› added 4 years ago

170

TIL Michel van Rijn, an art forger and dealer in stolen antiquities, went legit to help the Republic of Cyprus to recover priceless 7th-century mosaics looted during the Turkish occupation of the island.

dDED8 TIL With 8,130.5 mm (320.1 inches) of rainfall a year, Quibdó has the highest amount of rainfall in South America of any city of its size or greater. The wettest city of larger size, Monrovia in Liberia, receives 3,050 millimetres (120 in) less rain annually than Quibdó.
NXGmN TIL Steve Comisar sold "solar powered clothes dryers" in national magazines for $49.99 and subsequently sent customers a clothesline.
OoOGa TIL one of the first functional digital home computers was the Digi-Comp I from 1963. It was entirely mechanical and used no electricity. It could output 3 binary digits and programmers used thin wires to set up primitive logic. With no power, the user had to pull a lever to perform each CPU cycle.
9wy0D TIL that since 1945, the Netherlands has sent Canada thousands of tulips every year as a thank-you for sheltering their royal family during WWII. This annual gift led to the creation of the famous Canadian Tulip Festival.
a8jLN TIL in the 5th century, a Chinese missionary named Hui Shen claimed to have found a land east of China called Fusang. It is now theorized that Fusang may have actually been North America, due to archeological similarities between the California coast and Fusang as depicted by Asian sources.