› added 7 years ago

214

TIL while working at a railway, Richard Sears' station received a shipment of gold watches but the jeweler refused the shipment. Sears got the watches at a reduced rate (a common scam) and sold them to his coworkers who needed to keep accurate time. The success lead to his first mail-order catalog.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

ADMGg TIL that in Japan, western style underwear became popular only after a tragic incident of a fire in a departmental store (1932) which claimed 14 lives. It's alleged that some women refused to jump into the safety net as they were not wearing panties under their Kimono, the traditional Japanese dress
4XvRw TIL about Hookworms. Parasites that run rampant in the southern US that cause lethargy, intense brain fog, and a distended belly. This is where the stereotype of a “dumb, lazy, potbellied southerner” comes from.
BbQe TIL that in 1984 a cult spread salmonella on salad bars at restaurants in an Oregon city. They hoped to incapacitate the local population so that their candidates would win local elections. It was the first and single largest bioterrorist attack in US history.
5jJ8 TIL the original soundtrack of “Who wants to be a millionaire” took the pitch up a semitone for each subsequent question, in order to increase tension as the contestant progressed through the game.
0dar5 TIL That while Muhammed Ali was publicly resisting the draft for Vietnam, an activist group took advantage of security guards being distracted by his "fight of the century" with Joe Frazier to break into an FBI office and steal documents proving the FBI's illegal surveillance of Ali and many others