› added 6 years ago

118

TIL in addition to the protests & death threats Ruby Bridges had to face as the first black kid in a white school, her father lost his job, the local grocery store stopped serving the family, & her sharecropper grandparents were turned off their land.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

NXmMe TIL that WordStar was once the dominant word processor, in part because of the lack of copy protection. Many books on how to use WordStar became best sellers. Their authors knew that they were really selling manuals for what might have been the world's most pirated software.
e0RVJ TIL about Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher/professor whose will requested that his body be preserved and memorialized . He's now on display at University College London, where they sometimes bring him to board meetings where the roll caller marks him as "present but not voting".
dD5Vr TIL of William Henry Veno who emigrated from Scotland to America, then to England with a new name and a miracle cough mixture. Though he sold his successful business in his 50s due to fatal health concerns, he actually died almost a decade later from suicide. Also credited with inventing Germolene.
xVllb TIL Sari cloth is an effective way to remove cholera from drinking water (99%, according to laboratory studies). Filtering water to free it from microorganisms is practiced among Jains to follow doctrine of non violence, preventing pain to any living creature.
NMM TIL the San Diego Zoo monorail was named WGASA when a staffer responded to a memo requesting an “African sounding name” with the acronym for “who gives a shit anyway?”