› added 5 months ago

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TIL that NASA engineers use a “chicken gun” to test the durability of airplane windshields. They fire dead chickens at high speeds to simulate bird strikes during flight. It sounds ridiculous, but it's a crucial safety measure!

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Z81gv TIL that The Hoover Company had a free flights promotion in the 90s: customers were offered free return tickets to the USA if they purchased at least $120 worth of products; it ended in disaster and the company is said to have cancelled the promotion and reneged on its offers, leading to litigation.
n567 TIL while coming up with the character Aragorn, Tolkien initially conceptualized him as a Hobbit with wooden shoes, named “Trotter”. He would later be revealed to be Bilbo Baggins himself and the wooden shoes would turn out to be wooden feet as he was previously tortured by Sauron in Mordor.
l7Er TIL that an East Germany film studio made several successful “Westerns”. The heroes were not cowboys but Native Americans.
YrO7 TIL two lawyers knew that Alton Logan was innocent for 26 years, but kept his innocence a secret to protect their client. When their client died, they came forward with the truth and Logan was freed.
16k1W TIL that Kuboyama Aikichi, a Japanese fisherman, was the first known victim of hydrogen bomb radiation exposure. He was aboard the "Lucky Dragon No. 5" (Daigo Fukuryu Maru), a fishing boat caught in radioactive fallout from the 1954 U.S. Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test near Bikini Atoll.