› added 12 years ago

177

TIL that in 1913 a Slovakian coal miner invented a parachute skirt. He demonstrated it by jumping off a building in Washington within eye shot of the U.S. Patent Office.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

dLoB TIL Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark have been re-illustrated to become less scary.
krD1 TIL that J Edgar Hoover’s largest investigative file was of Eleanor Roosevelt. He believed her civil rights and humanitarian work was too suspicious to not be a communist
kaRB TIL that Mexico used to defend its borders against illegal immigration from the United States.
7rBXr TIL the Catholic Church’s legal system, called canon law, was the first modern Western legal system, and is still the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West.
4aKb TIL in 2008 a neo-Nazi group adopted a stretch of Missouri highway; much to the chagrin of state officials who couldn’t afford a lengthy legal battle. Instead, they renamed the highway after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled the Nazis and became a prominent theologian and civil rights advocate