› added 12 years ago

103

TIL that Citizen once made a series of watches powered only by the temperature difference between the wearers skin and the ambient air.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

wj9Y TIL: A 480 inch tall “skyscraper” which defrauded investors thought was to be 480 feet tall was built in Texas in 1919 and it still stands.
9wbLX TIL a Marriot hotel in Amsterdam has a hotel room with a 737 Cockpit inside of it. The hotel is not at the airport.
vNnK TIL King Gustav III of Sweden commissioned an experiment to prove coffee was poisonous. Overseen by two doctors, a prisoner was forced to drink three pots of coffee a day until he died. Both doctors and the King died before the prisoner.
xVXlg TIL that before the British royal family was the Royal House of Windsor, they were the Royal House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. They changed the name to sound more British during WWI after a German air raid killed a class of schoolchildren in London, whipping up extreme anti-German sentiment in the UK.
ON8X TIL The U.S. had 500,000 Purple Hearts manufactured in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these medals in stock.