› added 8 years ago

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TIL during the civil war the man who chose the location for the Arlington Cemetery, Montgomery Meigs, a southerner who hated the confederacy, chose Arlington, Robert E. Lees family estate to remind him of the men he had killed, including Meigs’s son who was buried feet from Mrs. Lees rose garden.

GYgQN TIL when firing the Germans biggest cannon in WW1, they had to move 300 yards away and fire it electrically. They were still so close they required cotton wadding in their eyes, nose and ears, and fired it with their mouth open to prevent the gun from blowing out their ear drums.
Z8eYv TIL that there are two KENWOOD companies, KENWOOD Limited (UK) that makes kitchen appliances and KENWOOD Corporation (JP) that makes mainly audio equipment, and that they have no relation to each other
JXOB TIL Jack Abernathy was known as “Catch-‘em-alive Jack” because he would catch wolves by jumping off a horse, shoving his hand in the wolf’s mouth so it was unable to bite down, and holding it down until it became docile. He performed this trick for Teddy Roosevelt during a hunt in Oklahoma in 1905.
XZe6 TIL that you aren’t supposed to walk through the gates of a Japanese shrine, the gates are reserved for the Shinto gods so you have to walk around them (unless you are in fact a Shinto god in the guise of a tourist).
Vnd0 TIL: For the past two decades, 10 percent of all the electricity consumed in the United States has come from Russian nuclear warheads.