› added 1 year ago

118

TIL Charles Perrault's Cinderella was originally believed to be a sexual innuendo. The words verre (glass) and vair (fur) sound the same in French, which suggests the Prince "tried on the fur slipper of all the maidens in the land."

Read more wikipedia.com

via reddit.com

Oo8Gg TIL that the man who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was also a fighter pilot and an intelligence officer who helped Winston Churchill convince the American government to secretly fight Nazi Germany before they joined World War 2.
woXe8 TIL in the 1970s, France acted as Saddam Hussein's "chief arms broker"; they sold $25billion in weapons to Iraq of which most was advanced fighters and missiles (close to $100bil in today's money)
awpd0 TIL that, when asked to investigate the space shuttle Challenger disaster, Richard Feynman wrote a very critical report about NASA's safety policy concluding: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
4k9Qg TIL when the band Slayer came to Toronto in 2018, a fan was kicked out of the open-air venue they were playing at for unruly behaviour. He then jumped into the lake surrounding the open-air venue to swim back in. He was banned for a year, but was later immortalized on a beer can label.
AD89x TIL the human body emits light as an energy called biophotons (unrelated to visible bioluminescence).