› added 5 years ago

61

TIL that after making an unsuccessful attempt on Franz Ferdinand's life Nedeljko Čabrinović tried killing himself by swallowing a cyanide pill then jumped into the nearby river finding that the cyanide pill was defective and that the river was only 4 inches deep. He was immediately arrested.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

W7xJd TIL Before natural gas distribution became common, houses had pipelines for coal-derived "town gas" to use for heating and cooking.
v10D4 TIL the Toyi-toyi was a dance used in protests in South Africa, especially against apartheid, where crowds would jump from one foot to the other
d87Br TIL that J.K. Rowling wrote a real person into The Goblet of Fire. The girl was named Natalie McDonald, a Harry Potter fan who was dying of leukaemia while Rowling was still writing the book. Her character is a first-year who dons the sorting hat and is sorted into Griffindor.
J1BX1 TIL - ASML holds a monopoly over the extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines used for the most advanced computer chips. Their best selling product is the Twinscan NXE:3600D costing $150 million. Shipping the machine requires 40 shipping containers, 20 trucks and three Boeing 747s.
9Ypp7 TIL that for more then 50 years, there was an operational telephone booth in the Mojave desert, in the middle of nowhere.