› added 3 years ago

526

TIL that the Eiffel tower grows 6 inches while tilting away from the sun in the summer due to thermal expansion

Read more toureiffel.paris

via reddit.com

e7WD TIL there is a reply to “Liar, Liar, pants are on fire.” “I don’t care, I don’t care, I can buy another pair.”
X0AnE TIL the co-founder of Encyclopædia Britannica was a 4'6" tall Scot with crooked legs and an enormous nose that he would sometimes augment with a papier-mache version. He deliberately rode the tallest horse available in Edinburgh, dismounting by a ladder to the cheers of onlookers.
4kMjN TIL about the Zanclean flood: 5.33 Mya the dried-up Mediterranean Sea completely refilled within months, after being cut-off from the Atlantic for 630,000 years (Messinian salinity crisis). The waters broke through the Strait of Gibraltar at 1,000x the rate of the Amazon!
ynew TIL A Japanese farmer discovered a gold seal while repairing an irrigation ditch in 1784. The seal turned out to be 95% pure gold and was a gift from the Chinese Emperor to a Japanese envoy from 54 CE, the earliest recorded date of contact between the two countries
KYeP9 TIL: Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters of the British Post Office were wrongfully prosecuted for supposed "financial irregularities" and 13 of them ended up committing suicide. The "financial irregularities" were in fact caused by a bug in the accounting software.