› added 1 year ago

42

TIL that Belgian businessman was a big help to the Manhattan Project. He realized how important uranium was and shipped 1,200 tons of it to Staten Island. When Lieutenant Colonel Nichols contacted him, he just said, " You can have the ore now. It's in New York. I was waiting for your visit. "

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

0wpQM TIL that Frank Sinatra’s publicist auditioned and paid girls $5 to scream at his early performances to get the crowd excited.
gMnZb TIL of Eva Saxl, a diabetic woman who synthesised her own insulin in a basement during WWII, saving not only her own life but the lives of over 200 people in the Shanghai Ghetto who would have died when legal insulin became unavailable
vP47D TIL: The oldest humanoid archeological find in Japan dates back over 22,000 years. It contained the fossils of 2 males and 3-7 females. It is believed that they were speared, cannibalized, and then thrown into the fissure. The males were 155cm tall while the females were 140cm.
Z8Q4v TIL In a 1915 federal case against "fancy mixed nuts" that were argued by competitors to be an inferior grade, the court declined to accept a trade standard, saying: "...such a vague and indefinite standard... to establish by the testimony of men engaged in the business of handling nuts."
4kdeX TIL that Calcio Fiorentino, an early form of football from Italy that is still played today, starts with the teams engaging in mixed martial arts to force opponents into submission before trying to score a goal.