› added 5 years ago

82

TIL in 1798 Congressman Matthew Lyon was imprisoned under the Sedition Act for criticizing and insulting the President. Later that year he became the only person ever reelected to Congress while incarcerated.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

10dO TIL that when Michael Jackson died, Google believed all the searches for his name were a DDoS attack, and blocked such searches for 30 minutes. Twitter and Wikipedia also crashed, with the Los Angeles Times suffering an outage also.
w6GW TIL that Europeans did not know anything about potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers, chocolate, corn, peanuts and vanilla until the “discovery” of the Americas.
OolJ6 TIL: Skittles have different fragrances and different colors but they all taste exactly the same.
0wOnA TIL The infamous scene, in Mel Gibson's film "the Patriot" depicting the herding noncombatant men, women and children into a church, and setting it on fire is based on the SS massacre of French villagers in Oradour-Sur-Glane in 1944. Nothing like this ever happened in the American Revolution.
a8BOy TIL that the rectangular 9 volt battery, king of toy batteries, is actually made of 6 small cylindrical 1.5 volt batteries.