› added 10 years ago

216

TIL that FedEx’s current CEO and founder Frederick W. Smith didn’t have enough money to keep the company afloat, he took the remaining 5k and brought it to Vegas and by Monday morning they had 32k, enough to fuel their planes and stay in business long enough for another round of funding.

Read more winthebet.com

via reddit.com

WeB4 TIL there is a town in West Virginia where, due to the presence of a high-tech government telescope, all phones and wifi are illegal.
NXA1J TIL of Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a fisherman who in 1984 survived 6 hours in 5 °C cold water after his ship sank and then trekked barefoot for 3 hours across lava fields before reaching safety. Despite only wearing shirt, sweater and jeans, he showed almost no symptoms of hypothermia or vasodilatation.
v17M8 TIL in Belgium and France, Farmers still recover tens of thousands of unexploded shells and ordinance From WW1 that get pushed up by normal ground shifting (frost thrust, etc) and plowed up in farming fields. They call it "The Iron Harvest". They expect this to continue for hundreds of years.
61B7 TIL Stephen King’s website has a “Dollar Babies” page - stories he’s willing to sell to film students for $1.
loXn1 TIL that Disney’s “Baymax” character design was inspired by Chris Atkeson’s pioneer work in soft robotics. His research in Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute is based on a theory: “For robots to effectively operate in our world, they’re going to have to be as squishy as we are”.