› added 1 year ago

55

TIL of the Battle of San Jacinto. Just six weeks after the Texans terrible loss at The Alamo in 1836. The Texans regrouped under Sam Houston, and surprised the Mexican forces and overwhelming defeated the Mexicans. The Texans had 11 soldiers killed and the Mexicans lost 650.

j6xbQ TIL Devon Allen, track & field athlete/Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver, was disqualified in the World Athletic Championships for a controversial false start. The starting blocks measured his reaction time from the time the gun went off at 0.099, which is 0.001 seconds faster than legally allowed.
l7Y1G TIL Doris Miller joined the Navy as a mess assistant, one option for a black man. During the Pearl Harbor attack he saved several lives and successfully manned an anti-aircraft gun with no training, until the ship started to sink. He was killed in 1943. An aircraft carrier is named in his honor.
RRn6 TIL that the first message sent over the Washington-Moscow hotline (aka “Red phone”) was “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 1234567890”. To make sure all keys on the teletypes were operational.
4XN7J TIL the National Trust implores us to stop urinating in a toilet, in order to save the water used in flushing, and instead wee onto compost heaps, which speeds up the chemical process of decomposition, making it a better fertiliser to grow vegetables and save even more energy in reducing food miles.
ZpJXD TIL a Japanese cafe has robots that serve customers while being controlled by paralysed people, who get paid 1,000 yen (about $7.66) per hour for their work.