› added 3 years ago

153

TIL After losing her husband and four children to yellow fever, and her job to the great Chicago fire, Mary "Mother" Jones became a labor organizer. She organized a march of working children from Philadelphia to New York, and her speeches provoked workers to organize during the Coal Wars.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

ZnOo TIL that the world’s largest brothel, with 500 rooms, was built in Seattle in 1910. It was so scandalous that the mayor lost his job, and the building became the ordinary Lester Apartments. It was destroyed 40 years later when an air force bomber crashed into it.
YpJMv TIL that during first lunar landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were literally lost for the duration of being on the Moon. Neither NASA nor Michael Collins from Columbia module orbiting the Moon were able to locate the landed Apollo 11 for 22 hours it remained on the surface.
W7EPL TIL that in 1943, the hull of the tanker ship SS Schenectady cracked in half while docked in Portland, Oregon. The sound of the fracture was reported to have been heard over a mile away, and the cause of the failure wasn’t fully understood for another 50 years.
KOkVE TIL in the song "9 to 5," Dolly Parton created the typewriter sound effect by tapping her acrylic fingernails against one another.
DQ4eY TIL The mathematician William Playfair (noted for inventing the line, area, bar, and pie charts) was also a spy. The Scottish Playfair counterfeited and distributed false assignats which drove down their value and put France into an economic crisis by 1795.