› added 8 years ago

420

TIL an engineer designed a 3 in-lb torque wrench that was emailed to an astronaut that became the first object designed on Earth to be manufactured in space.

Read more nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov

via reddit.com

mxDpM TIL that the writers if Airplane! bought the rights to Zero Hour! and that the propeller sound the jet engines make throughout the movie were sampled directly from Zero Hour!
V9rp TIL Spain has a land border with Morocco, as it stills has sovereignty over two small coastal cities in North Africa, Melilla and Ceuta.
D11KJ TIL the worst maritime disaster in US history was Steamboat Sultana, where 1192 souls perished after its boilers exploded just outside Memphis. Not very many people heard about it since news coverage focused on the killing of John Wilkes Booth the previous day.
0pDM TIL that the word ‘fortnight’ is just a contraction of 'fourteen nights’
l77MK TIL just after WW2, the US occupied two provinces of Northern China with 50,000 marines to repatriate the 600,000+ Japanese soldiers and Korean conscripts still in China after the war since neither Japan nor either side of the Chinese Civil War were logistically capable of doing so at the time.