› added 4 years ago

84

TIL of Qin Shi Huang the 1st emperor of China. Obsessed with immortality he sent out quests for magicians & searched for powerful mountains to give him long life. Reportedly, he died from poisoning due to ingesting mercury pills, made by his physicians believing it to be an elixir of immortality.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

oBBkK TIL The human eye's optical axis doesn't line up with its visual axis, the clearest picture is not projected where the most sensors are (fovea)
aQj0 TIL that a man named Edward Leedskalnin, with a 4th grade level of education, built a 1000 ton castle single handed for the love of his life over the course of 28 years only for her to leave him the day before the wedding.
LQNZ0 TIL Donald Bellisario, the creator of the show "Quantum Leap", served in the Marines(sgt) with Lee Harvey Oswald and interacted with him. He created an episode where it is made clear that Oswald killed Kennedy specifically because Bellisario was confident Oswald committed the assassination
R7VKl TIL about Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who began taping whatever was on television in 1979 and didn't stop until her death in 2012.. The 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes she made are the most complete collection preserving this era of TV. They are being digitized by the Internet Archive.
XpQ8 TIL before antibiotics, patients with syphilis were sometimes purposefully infected with malaria. This was because the bacteria that causes syphilis doesn’t fare well at higher temperatures (a blistering fever is a side effect of malaria).