› added 6 years ago

76

TIL that J. M. Barrie based the character of Peter Pan on his brother David. The reason Peter always stays the same age is because David drowned the day before his fourteenth birthday, and his family always remembered him as the boy who never grew up.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

dxP8 TIL that Egyptian Pharaohs were at one time required to masturbate ceremonially into the Nile River.
yVYra TIL that the co-founders of the Guinness Book Of Records were the twins, Norris and Ross McWhirter. Ross would later be murdered by the I.R.A.
X0ZdP TIL Manfred Clyne proved human emotions to be transmissible via a recording of pressure sensitive clicks. Aborigines in Central Australia were able to correctly identify emotions from sounds derived from the touch of white urban Americans
1pxr TIL that a man was mauled by a bear, partially buried by friends then woke up and hiked like 200 miles back to camp and survived.
RKn1 TIL during the Cold War the CIA spent $3.8B to construct a ship with a 16,000ft underwater claw arm in order to retrieve a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.