› added 2 months ago

11

TIL After the battle of Sedan, over 100,000 French soldiers were captured, including Emperor Napoleon III himself, but he headed to a "comfortable captivity" while his soldiers were left starving in makeshift POW camps. On hearing the news, Napoleon's wife asked "why didn't he kill himself?"

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

rRX8w TIL: Americans call a knob of butter "a stick" of butter.
xVXVk TIL the expression “turn a blind eye” comes from Admiral Nelson, who was blind in one eye; when he was signaled to stop attacking a fleet of ships, Nelson raised the telescope to his blind eye and said: “I have only one eye, and I have a right to be blind sometimes… I really do not see the signal!”
j6krp TIL that Hey Arnold originally began as a short film called Arnold Escapes from Church, which was made in 1994. It was a part of a series of Nickelodeon animated shorts.
xn55 TIL of the Shadow Biosphere. A hypothesis proposing the existence of lifeforms undetected by standard methods. One such being the continuation of the RNA World
40Wa TIL Robert Downey Jr. was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder – the character he plays is an overly pretentious method actor who only takes roles that will potentially win Oscars.