› added 9 years ago

63

TIL that between 1970 and 1980, 2 billionaire brothers attempted to corner the silver market. They owned an estimated 1/3rd of the world supply when in 1980 the silver price collapsed with 80%. The brothers lost over a billion dollars.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

VBX6m TIL the "official" death of President Zachary Taylor was an overconsumption of cherries and milk, but the cause of death has been the subject of conspiracy theories.
R7o1w TIL how you can tell if two screenwriters wrote the screenplay together or rather rewrote each others. If it says "x&y" it means they wrote it together. However if it's "x and y" it means that they rewrote each others material.
R7XA4 TIL that on the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave me “colly birds”, aka blackbirds, not “calling birds” until “calling birds” became more popular in the 1970s.
nba7 TIL that, in 2014, English YouTube star Zoella uploaded a picture to Instagram of a “random man & his dog” on the beach. The “random man” was Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour.
0ddnv TIL about the Vennbahn, a former railway line that runs across Germany, but the trackbed of the line is part of Belgium, so it creates 5 exclaves of Germany, one of which is only a house with a garden