› added 3 months ago

18

TIL that Edgar Allan Poe wrote his first detective stories after trying to debunk a famous chess-playing "robot" called The Mechanical Turk in 1836. Poe asserted that a mechanical chess player would play perfectly, but noticed that the Turk occasionally erred, and therefore suspected its creation.

wGBJ TIL a Hungarian man was shot in the frontal lobe during World War 1, making it impossible for him to fall asleep. He continued to live a full, sleepless life.
6Er07 TIL a man known only as "Django" drove his own boat out & freed a whale caught in a shark net off an Australian beach (without cutting the net). Before taking action, Django had waited hours for help from officials who had been called; when officials arrived, he faced a fine for acting alone.
n0pW TIL: Patrick Ewing was close to signing a letter of intent with the University of North Carolina. While visiting the campus he stayed at the Carolina Inn and after witnessing a rally for the Ku Klux Klan ultimately decided not to sign with UNC.
P1YOe TIL of "Unit 731", a secret Japanese research facility disguised as a water treatment plant during WWII. Responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes ever committed, researchers captured by the USA were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered from their human experiments.
Yp0G TIL A US man who stored his amputated leg in a barbecue smoker that was later auctioned off is locked in a custody dispute with the man who bought it