› added 3 months ago

18

TIL in 1828 two men from Edinburgh made a business out of killing people and selling their bodies to Robert Knox, an anatomist seeking bodies for dissection. They killed about 16 people and sold them for £7-£10 each. The suppliers were convicted, but despite public pressure, Knox wasn't charged

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

69MyZ TIL in more than a hundred Brazilian telenovelas broadcast from the 1970s to the 1990s, 72 percent of the main female characters younger than 50 years old had no children. Brazilian telenovelas were responsible for an average 11 percent drop in fertility among women over 35.
jbZE TIL that in 1961 a Russian surgeon stationed in Antarctica removed his own appendix without anaesthetic, as he was the only doctor on the base and would have died if he didn’t.
ANoWl TIL the six Tongan castaways were able to keep a fire burning continuously for more than 12 of the 15 months they spent marooned on a deserted island in 1965 after one of the boys named Stephen (who would go on to become an engineer), had managed to use two sticks to start one.
78r0O TIL Uber developed a secret program called "Greyball" to avoid lawsuits, Uber would try to identify government officials and give them a fake version of the Uber app that showed inaccurate information about driver locations and didn't allow any rides to be hailed.
R7Ly6 TIL shipping magnate Malcom McLean built the high speed SL-7 cargo ships only to see the '73 Oil Crisis increase fuel costs tenfold, forcing them from service. Next he bet the fate of his company on the extremely fuel efficient Jumbo Econships, only to see oil prices crash. US Lines went bankrupt.