› added 11 years ago

345

TIL Mt. St Helens erupted while the Grateful Dead were performing ‘Fire on the Mountain’ in Portland, OR on June 12, 1980.

Read more archive.org

via reddit.com

6EaK7 TIL that there was an elective monarchy in Africa called the Kingdom of Nri that existed from the 9th century CE to the year 1911.
9wL8p TIL that the first recorded Ponzi scheme wasn’t by Charles Ponzi: it was by German Adele Spitzeder in the 19th century, who used new investors’ money to repay old investors. At her height, she was the wealthiest woman in Bavaria, until she was convicted of bad accounting and stripped of her assets
e0v6 TIL Academy Award winners are not allowed to sell their statuette without first offering it to the Academy for $1
mLpY TIL of Iqbal Masih (1983-1995), a Pakistani child who, at age four, was sold into bondage by his family, escaped after years of hardship and helped thousands of children flee bondage labor through his internatioal activism. He was assasinated at age 12.
PYDYJ TIL about the Pseudo-Geber corpus, a group of influential works on chemistry and alchemy from the 13th and 14th centuries, whose authors are unknown because they attributed them to the legendary alchemist Geber in an attempt to gain credibility.