Post * Wv94 — Curious Curator

› added 10 years ago

87

TIL that mercury use in hat-making, which causes “Mad Hatters Disease”, was banned in France in 1898, However the practice continued in the US until 1941, despite 80% of hatmakers being diagnosed with “mercurial tremors”, until it was abandoned due to the wartime need for mercury.

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kmyg TIL the original voice for Siri was a woman named Susan Bennett. She was paid hourly to record nonsense phrases for a third party company, and only later learned that she had provided Apple with “all of the sounds of the English language”, which they could then formed into any response.

WrGB TIL A man lost a legal battle to keep his strip club open, then walked into an in-progress city council meeting and paid court ordered legal fees($6,400), with 4 $100 bills and 1.65 tons of pennies.

g0XA TIL George Smith (1840-76)(modest family, left school at 14) had a keen interest in Assyriology and was so often seen at the British Museum that he was employed as classifier. He taught himself Sumerian and literary Akkadian and became the one to discover the oldest story we have: Epic of Gilgamesh.

gD98 TIL of the FP-45 Liberator, an extremely cheap single shot pistol developed by the US military to be air dropped in occupied territories during WWII. It was intended for use by resistance forces fighting axis powers.

wm7 TIL that football evolved out of mob football, a game played between whole villages, with the goal being to get the ball into the center of the other village. Any means could be used to move the ball, as long as it did not lead to manslaughter or murder.