› added 5 years ago

71

TIL of the Secession of the Plebs. A form of protest where Rome's non-aristocratic citizens would leave the city en masse leaving the aristocratic Patricians to fend for themselves.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

jNygn TIL that a 2-Ton Elephant escaped from a farm in New York's Catskills mountains and roamed its forests for 2 weeks in November 1957 before it was peacefully recaptured 7 miles away.
YpgaG TIL of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, presented annually to the author who produces the worst description of a sex scene in a novel. The award is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it".
DEyr TIL Thomas Edison abandoned his research into x-rays when he damaged his eyesight, and his assistant had his arms amputated from repeated exposure. “Don’t talk to me about X-rays,” he said. “I am afraid of them.”
VMKpp TIL Mountain Dew was originally developed as a mixer for liquor. Tennessee bottlers Barney and Ally Hartman developed Mountain Dew as a mixer in the 1940s as they had difficulty in Knoxville obtaining their preferred soda to mix with liquor, preferably whiskey, so they developed their own.
nWG6d TIL Same-Sex Behavior is common among 1,500 animal species (everything from mammals to crabs and worms). It has consistently been underreported and rarely published even though it is widespread and natural in the animal kingdom.