› added 8 years ago

68

TIL that Charles Hires, the first person to successfully market a commercial brand of root beer, decided to call his drink “root beer” despite it not containing any alcohol because he wanted to market it to Pennsylvania coal miners

Read more wikipedia.org

via ift.tt

grOgL TIL in 1987, United Airlines purchased Hertz, Westin, and Hilton for $2.3 billion, and rebranded itself as Allegis Corp., a one-stop fly-drive-sleep travel company. Stock prices tanked, investors balked, and it was dismantled less than 4 months later.
79lx TIL 35 GBs of Titanfall’s total file size of 49 GBs is uncompressed audio because the engineers thought the minimum specification CPU couldn’t handle decompressing the audio.
xVEO5 TIL in 1975, Joel Kaplan escaped from a prison in Mexico without breaking a single law. He didn't bribe or assault the guards since they were on a break, the helicopter and plane used in his breakout were bought legally, his flight followed FAA guidelines, and he entered the US with his real name.
XDWR TIL The 3.6m year old Laetoli footprints, one of the most important finds concerning Human evolution and evidence of upright bipedal walking, was discovered by Paleoanthropologist Andrew Hill when he dove into the ground during the middle of an elephant dung fight with a colleague.
8amda TIL researchers modeled a system where the Peter Principle holds true and found that instead of promoting the best employees until they reach a level where they stop performing competently, it's more efficient for a company to promote employees at random. For this research they won an Ig Nobel.