› added 7 years ago

186

TIL in WW2 Japan unwittingly created one of the best fighter aircraft of the war. When the inline engines intended for the Ki-61 were destroyed in a bombing raid, engineers shoehorned in a radial engine instead. The resulting amalgamation was the venerable Ki-100.

Read more century-of-flight.net

via ift.tt

BgaPe TIL about Craig Shergold, a former cancer patient who requested greeting cards to try and beat the record for "most greeting cards received". The number stood at 1,000,065. Shergold broke the record and obtained 350 million cards throughout his life until he requested for them to stop.
xww1 TIL in 1997 Pepsi held a contest to win a life-size replica of the Simpsons house or $75,000. The contest winner chose the cash. The house, which cost $120,000 to build, was renovated to look like a normal home and re-sold
eb0D TIL Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, was gay, as well as NASA’s first LGBT+ astronaut (that we know of).
a45o TIL there is a legend that flexible glass was invented around 20AD, when a craftsman presented Tiberius Caesar a bowl of this glass, whereupon he threw it to the ground and it did not shatter. Fearing the implications of such a material, the Caesar had the man beheaded, the formula now lost forever.
wL7DJ TIL the term "Cockney" literally means "cock's egg" in Middle English. It originally referred to the small, yolkless eggs that farmers sometimes find in their chicken coops, and later became slang for a feeble and useless person—such as a city dweller.