› added 3 months ago

10

TIL people in the 19th century regularly died from eating ice cream due to a lack of food safety standards and contamination. Despite this, it was still a popular dessert

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PYJWw TIL the British were the first nation to employ the use of Agent Orange as part of a starvation campaign during the Malayan Emergency in the early 1950’s. The US would adopt this strategy in 1961 in Vietnam.
vVjB TIL In order to transport the Statue of Liberty from France to the United States, the statue had to be broken down into 350 individual pieces and placed through 214 crates in just under a year after the completion
OGZDX TIL to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, a famous medieval manuscript that extensively documented British properties, BBC made a crowdsourced comprehensive data set on the UK, with the goal of preserving the way of life at the time. They then put it on Laserdisc.
PY8Mw TIL that a horse actually has up to 15 horse powers.
Z89GB TIL that while the guillotine was being prototyped, King Louis XVI "recommended that an oblique blade be used instead of a crescent blade, lest the blade not fit all necks". His own was "offered up discreetly as an example". He was later beheaded in 1793 during the French Revolution.