› added 5 years ago

96

TIL Legislators mix up Slovakia and Slovenia so often that embassy employees meet every month to exchange wrongly-addressed mail.

Read more slovak-republic.org

via reddit.com

wL848 TIL The first bumper cars were not meant to collide. Instead, drivers supposed to avoid collisions despite all the erratic driving. Hence the first company to patent a bumper car in 1920 was called Dodgem.
69YLW TIL that the French had for the best part of 5 centuries a very lucrative salt tax. So much so that at some point it was as valuable to France, as the American silver mines were to Spain (according to Cardinal Richelieu)
Y7xMW TIL that 90% of traded goods are transported via ocean shipping.
JZdB TIL that dating was such a novelty in the early 1900s that women were often misperceived as prostitutes and arrested for letting a man buy them dinner
APaw TIL The Space Needle provides therapy to a man who attempted suicide by letting him hang out on its observation deck everyday