› added 2 years ago

153

TIL Richard M. Daley authorized the midnight bulldozing of Meigs Field, a small, downtown, lakefront airport in Chicago. This stranded 16 planes on the ground including several Fire Department helicopters. The FAA fined the city $33,000 for not giving 30 days notice ahead of an airport closure.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

woAQW TIL that, in 1947, there was a proposal to create an independent united Bengali state instead of partitioning Bengal between India and Pakistan. It was not accepted, though it did have some support. (In 1971, east Bengal, also known as East Pakistan, acquired its independence as Bangladesh.)
l7XoK TIL Every two years, The Inuit come to Puvirnituq for approximately a week for the Snow Festival. In 2005, participants made a giant igloo 40m around and 5m high, and welcomed 400 people inside simultaneously
wj7o TIL that Einstein was stopped so much in public, he would reply, “Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein.”
groN9 TIL that Paris Hilton's Grandfather was so disgusted by her and her sister's antics that instead of leaving his $4.5 B fortune to his 24 heirs, he gave 97% of it to his family charity and instead of getting $181 M each, each heir only received $5.6M. Paris still has $300M from her antics though.
yQ4dV TIL Einstein's last paper on quantum physics before departing from the field argued that it's an "incomplete" solution to a fundamental problem, with him writing that God "does not play dice." Ironically, the paper was highly influential and paved the way for decades of progress in quantum physics.