› added 12 years ago

94

TIL that President G.W. Bush’s great, great, great, great grandfather Obadiah Newcomb Bush was vice president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, supported the Underground Railroad, and petitioned the New York State Legislature to secede from the Union in a protest against slavery.

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xVvYw TIL That Neil Armstrong's NASA application was a week late and if it weren't for his friend, Dick Day, secretly slipping it into the pile of on-time applications, he would have been rejected.
jN0eX TIL it used to be common for woman in the US to wear extremely long metal hatpins but in 1910 hatpins longer than 9 inches were banned because woman were using them for self-defence and/or accidentally killing people with them.
Bljd TIL there was a pilot filmed for a show called Idiot Quest, where you won points by giving the wrong answer to general-knowledge questions - but the contestants were hooked up to lie detectors to make sure they really didn’t know the answer. It never aired.
l7Yrr TIL Pringles are made with a mixture of 1/3 water to 2/3 potato flakes and cornstarch, the mixture is then pressed and rolled into a thin sheet with 4 tonnes of pressure. A cutter punches an oval shape in the sheet and the scrap dough is separated and recycled back into the chip-making process
PZbE TIL that Prairie Dogs live in “towns” and the biggest one ever was 65,000 sq.km. and had 400,000,000 inhabitants