Schweinsteiger said the Yellow Wall.

Yellow was the emperor's colour in imperial China, so nearly every roof in which Beijing palace has yellow tiles?

Forbidden City roofs carry yellow glazed tiles almost throughout. Bright yellow could be worn only by the emperor and his household, and special guests were welcomed on a yellow carpet.

Yellowcake is a powdered concentrate made as an intermediate step in processing the ores of which metal?

Uranium ore is milled and chemically treated to make yellowcake, which is typically about 80 percent uranium oxide. The powder is produced after mining but before enrichment or fuel fabrication.

Which Canadian singer wrote Big Yellow Taxi on her first trip to Hawaii, releasing it on Ladies of the Canyon?

Joni Mitchell recalled looking down from her hotel at a parking lot that ran as far as the eye could see. The 1970 song is known for its environmental concern.

Which American writer's 1892 story The Yellow Wallpaper is the journal of a woman confined by her physician husband?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman has the husband keep his wife in an upstairs nursery and forbid her to work or write, his cure for what he calls a temporary nervous depression.

China's Yellow River owes its colour to which fine yellowish sediment, picked up as it crosses a huge plateau?

Loess washes off the Loess Plateau in such quantity that the river is named for the colour. Chinese chronicles suggest the water only turned muddy some time between 367 BC and 165 AD.

Which pop act spent four weeks atop the US chart in 1973 with Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree?

Tony Orlando and Dawn sing as a man riding the bus home from prison, unsure whether his girlfriend will welcome him. It was 1973's top-selling single in both the US and the UK.

Which entrepreneur founded Chicago's Yellow Cab Company in 1915, offering taxi rides at modest prices?

John Hertz later moved into car hire, buying a rental business and renaming it Hertz Drive-Ur-Self. His cab firm's rivalry with Checker Taxi was fierce and frequently violent.

Which Spanish football club is nicknamed the Yellow Submarine because of the bright yellow strip it plays in?

Villarreal are El Submarino Amarillo in Spanish, a name that also fits a low-profile club beside Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid and regional rivals Valencia.

Which Scottish singer took Mellow Yellow to number two in America, with Paul McCartney among the background revellers?

Donovan had lent a small hand with the words of Yellow Submarine, so McCartney returned the favour, also playing uncredited bass on parts of the album.

Jaundice turns the skin and the whites of the eyes yellow when which pigment builds up in the blood?

Bilirubin is a red-orange compound left over when the body breaks down heme. A related pigment, urobilin, is what gives urine its straw-yellow colour.

At sea, a ship flying the plain yellow flag nicknamed the Yellow Jack historically signalled that it was under what?

Quarantine may be the reason the plain yellow flag stands for the letter Q in maritime signals. 'Yellow jack' also became a name for yellow fever.

Which yellow property on the American Monopoly board misspells the name of a real New Jersey neighbourhood?

Marvin Gardens should read Marven Gardens. Parker Brothers acknowledged the mistake in 1995 and formally apologised to the neighbourhood's residents.

Yellowstone, widely regarded as the world's first national park, lies mainly in which American state?

Wyoming holds most of the park, with small portions extending into Montana and Idaho. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act that created it on March 1, 1872.

The small yellow Minions first appeared in 2010 as the henchmen of supervillain Gru in which animated film?

Despicable Me introduced the capsule-shaped creatures, the work of Eric Guillon, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud. They went on to star in a prequel series of their own.