Post * VN18 — Curious Curator

› added 8 years ago

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TIL as a struggling actor, Jim Carrey wrote himself a $10 000 000 check for ‘acting services rendered’ and dated it for thanksgiving 1995. By 1994, Carrey had made millions from Ace Ventura and Dumb and Dumber.

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4XJWJ TIL Foxconn's Longhua factory, responsible for manufacturing Apple's iPhones, had issues with workers committing suicide by jumping off buildings in response to poor working conditions. They tried to resolve the situation by installing large safety nets to catch falling bodies.

dD5Z7 TIL an 1854 London cholera outbreak was curbed by a man who defied the day's medical beliefs. Dr John Snow, father of modern epidemiology, traced the outbreak to a tainted water pump. The pump handle was removed, basically ending outbreak. The theory that disease spread by "bad air" soon unraveled.

R7Eyw TIL in 1879 it was estimated the Oxford English Dictionary to take 10 years for completion, but in five years they'd only reached the word "Ant". After crowdsourcing readers to help it was completed 44 years later. The publishers now estimate it would take a single person 120 years to just type it.

d8bWZ TIL that Red Cloud, a Chief of the Lakota, was the only American Indian in the West to win a war against the US, inflicted the largest military defeat suffered by the US on the Great Plains until the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and was the most photographed American Indian in the 19th century.

nmOP TIL Christopher Walken worked as a lion tamer as a teenager.