› added 11 months ago

66

TIL In 1963, The Alweg Monorail Company offered to build a 43-mile monorail system for Los Angeles County free of charge, recouping construction costs from passenger fares. The County Board of Supervisors declined the offer under pressure from Standard Oil.

Read more monorails.org

via reddit.com

w471 TIL that there exists areas where self-sustaining nuclear fission has occurred naturally, essentially a natural “nuclear reactor”
XEOxr According to the independent research group Shrink That Footprint, apartments in Hong Kong are on average the smallest in the world (484 sq ft). The average one-bed flat size in Manhattan, New York, is 716 sq ft, in London, it is 550 sq ft. And soon, by converting drainpipes into homes, flats in Hong Kong are set to shrink even more.
e1BD TIL the FBI seized a server that was being used to host child pornography and ran it for two more weeks. Defendants caught in the sting argued the FBI did a better job hosting a child porn site than whoever originally ran it: The site’s average weekly visitors jumped from 11,000 to 50,000
PYonJ TIL that after the Nazi assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbart Dollfuss. Fascist Italian dictator Mussolini mobilized the Italian army on the Austrian border and threatened Hitler with open war if German troops crossed into Austria.
BgaGD TIL Michael DeBakey, developed over many years the technique of replacing the damaged aorta with a tube made of polyethylene terephthalate. He himself suffered aortic dissection at the age of 97 and survived for two years thanks to the technique he developed himself.