› added 4 years ago

150

TIL after conquering China, by 1241 the Mongols were expanding their empire to the west, using Chinese rockets (self-propelled flying bombs) in battles across Eastern Europe. And with them came secret of black powder - the recipe was first written down around 1250 by English scholar Roger Bacon.

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6EEj7 Conrad Heyer, a Revolutionary War veteran, was the earliest-born American to ever be photographed and he was photographed in 1852 at the age of 103! He’s also “the only U.S. veteran to be photographed who crossed the Delaware River alongside George Washington in December 1776”.
BgmPD TIL that Archie Comics Jughead Jones' iconic "crown" is actually a style of hat known as a whoopee cap. Made of a fedora with the brim cut and folded upwards, it was a style of hat popular in the mid-20th century. Youths often decorated their caps with buttons or bottlecaps, as seen in Jughead's cap
4keeg TIL that half of all fertile women in Greenland in the 60s and 70s were forcibly given IUDs in a genocidal campaign, where the birth rate was cut in half.
m1E5P TIL that Austrian police once locked a suspect in a basement interrogation room and forgot him there, accidentally making him the reigning world record holder for "longest survival without either food or water" (18 days).
D1Mxj TIL in 1977, two American colleges, Carleton College and St. Olaf College, members of NCAA's Division III conference, attempted to play an American football game using purely metric measurements