› added 3 years ago

131

TIL that the treadmill was first introduced as a Prison Rehabilitation Device, meant to cause the incarcerated to suffer and learn from their sweat. When Oscar Wilde was sentenced to 2 years in prison in 1895, he was forced to use a treadmill as part of his punishment.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

1av74 TIL That all of McDonalds’ delivery trucks in the UK, have been running on used cooking oil from their restaurants since 2007.
G4G TIL the U.S. government has specifications for its pens used by personnel: The pen consists of seven different parts and meets 16 pages of military specs, including that it be able to write for a mile with no fading and withstand temperatures up to 160 degrees and down to 40 degrees below zero.
VML9Q TIL Dennis Richie, who along with Ken Thompson, created the C programming language in the 60s, the most influential language in history, as well as Unix (THE operating system behind MacOS and Linux), died a week after Steve Jobs in 2011. His death was ignored due to media coverage of Jobs' death.
OPAX TIL The Candy Companies lobbied to extend Daylight Savings Time to increase the time kids can trick or treat on Halloween
Z8JQG TIL that in 1986, Primus frontman Les Claypool auditioned to be the bassist of Metallica after the death of former bassist Cliff Burton. Metallica frontman James Hetfield remarked that Claypool was not offered the job because "he was too good" and "should do his own thing".