› added 6 years ago

108

TIL in 1907 a 9,317 mile automobile race from Peking to Paris was held after a French newspaper asked if anyone could prove their claim that if a man has a car, he can go anywhere. The race was held despite the race committee cancelling the race and the winner won a bottle of champagne.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

XE0dX TIL That to calculate the position of the Voyager 1 spacecraft some 12.5 billion miles away, you only need to use the first 15 digits of the value of Pi to be accurate within 1.5 inches
VGLB TIL JK Rowling’s parents met on a train from King’s Cross Station in 1964. Rowling used King’s Cross as a gateway into the Wizarding World.
oBxxY TIL Guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier take an average of six hours to prepare their uniform. They are also required to memorize 35 pages of information about Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including the locations of 300 graves and who is buried in each one.
18MP TIL - Microsoft search engine Bing has lost the company 5.5 billion since its launch in 2009.
b9KAQ TIL of Rebecca Twigg. After winning two Olympic medals in cycling, six world championships, and appearing in Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, and numerous commercials, Twigg abruptly dropped out of the sport, had trouble holding down a desk job, and has been living on the street for years.