› added 5 years ago

89

TIL 1816 was “The Year Without A Summer.” The dust from a massive volcanic eruption reduced sunlight for months, dropping temperatures and killing crops in North America & Europe. This indirectly led to the development of Mormonism, Frankenstein, and the modern bicycle.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

vPYo4 TIL about colloidal suspensions. It is a type of mixture where tiny particles of one substance are evenly dispersed in another substance. The particles are so small that they do not settle to the bottom, but instead stay suspended in the mixture.
l7L7a TIL that an NFL player simultaneously served in the US Navy. Napoleon McCallum played for the LA Raiders while assigned to a ship in Los Angeles; the military allows outside jobs that don't interfere with service. After one year he was reassigned; McCallum returned to the NFL after leaving the Navy.
Jk48 TIL that to shoot the candlelight-only scenes in Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick used rare f/0.7 camera lenses manufactured by Carl Zeiss for NASA. Zeiss made only ten of the lenses; he sold three to Kubrick and six to NASA, who used them in the Apollo program to photograph the dark side of the moon.
nWaRP TIL of Juan Pujol García, a Spanish spy from WWII. After the British Army turned him down, he joined the Nazis, and became a double agent, working for the British. Juan is now one of the few people who have received both an MBE from King George and an Iron Cross from Hitler.
jNM0n TIL When USSR premier Nikita Khrushchev visited IBM's Silicon Valley research facility in 1959 he showed indifference to computing technology, but he was so impressed by their buffet style cafeteria that he instructed factories across the Soviet Union to implement the self service dining concept.