› added 8 years ago

229

TIL that the world’s largest brothel, with 500 rooms, was built in Seattle in 1910. It was so scandalous that the mayor lost his job, and the building became the ordinary Lester Apartments. It was destroyed 40 years later when an air force bomber crashed into it.

Read more seattle.curbed.com

via ift.tt

QJM9a TIL that Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, two wealthy extremely entrepreneurs, sent each other gag Christmas gifts. Rockefeller sent Carnegie a cardboard vest to make fun of his poor childhood. In return Carnegie sent a fine whiskey to Rockefeller, a devout baptist who had given up drinking.
WxrB TIL that in the novel Around the World in Eighty Days, not once do they travel by hot-air balloon. In fact, the text dismisses the idea as “highly risky and, in any case, impossible.”
yMYw TIL that the most expensive fossil ever sold was Sue the T Rex, a 40-foot 80% complete specimen discovered in South Dakota in 1990. She was sold at auction to Chicago’s Field Museum for $7,600,000.00.
yQRma TIL about Sister Doris Engelhard of Mallersdorf Abbey, the last nun working in Europe as a brewmaster. The abbey brews about 80,000 gallons of beer a year, all of which is consumed locally. The beer is untreated and needs to be drunk while it is still fresh.
Wkeg4 TIL that birds' beaks are not a solid, exposed bone, but instead are a bony structure covered in translucent living tissue that can change color at different times of the year, when they are breeding, or based on their diet/health.