› added 6 years ago

83

TIL popcorn became popular during the Great Depression because it was fairly inexpensive.

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8e6jV TIL that a 12 year old boy enlisted to fight in WWI after lying about his age and fought in the Battle of the Somme at 13 before his mother revealed his true age and brought him home.
R5da6 TIL The earliest reference to opium growth and use is in 3,400 B.C. when the opium poppy was cultivated in lower Mesopotamia (Southwest Asia). The Sumerians referred to it as Hul Gil, the "joy plant."
E46p TIL: John Sedwick made fun of his troops for being afraid of being shot by snipers, his final words were “they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” right before being shot and killed by a sniper
OR71 TIL over 300 incidents of child murder occurred in 1700s Germany and Austria due to incidents of “suicide by proxy”. Religious people were killing young children in order to have the government execute them so they could get into heaven.
XKrr TIL that Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” almost wasn’t published by the Royal Society of London because they had spent their whole budget on a book about fish, called “The History of Fishes”. The cost was instead covered by astronomer Edmund Halley