› added 1 month ago

5

TIL sick Crimean War soldiers first called Florence Nightingale “The Lady with the Hammer” for breaking into locked storage cabinets for medicine, but a journalist found it unladylike and popularized her enduring title, “The Lady with the Lamp” instead.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

BgO7L TIL that the planning documents for the lower Thames crossing (a proposed road crossing in England) are 359,866 pages long across 2,383 documents, and laid end to end would stretch 66 miles -- 5 times longer than the proposed road itself
JYJVm TIL the bacteria which caused the black death, first infected Oriental Fleas by blocking their foregut, keeping them hungry and biting, to facilitate it's rapid transmission to human hosts.
ONL6 Montreal’s subway trains use brake shoes made from wood soaked in peanut oil. They are quieter and don’t wear out metal wheels as much as more conventional alternatives.
MeyY8 TIL that after the Norman conquest, English nobility adopted the title Countess, but rejected "Count" in favor of keeping the term "Earl" because Count sounded too much like "cunt."
WkByA TIL: That the Yakuza has been distributing sweets to local children at Halloween since 2013 in the city of Kobe.