› added 9 years ago

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TIL the story that NASA spent $1 million on a space pen while the soviets simply used a pencil is false. The pen was developed by a private company without any taxpayer dollars and NASA simply became a client afterwards.

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KOa59 TIL Napoleons military genius was considered to be so enormeous that the entire stategy of the Coalition that defeated him (the Trachenberg Plan) depended on retreat wherever & whenever they faced him and only attacking his underlings until they built up an overwhelming numerical troop advantage.
neVrY TIL that the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Jeannette Rankin was the only member of the US congress voted AGAINST going to war with Japan. "As a woman, I can't go to war," she said, "and I refuse to send anyone else."
691jX TIL 19-year-old Matilda Scheurer, a Victorian-era factory worker, died after regular exposure to Scheele's Green, a popular arsenic-based dye used in various common items at the time. She died after allegedly vomiting green, while the whites of her eyes and her fingernails turned green.
M6Rm TIL there’s a man with a neurological condition rendering his vision, feeling and hearing out of sync. He hears people speak before seeing their lips move, and can hear own his voice before he feels his jaw movements.
0wPo1 TIL that in 1945 Myanmar, 900 Imperial Japanese soldiers crossed through 10 miles of mangrove swamps that contained saltwater crocodiles in an attempted retreat from the Royal Navy. Less than 500 Japanese soldiers are known to have reached the end of those swamps.