› added 11 years ago

94

TIL: In 1948 the Ford company was offered the Volkswagen company free of charge and declined the offer because it “wasn’t worth a damn”.

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nRR7 TIL that the common heart shape (♥) is quite possibly based on a seed that was used for birth control in ancient times.
W7rMA TIL that nearly one-quarter of Manhattan is built on landfill. Notable examples include Battery Park City, constructed using material excavated during the World Trade Center’s construction, and Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, developed atop decades of coal ash and garbage dumps.
mdbE TIL that the 404 error code originated at the CERN labs in Switzerland, where a physical room numbered 404 housed the original WWW database.
DQ0ev TIL That a 'Bear' Market, when referring to the Stock Market, comes from the 17th century insult 'Bearskin Jobber'. They were someone who sold a bear skin before actually having caught and skinned a bear. This became attributed to someone who shorted a stock without actually owning it.
M7QV0 TIL Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks played herself in an episode of Touched By An Angel in 1999