Post * AdPx — Curious Curator

› added 9 years ago

95

TIL that a Roman general named Marcus Crassus created Rome’s first firefighting crew with a team of 500 men. His team would respond to a fire, and then Crassus would force the owner of the burning building to sell him the property at an exorbitantly low price, or let it burn to the ground.

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4xk6 TIL that the Peregrine Falcon hunts by diving at 230+ mph straight down, and killing its prey on impact with a balled foot. It kills other birds with a literal falcon punch.

0wPyj TIL a small war was fought between the 3 original settlements that would become Milwaukee. Even today the bridges downtown are crooked because each settlement refused to acknowledge the street layout of the settlements on the other side of the river.

ANGrw TIL the night before he drove in the Italian Grand Prix of 1961, Wolfgang von Trips, speaking about mortality, told a journalist “It could happen tomorrow. That’s the thing about this business, you never know.” In the race the next day, he died in an accident that also killed 15 spectators.

rkro TIL Thomas Midgley Jr, inventor of CFC and leaded gasoline, who is regarded as having the greatest impact on the atmosphere of any single organism in history also accidentally strangled himself to death with his final invention.

nmbW TIL that Cameron Lyle of the University of New Hampshire is ending his college athletics career and will miss the conference championship in order to donate bone marrow and save a strangers life. He is a 1 in 5,000,000 perfect match.