› added 12 years ago

176

TIL that legendary American figure Johnny Appleseed set out to plant apple trees for hard cider, not eating.

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pYngA TIL the Battle of Castle Itter, fought on May 5, 1945 near the end of WWII, saw the Americans and Germans join forces to combat the SS attacking the Itter Castle in Austria, known to have housed a number of high-profile French prisoners.
Z8la TIL: Last year, the norwegian police only fired a gun in one occasion. In 2007, not a single shot was fired.
PBNn TIL Roman Emperor Caligula was told that he had “no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding a horse across the Bay of Baiae”. He then built a two-mile temporary floating bridge and walked his horse across.
0wVy1 TIL same-sex relations have been legal in the Netherlands since 1811.
d876E TIL about the 'Watras incident' where a worker at a nuclear powerplant triggered contamination alert after returning from the weekend. They found the source of this being his home, flooded with radon gas. He was told that each day of living there was the equivalent of smoking 135 packs of cigarettes