› added 5 years ago

116

TIL that in 1905 JP Morgan hired a young black woman as his personal librarian. Over the next 40 years she established his library as one of the premier collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

1JAO TIL That the magician Teller, of Penn and Teller, has no first name. On his driver’s license it is marked NFN (no first name.)
LQr8d TIL: An Wang was an immigrant who coinvented "write-after-read" which made magnetic core memory possible in computing while working at Harvard. However, Harvard cut computer research in 1951 so he started a business. He said, "Success is more a function of consistent common sense than of genius"
DEPr TIL Roger Deakins, Director Of Photography for films like Skyfall and No Country For Old Men stopped shooting documentaries because he witnessed a schizophrenic woman have an episode and his parter wanted to keep filming. Deakins instead decided to put the camera down and help the woman.
eppm6 TIL of George Forster, a convicted murderer who was sentenced to death in 1803 in London. His body was subject to a Galvanism experiment by Giovanni Aldini, where a current was passed through his muscles, despite being dead his face contorted and one eye even opened.
GYW7Q TIL Two weeks before the Castle Gate Mine disaster that killed 171 men, the Utah Fuel Company laid off many of the miners without dependents during a shortage of coal sales. As a result, 114 of the men killed in the disaster were married men and left behind 415 widows and fatherless children