› added 2 years ago

83

TIL of Marcus McDilda - a P-51 Mustang pilot shot down over Japan two days after the first atomic bombing. Tortured by the Japanese to learn U.S. atomic bomb capabilities, he told his captors the U.S. had 100 atomic bombs that would be dropped on Tokyo and Kyoto within "the next few days."

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

KOEgQ TIL about the 'Time Cube', a conspiracy theory in which modern education and physics are hiding the ultimate truth: That each day actually consists of four separate simultaneously occurring days.
6EXZW TIL Charles Shultz included Franklin, a black child, in his Peanuts comic strip at the height of the civil rights movement. He has since been accused of racism, but that is entirely incorrect. Shultz threatened to quit if his strips with Franklin weren’t run as is.
xV6Rw TIL For many ovens the drawer beneath is meant to keep foods warm, not as storage for baking sheets/pans
KORea TIL the Statue of Liberty was originally designed in the 1860s for Egypt. Named 'Progress Carrying the Light to Asia', French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi modelled the statue after an Egyptian woman dressed in a veil. Due to costs, the idea was rejected, and a lighthouse was erected instead.
yXo8 TIL in 1953 a newspaper boy was paid with a coin which he found to be hollow and contain a coded message. He gave it to authorities but the code could not be deciphered. Years later, a Russian spy in the U.S. defected and during his interrogation was shown the coin and code. The message was for him.