› added 5 years ago

143

TIL from 1777 to 1870, Vermont had a fourth branch of government called the Council of Censors. It consisted of 13 members, elected every 7 years, who had to check if "the legislative and executive branches have performed their duty as guardians of the people." They could also amend the constitution

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

a8DvZ TIL That European settlers introduced the possum from Australia into New Zealand to establish a population for hunting purposes in the 1850's, after awhile the population sky rocketed up to 70 million at one point and are considered a destructive pest in New Zealand today.
b9Akp TIL, A Soviet dog called Strelka was the first to go to space and come back alive. She had 6 puppies and Nikita Khrushchev gifted one of them to JFK. (It was checked for listening devices first).
AD7va TIL there is a restaurant in New York that doesn't employ professional chefs. Instead, every day a grandmother from a different country designs a menu that showcases her native cuisine.
pvKO TIL Apollo 14 commander Alan Shephard once said “If somebody’d said before the flight, ‘Are you going to get carried away looking at the Earth from the Moon?’ I would have say, 'No, no way.’ But yet when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon, I cried.”
xA5b TIL the engineer who designed the Japanese Kamikaze dive-bombing planes of WWII felt bad about his role in the war, so at its end, he decided to use his skills for peace by designing the body of the Shinkansen (Bullet Train), which has, to this day, operated with zero accident-caused fatalities.