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Joe Blanton, director of our Research Correspondence staff, oversees the answering of 50,000 queries and comments addressed to the National Geographic Society annually. Each week he posts answers to three of the most interesting inquiries received online at Glad You Asked. Unfortunately, individual e-mail replies are impossible.

Billions and billions ...

Do you know how many NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazines have been printed?

I’m glad you asked that, because I do know. Well, approximately. Back when the first issue came off the press in October 1888, the print run was 207 copies. Since that time some 4.4 billion of those familiar magazines have come down the line.

But wait—I have other numbers for you! If those magazines were piled up in a single stack, they would weigh about 3.3 billion pounds (1.5 billion kilograms). If you laid them end to end, at 10 inches per magazine, they’d stream out for 694,000 miles(1.1 million kilometers), enough to stretch nearly three times from the earth to the moon.

On the map there’s a little place between Poland and Lithuania marked Kaliningrad. Is that a country or what?

No, it’s not a country. That Connecticut-size parcel is an oblast (province) of Russia. (Thought maybe somebody had forgotten that little slice of Europe and you could lay claim to it?)

Kaliningrad came into existence after World War II as a result of the Potsdam Conference of 1945, which bestowed the northern half of German East Prussia on the Soviet Union. The oblast is built around the old German city of Konigsberg, which Russia had destroyed in the war. Konigsberg itself had developed around a fortress built in 1255 by Teutonic Knights and later became a center of trade for merchants of the Hanseatic League.

Separated from Russia by Lithuania and Belarus, Kaliningrad provides today’s Russia with year-round, ice-free access to the Baltic Sea. In recent years Russia has created the Yantar Free Economic Zone within Kaliningrad in hopes that its duty-free status will attract international commerce.


Why do we have daylight saving time?

Well, because daylight is a good thing to save. Summer days are longer than winter ones in terms of the hours of daylight. When we set our clocks ahead each spring, we are, in effect, repositioning time in order to enjoy more daylight in the evening. We’re trading an hour of very early morning light for an hour of evening light. One of the first proponents of such an idea was Benjamin Franklin. Interestingly, his motivation was to save candle tallow.

Having more daylight in the evening is preferable for a number of reasons. Most people work during the day and enjoy having extra daylight after work. And humans are more active during daylight. By cranking the clock forward during the summer months, productivity increases, and people feel safer being out and about. Daylight saving time even benefits those who suffer from night blindness.

I hope this sheds some daylight on the issue.