› added 10 years ago

106

TIL a former slave ship captain wrote the song “Amazing Grace.”

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

BgQOK TIL that the rumbling noise that you can make by tensing/contracting some muscles in your ears is caused by the Tensor Tympani muscle, which is a muscle that exists to dampen passive but loud sounds like fireworks, chewing or yelling.
rNbo1 TIL: Germany conducted one major paratrooper operation in WWII, the invasion of Crete in 1941. The casualties were so catastrophic that Hitler permanently banned all future large-scale airborne assaults.
rNQRd TIL: Both current record holders for the tallest man (Sultan Kösen) and tallest woman (Rumeysa Gelgi) in the world are from Turkey.
y8ow TIL a surviving eyewitness to Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 assassination gave an account of the event on TV in 1956.
D1NEJ TIL Norway leads the world in commercial whaling, hunting hundreds more than Japan per year despite its much smaller population.