› added 5 years ago

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TIL the reason Phoenix can exist in the middle of the desert is because in 1868 Jack Swilling discovered the ruins of a 27,000 sqmi canal system built by the Hohokam. He restarted the canals and today that infrastructure, with modern expansions, waters the city of over a million in the hot desert.

Read more azheritagewaters.nau.edu

via reddit.com

0wKdp TIL when the Monty Python team was taken to Germany to find things to write comedy about there, they were taken straight from the airport to Dachau concentration camp
AprB TIL engineers designing the Voyager mission planned it to avoid planetary encounters over Thanksgiving and Christmas
D8Jr TIL water privatization has proven to be another cause of—rather than a solution to—chronic water shortage problems
xXK7 TIL on December 1, 1948, a dead man bearing no identification was found on an Australian beach. Well dressed in clothes with deliberately torn-out labels, in excellent physical condition, and having left behind a rare book containing a bizarre code, the man remains unidentified to this day.
eva6 TIL in large 16th Century kitchens a now extinct breed of dog was placed on a giant wheel and used to turn meat. It was viewed as a utensil rather than as a pet.