› added 11 years ago

66

TIL Uncle Sam was a real person who got his name correlated to the U.S. during the war of 1812.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

7rYAP TIL 3 Scottish soldiers escaped capture from German soldiers when they spoke their native Gaelic to confuse them after their capture claiming they were Ukrainian. The German soldiers let them go.
Zobp TIL pineapples used to be valued at $5000, rarely eaten and used as a status symbol at parties
wgvE TIL that in 1924, when Standard Oil was researching tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive, 32 of 49 workers had to be hospitalized due to lead poisoning, and 5 of them died. A federal panel made entirely of industry scientists later concluded that there “no danger” from tetraethyl lead.
a8r90 TIL that out of the 400-500 known species of shark, the Sand Tiger Shark is the only one that farts
KOOW4 TIL that the official definition of 1 second is based on a quantum mechanical phenomenon, namely "the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a Caesium 133 atom's outermost electron"