› added 1 year ago

53

TIL that The Great Gatsby was largely considered forgettable and a commercial failure when it was published in 1925. It was only after WWII, during which free copies of novels were sent to US soldiers overseas, that the book was re-examined and became a core part of American high school curriculums.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

dDjD7 TIL Cary Grant turned down The Bridge on the River Kwai just to work with Marlon Brando in The Pride and the Passion. But Brando, calling the script “mediocre at best,” bailed. Grant filmed it with Sinatra instead, and it flopped, while The Bridge on the River Kwai became an Oscar-winning classic.
XYZk TIL that actress Hedy Lamarr was also a prolific inventor. One of her inventions allowed for guided torpedoes in WWII. But because the Navy wasn’t receptive to ideas coming outside the military, it wasn’t implemented during the war. Her idea went to later be basis for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, & CDMA.
Me0KV TIL about Zakynthos, a Greek island that hid it's Jewish residents who otherwise would have went to Auschwitz. It is Europe's only complete surviving Jewish community during the Holocaust.
awvwb TIL in 2017, a man stopped to be interviewed on the street by a local news reporter about public transit issues, only to be identified by viewers as a suspect who attempted to rob three banks shortly before. This ultimately led to his identification and arrest.
8gmK TIL that the Infinite Monkey Theorem, stating that monkeys with typewriters and enough time could produce the entire works of Shakespeare, has been tried out in real life. They wrote five pages of S, slammed the keyboard with a stone and took a shit on it.