› added 9 months ago

33

TIL The last "Civil War Widow," Helen Viola Jackson, lived until 2020. Jackson was married to James Bolin, a 93-year-old Civil War veteran, at the age of seventeen and died just four years ago at the age of 101.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

XELXj TIL Army vet Gregory Holeman needed a ride to the hospital but didn't know if Veterans Affairs covered an ambulance not pre-authorized. He asked his sister to call a social worker but she misdialed & Jimmy John's answered; JJ delivery driver Zack Hillmer (a U.S. Navy vet) drove him to the hospital.
4krgo TIL the first animals to receive formal scientific names were spiders. Carl Alexander Clerck published 'Svenska Spindlar' (Swedish Spiders) in 1757, becoming the first person to consistently apply Linnaean binomial nomenclature to animals.
E1MRw TIL that the "Battle of the Little Bighorn" actually took place along the Little Horn River—its junction with the Big Horn was several miles away—so the term for the battle has always been a misnomer.
691yl TIL John Von Neumann worked on the first atomic bomb and the first computer, came up with the formulas for quantum mechanics, described genetic self-replication before the discovery of DNA, and founded the field of game theory, among other things. He has often been called the smartest man ever.
W7ygA TIL the 1993 Chinese film, "An Old Man and his Dog" was banned in its native country for decades due to the discovery that the dog trainer and body double to the lead actor was a serial killer who fed his victims to dogs, including the ones onscreen.