› added 3 days ago

1

TIL the first known movie to use a special effect is the 18 second long film The Execution of Mary Stuart. The effect was the stop trick, involving the splicing of two shots, one with the actor playing Mary and the other with a mannequin, with the mannequin's head being chopped off.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

NY16 TIL that, during a hostage crisis in 1985, Russian special forces took the kidnappers’ relatives as hostages, dismembered them and sent their body parts to the kidnappers as a negotiation/intimidation trick.
5xER TIL when Nathan Lane told his mother he was gay, she replied “I would rather you were dead”. To which Nathan said, “I knew you’d understand.”
mxEBv TIL Dupont, a chemical company, knowingly dumped an incredibly toxic chemical, called C8, into the Ohio River. The chemical eventually made it's way to aquifers downstream and gave thousands of people different kinds of cancers, and many kids birth defects.
mdkP TIL the writer of “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest” Ken Kesey faked his own death and fled to mexico because he was caught in possession of marijuana
GYjYg TIL The great composer J.S. Bach, who created monumentally beautiful choral works like the St. Matthew Passion, got into a dagger fight with one of his students after calling him a "nanny-goat bassoonist".