› added 11 years ago

140

TIL in 1914, to save money on train fare, May Pierstorff’s parents paid the 53¢ postage, and mailed the 5-year old to her grandparents for a visit. She rode the whole way in the mail car, and was delivered to her grandparents’ house by the mail clerk on duty.

Read more postalmuseum.si.edu

via reddit.com

69dPm TIL Matt Damon was offered the lead in Avatar & 10% of the film's profits, but turned it down out of respect for his verbal commitment to the ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ & ended up losing out on nearly $300 million
LQ0Er TIL that when Johannes Rebmann, the first European to see Mount Kilimanjaro, published his discovery in 1849, it was dismissed as a malaria-induced hallucination because it was believed that snow at this latitude was impossible. It took 12 more years for scholars to accept the mountain's existence.
d85LE TIL In 1969 Mister Rogers' and Officer Clemmons of "Mister Rogers' neighborhood" shared a pool in episode 1065 . This marked the first time in TV history an African American was portrayed swimming with a White. Clemmons hoped "the world would change" after the airing of the episode
1a9PO TIL that during the Danish Colonization of Greenland, missionary Hans Egede found that local Inuit had no concept for what bread was and so he changed the Lord’s Prayer to say “Give us this day our daily seal”.
b6lx0 TIL that the Great Vowel Shift between 1400-1700 was a series of pronunciation changes in English. With that many words froze with spelling and pronunciations not matching. This is why some English vowels are a mess with words like "meat" and "meet" being spelt differently but pronounced the same.