› added 1 year ago

28

TIL the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 refers to a supposed newspaper article that said because of horses, in "50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure." It's an analogy for how new technologies (in this case cars) can take care of problems that seemed unsolvable.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

xVwYo TIL that Fakhruddin Razi (d.1210), a Persian Polymath, decentred our universe-centric ideas with his conception of a multiverse. This astonishing idea happened 300 years before Copernicus' more well-known revolution of moving western astronomical knowledge from geocentric to heliocentric
QJmle TIL about Eats, Shoots & Leaves a book dedicated to Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution.
X0VEP TIL about Enoteca Maria, a restaurant in New York where the chefs are grandmothers from various countries and cultures. Each day, a different grandmother takes charge of preparing a special dish, offering customers a diverse range of traditional cuisines from around the world.
5Vr0R TIL the most catastrophic accident in motorsports was in 1955 during the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. About 80 to 84 people died and 120 to 178 people were injured when a Mercedes rear-ended another car at 200 km/h (125 mph), jumped the berm and landed into the crowd.
69Vo7 TIL about the Dictionnaire Infernal, a book on demonology first published in 1818. Initially a work of fiction, author Collin de Plancy later converted to Roman Catholicism and amended the book: the final edition aligns with Catholic theology and affirms the existence of the demons.