› added 9 years ago

449

TIL Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, before having 10 children, three of which died before the age of 11. This lead him to wonder whether close genetic matches had an impact on health, adding to his theory of evolution and the passing of traits to offspring.

VMn7k TIL as President McKinley was dying, no one knew where Vice President Teddy Roosevelt was. When located in the wilderness he raced all night down mountain roads on a buckboard wagon in pitch black and pouring rains to be sworn in.
N7vLN TIL of Elizabeth Lundy, the "grandmother of the Canadian Army". Starting in 1914, she knit 400 pairs of socks for Canadian soldiers serving overseas.
nWrVo TIL that in the 1970s a person died due to gas in their colon exploded during colonoscopy with electrocautery. Colonic gas explosion is very rare these days, due to better bowel preparation (see the first citation for the fatal case study).
6EdBw TIL Starbucks' "Frappucino" is a registered trademark that act as a sub-license out of the Netherlands. When you purchase a beverage, your money goes to pay a trademark fee, which Starbucks books as losses, and the entity in the Netherlands pays little to no tax on the trademark revenues.
x6565 TIL of the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a government death squad in Apartheid South Africa. Accused of murders, they also bombed a kindergarten, harassed a dissident by pointing a RPG7 at him while forcing him to drink moonshine, and tried to bewitch Desmond Tutu by hanging a baboon fetus in his home.