› added 10 years ago

93

TIL King Gustav III of Sweden commissioned an experiment to prove coffee was poisonous. Overseen by two doctors, a prisoner was forced to drink three pots of coffee a day until he died. Both doctors and the King died before the prisoner.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

J1LOj TIL a 5-year-old girl from Oklahoma defeated 52 other children to win a regional spelling bee and qualified for the 2017 national event. She is the youngest participant to secure a spot in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. She spelled such challenging words as jnana, sarsaparilla and Baedeker.
QNMZL TIL that President Richard Nixon often traveled to Camp David, Maryland to catch broadcasts of Redskins' home games that were "blacked out" on TV in Washington DC. He also once reserved a phone line at his Florida White House to receive the play-by-play of a Cowboys-Redskins game in Dallas.
eeDJ TIL that European Royal Families had a “Court Jew” to handle finances and negotiate loans since usury was forbidden by the Catholic Church
K71a TIL Jimi Hendrix was once invited to play with Cream alongside Eric Clapton. In the middle of the show, Clapton walked off stage. He was found in the back shaking angrily and smoking a cigarette. When asked what was wrong, he simply replied, “You never told me he was that fucking good.”
P1EyO TIL Ancient DNA shows that the culture that brought Bronze Age technology to Britain was connected to a migration that almost completely replaced the island's earlier inhabitants, the latter who were the Neolithic communities responsible for huge megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge.