› added 11 years ago

578

TIL to besiege an army, Julius Caesar built an 18km wall around their city. Upon learning of an approaching relief force, he built a 21km wall around the first. The armies attacked from inside the city and out, and Caesar defeated the 180k strong enemy with 60k men. The entire episode lasted 3 weeks

OGjoR TIL a man who received a bone marrow transplant was found that the DNA in his blood and semen had been completely replaced by that of his donor
OGOy4 TIL Jesuit missionary in China Ferdinand Verbiest won an astronomy contest against the imperial court's top astronomer. His Chinese opponent was exiled and Verbiest assumed the post. He renovated Beijing Observatory and designed what some claim to be the first ever car, among other inventions
W7ad TIL in 1917 Germans built a 25-foot-tall armor-plated fake tree with a soldier sitting in it to spy on Allied forces. the Germans waited until nightfall and cut down one of the real trees to replace it with the fake one With artillery firing the whole time so the Brits wouldn’t hear the axes.
QN85M TIL an elephant trampled a woman to death then returned days later to her funeral to trample the body again
O9xR TIL that in 2003 the U.S. Government forcibly seized some 500 horses from two elderly Western Shoshone women on the grounds that they were grazing and destroying “public land”, they later found vast deposits of gold, phosphates, and geothermal energy and are now power mining to extract the gold