› added 5 years ago

69

TIL of the 1904 disaster of the burning and sinking of sidewheel passenger steamboat PS General Slocum. At the time of the accident, she was on a chartered run carrying members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church to a church picnic. An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board died.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

761L TIL when Mao Zedong received Nikita Khrushchev for a state visit in 1958, he had figured out Khrushchev could not swim. Mao, who loved swimming, decided to hold the meeting in his private swimming pool, forcing Khrushchev to wear floaties while they talked.
4kVmN TIL Rust doesn't cause tetanus and is relatively harmless in small quantities
KOn0R TIL that the "Elephant's Foot" in Chernobyl was found to be impervious to a drill, but was able to be damaged by an AK-47 using armor-piercing rounds
E4g0 TIL The person who does the voice of Optimus Prime also does Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh
M71Q7 TIL that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology conducted an "autopsy" of the failed Friendster social network to determine the causes of its collapse