› added 10 years ago

160

TIL that on September 11-12, 1683 during the battle of Vienna, Polish horsemen lead history’s greatest ever cavalry charge against the Ottoman army. 18 thousand riders were involved.

Read more m.wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

QB16 TIL Engineers in Canada receive an Iron Ring to to remind them to have humility. It is in memory of a bridge that collapsed twice due to incorrect calculations involving iron.
Lk8QV TIL that before being transferred to Alcatraz, notorious mobster Al Capone's mind had begun failing due to complications with syphilis. He was frequently bullied by his fellow inmates in East State Penitentiary and his cellmate feared that Capone would have a mental breakdown.
4Xmvw TIL Adam Walker was protected from a great white shark by a pod of dolphins while swimming to raise money for dolphin conservation. About 10 dolphins surrounded him for about 1 hr in Cook Strait, 6th leg of the Oceans Seven: a marathon of 7 long-distance open water channel swims around the world.
Oo69L TIL The massive ancient library of Ninevah (think: Mesopotamian equivalent of the library of Alexandria) was burnt by the Medes. Unlike a library containing organic documents, the fires treated the ~30,000 clay tablets and preserved the cuneiform text very well rather than destroying it.
R7A18 TIL an abstract from a paper about butt reflexology (pressure points on the butt that can be used for therapeutic effects) that was written to show the dangers of having low standards in science, was accepted by the Jerusalem International Conference on Integrative Medicine.