› added 7 years ago

1432

TIL the British Army developed a salute with the palm facing outwards. The Royal Navy instead adopted a version with the palm facing downwards, as many men working on ships had dirty palms and to display them was disrespectful. The United States Armed Forces would later use the Royal Navy's version.

Y7VLP TIL The reason The Simpsons are so crudely drawn in their first appearances on the Tracey Ullman Show was because Matt Groening had sent in basic sketches assuming they'd be cleaned up by the animators, but the animators just traced over his drawings.
e0LYL TIL that in 1949, Gallup polled Americans on what scientific advances they thought would happen by the year 1999. 88% believed cancer would be cured, and 63% believed planes would be nuclear powered. Only 15% thought a man would walk on the moon.
oV47 TIL Jews in many Nazi extermination camps, acknowledging death was inevitable, chose to stage uprisings in order to die honorably
OG6PL TIL about the white-throated sparrow, where male and female birds each exist in two forms: a white morph and a tan morph. Tan morphs only mate with white morphs, creating four different groups of birds that each act like a distinct 'sex' - tan males, tan females, white males and white females.
1aZ44 TIL in the civil war, the commander of the Union "lightning brigade" personally took out a loan to buy his soldiers advanced new repeating rifles because the government would not supply them. Using the firepower advantage afforded by the new rifles, his brigade proved extremely effective in combat.