› added 9 years ago

137

TIL that Greek soldiers once provided enemy Turkish soldiers with ammunition to prevent them from using lead in the Parthenon to make their bullets.

Read more parthenon.newmentor.net

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Wk8Jo TIL automaker AMC and pants-maker Levi's collaborated on a 1974 Gremlin. The Gremlin's upholstery was made from synthetic materials that looked like real denim (cotton is too flammable for use in car interiors), complete with stitching, Levi's tags, and copper rivets.
edDg TIL that Ferdinand Cheval, a postman, every day, for 35 years, picked up stones during his daily mail round. He used the stones to build ‘the perfect palace’, one of the most beautiful amateur architectural works known today.
1jA7 TIL there was a roman emperor who had been reported to be “delighted to be called the mistress, the wife, the queen of Hierocles”, regularly wearing makeup and offering a vast sum of money to a physician capable of giving him a sex change
8wRb TIL that the Romans used a plant called Silphium as contraception. They had so much sex that they drove it into extinction.
R7on8 TIL the Tesseract, or Hypercube, isn't the only 4 dimensional shape, and there are 5 others recognized as Regular, including one with 600 corners.