› added 6 years ago

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TIL that in 1799 Aaron Burr raised $2mil to provide drinking water to Manhattan. He used $1.9mil of that to found a bank instead, and the water he did provide was often contaminated. NYC did not have a clean water source until 1842. The bank he founded is now known as JPMorgan Chase

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MejPB TIL Clarence Birdseye, inventor of frozen foods, had previously worked as a hunter for the US government. Seeking to find a cure for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Birdseye was assigned to collect small animals and search them for the ticks which transmitted the disease. He found nearly 4,500 ticks.
0d6vy TIL Francis Ngannou worked in Sand mines as a child, was homeless in France, jailed as an illegal in Spain, lived in the forest where he cut himself open scaling barbed wire and was subsequently deserted in the dessert in Morocco before he ever trained to be a fighter.
EWWx TIL in 1993 the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo released aerosolized Anthrax in a city near Tokyo over the course of 2 days. It should’ve killed thousands, however, they used a strain of Anthrax used for cattle vaccinations and inadvertently could’ve immunized everyone instead.
OGnB7 TIL that while the game "BINGO" is centuries old, the WORD "bingo" has no real known origin and is not found before the 1920s.
BrVWb TIL about Anatoli Brouchkov - a Russian scientist who injected himself with a 3.5 million year old strain of bacteria just to see what would happen.