› added 5 years ago

255

TIL that hundreds of women disguised themselves as men in order to fight in the American Civil War. They were first discovered in 1863, when a Union burial detail found that the corpse of a woman wearing the uniform of a Confederate private. Estimates put the number of female soldiers at 400-750.

Read more battlefields.org

via reddit.com

mxvxp TIL Fritz Haber invented the process for modern agricultural fertilizer thus saving millions of lives from starvation. He also pioneered chemical weapons processes which killed and horribly injured hundreds of thousands during WWI. His wife, son, and grand daughter all committed suicide.
x6lxB TIL General Motors created an electric car in the 90s to comply with California clean air regulations, after it proved far more popular than expected they shut down the program and against the protests of their customers reclaimed all the existing EVs and crushed them and buried them in the desert.
Y7kLv TIL when given a full-grown grizzly bear by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1811 (the first ever in the United Kingdom), King George III said he would have preferred a new tie or pair of socks
Gp0G TIL there’s a park with a statue of John Lennon in La Havana where a security guard is paid to sit next to the statue and put his glasses on and off if requested because they always got stolen / vandalized.
apyL TIL Sacha Baron Cohen received a letter from a lawyer saying he was being sued for $100,000 for his role in Borat. The lawyer added “P.S. Loved the movie. Can you sign a poster for my son Jeremy?”