› added 3 years ago

97

TIL in 1678 a pamphlet titled "Mowing-Devil" was published in Hertfordshire, England. It claimed the devil mowed farmers crops and left strange circles, it is first recorded case of crop circles

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

E14a7 TIL Joesph Bramah stared a lock company that was famed for their resistance to lock picking. The company had a “Challenge Lock” where they would pay whoever could pick the lock 200 guineas. The challenge stood for 67 years until Alfred Hobbs finally picked it in 51 hours, spread over 16 days.
4XkZw TIL that the World Bank stopped tracking inflation in Zimbabwe in November 2008, when it reached 79.6 billion percent. One year later, the country abandoned its currency. The exchange rate at the time was $35 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars to $1 USD.
4M8w TIL that when the number of chlamydia cases in young Swedish people doubled in one year, it was decided that condom ambulances would be on standby three days a week, waiting for calls from those caught in a promising situation, but without protection.
GxN7 TIL in 1994 David Hasselhoff tried to re-ignite his music career by staging a Pay Per View performance. The event however was eclipsed by the live coverage of OJ Simpson fleeing from police. Hasselhoff’s event took a 1.5 million dollar loss.
M7OM0 TIL in 1999 NASA lost a $125M Mars orbiter because of a calculation error. The mistake occurred because Lockheed Martin engineers used English (inch, ft) measurements in their calculations in contrast to NASA’s metric (cm, m) calculations.