› added 3 years ago

309

TIL that people used to believe that mischievous sprits lived in the grains of wood, so while they were speaking about good fortune they would "knock on wood" to make noise so that the spirits couldn't hear what they were saying and cause their fortune to take a turn for the worse.

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PYY4G TIL Tanks are called tanks because, when they were introduced in WWI, the British were trying to fool the Germans into thinking the weapons were water carriers for the Middle Eastern front of the war.
rRPWy TIL: Microsoft tried a 4-day workweek in Japan as part of a "Work Life Choice Challenge" by shutting down offices every Friday. Productivity, measured by sales per employee, increased by almost 40% compared to the same period the previous year.
b9WYa TIL Former fire captain/fire investigator John Orr was one of the most prolific serial arsonists in US history. He set over 2000 fires, killing 4, and after his capture brush fires in the foothills of California decreased by 90% from an average of over 60 per year to just 1 per year.
Xx9R TIL that a US submarine placed a wire tap on Russian undersea cables to monitor secret military communications during the Cold War, and only found the cable after a week of searching because of a sign on the shore saying “Cable Here. Do Not Anchor.”
Br5yL TIL that Heroin was sythesized, named, commercialized and marketed by Bayer, the pharmaceutical company.