› added 7 years ago

101

TIL of Douglas Bader, a British World War 2 pilot who had more than 22 aerial victories, survived being a P.O.W whilst attempting multiple escapes, befriended a German ace pilot... All whilst missing both his legs.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

MelAa TIL Johannes Kepler wrote the world's first genuine science fiction in 1609. The novel advanced a Copernican model of the universe, described gravity decades before Newton, envisioned speech synthesis centuries before computers, and presaged space travel three hundred years before the Moon landing.
d8DOd TIL male fruit flies drink away pain of rejection. Males who had been rejected and who'd gotten lucky had the option of eating normal food or food spiked with alcohol. While the happy/lucky fruit flies had no preference, the rejected fruit flys were far more likely to eat the alcohol-infused food.
5YnoD TIL that during its revolution France tried to de-Christianize time by introducing a new clock that consisted of days of 10 hours of a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds. The new clock system failed and was abolished in 1806.
wLwx7 TIL photography film was made with only Caucasian skin in mind and Kodak only really developed the technology to colour balance darker skin tone by chance- because of complaints over poor light calibration from makers of brown furniture.
ep6eD TIL Jason D. Padgett is an American artist with alleged acquired savant syndrome.On the night of September 13, 2002, Padgett was attacked and robbed by two men outside a local karaoke bar. This attack allegedly caused a change in his brain activity.