› added 5 years ago

107

TIL JFK’s PT-109 patrol boat came under attack near the Solomon Islands, and sunk. Swam 3.5 miles to the island. He then etched an SOS message into a coconut shell, asked two natives to deliver it to a nearby base in order to arrange for their rescue. He later turned the shell into a paper weight.

Read more mentalfloss.com

via reddit.com

Brn6D TIL that summer in Japan is considered the season for ghost stories/spooky events and has the same eerie resonance as Halloween does for the U.S. The tradition comes from the Buddhist festival of the dead (Obon) which takes place in summer.
78Bj7 TIL North Town Hall in Chelmsford, Massachusetts was built in 1853, served as the town's community center for everything from graduations and proms to polling, and now thrives again as a restored National Register-listed community hub.
djEQ TIL During WWII, George de Hevesy used aqua regia to dissolve the Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck to prevent them being confiscated. He left the solution in his lab, where it was ignored. After the war, he precipitated the gold out and the medals were recast.
JLAk TIL that a guy in Illinois built a homemade gatling gun out six SKS semi-automatic rifles and a hand crank. It’s dubbed the “Redneck Obliterator.” It’s perfectly legal. And it recently sold for $3,450.
LkYRr TIL scientists applied Einstein's Theory of Relativity to Luke and Leia's journeys to Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back and calculated that Leia would be nearly two years older than Luke