› added 6 years ago

79

TIL Alexander Hamilton was only 18 when the American Revolution began

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

P1kEL TIL the gourd was one of the world's first cultivated plants grown not primarily for food, but for use as containers. It is also used as a resonator on many stringed instruments, including the sitar
rNKAo TIL avenue Victor Hugo in Paris, named after the famous french author, was named after him before he was dead. In fact, he lived on that avenue at that time. He would cheekily have mail addressed to him by using "Victor Hugo, en son avenue", meaning "Victor Hugo, in his avenue"
9Y06G TIL that “huh” is a universal word, existing in almost every language across the world
ZM6R TIL Soviet gulag prisoners would get large chest and back tattoos of Stalin and Lenin, not out of respect, but to avoid having internal organs damaged during beatings by guards who would not denigrate the images.
d8gd9 TIL that several human genes had to be renamed because Excel would auto-format their original names (like SEPT1) into dates and it was causing issues for data storage