› added 12 years ago

1453

TIL Mongol leader Genghis Khan never allowed anyone to paint his portrait, sculpt his image or engrave his likeness on a coin. The first images of him appeared after his death.

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epjN6 TIL about the Dionne quintuplets, the first know quintuplets to survive their infancy. At age 5, the Canadian government made them wards of the Crown. During this time they became a profitable tourist attraction. As adults, they sued the Canadian govt for exploitation, eventually settling for $4m.
YppXP TIL Harvard's first black faculty member was a dentist. Dr. George Franklin Grant joined the Dept of mechanical dentistry in 1871. Also an inventor, he patented the wooden golf tee. Previously, golfers carried around buckets of sand, placing their balls on little piles as they went.
Nad8 TIL that the F-117A stealth fighter shot down by the Serbians in 1999 was picked up on radar because it had opened its internal bomb doors - the open doors increased its radar profile, allowing a SAM missile crew to get a lock on.
kOLk7 TIL: just after the end of WW2 Sweden and Greece both had thousands of sightings of UFO's called Ghost Rockets. The US government took them seriously enough that Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower sent war hero Gen. Jimmy Doolittle to Sweden to investigate in 1946.
vvO4 TIL there are no current statistics on religion in Tanzania. Home to many faiths, its census hasn’t asked about religion since 1967 in order to avoid fights over which was the biggest.