› added 11 years ago

84

TIL the Rothschilds had such an efficient system of couriers that they knew Napoleon lost at Waterloo a day before everyone else. Nathan Rothschild, in one of the most audacious moves in financial history, immediately bought up the government bond market. He then sold for a 40% profit, a huge sum.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

99nD TIL that after Kurt Cobain dropped out of high school, he got a job as a janitor, at the very same high school that he dropped out of.
aBob TIL: Dian Fossey, American Primatologist murdered in Rwanda, left all her money (including movie profits from “Gorillas in the Mist”) to the Digit Fund to finance anti-poaching patrols, but her mother challenged the will and was successful.
4krgo TIL the first animals to receive formal scientific names were spiders. Carl Alexander Clerck published 'Svenska Spindlar' (Swedish Spiders) in 1757, becoming the first person to consistently apply Linnaean binomial nomenclature to animals.
N7wNN TIL less than 100,000 giraffes are left in the wild. In the last 30 years populations have dropped 40%. In the last 10 years 40,000 Giraffe parts have been imported to the USA. Giraffes are facing ‘silent extinction’.
nWEmW TIL that people with aphantasia cannot visualize or picture memories