› added 10 years ago

160

TIL that William Whipple freed his slaves when he signed the Declaration of Independance, because he believed that he could not fight for freedom and own slaves.

4Qvb TIL that Disney created a short called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice to boost Mickey Mouse’s fading popularity. As production costs began to mount, they decided to include it as part of a feature film set to classical music. This became the classic Disney film, Fantasia.
9EA6 TIL that Kim Jong Il wanted to solve the North Korean hunger problem by breeding giant rabbits. A German farmer supplied 11 rabbits to help him get started, but it was later discovered Kim Jong Il ate all of them at his birthday party
VM5QG TIL One reason the Lockheed F-117 and the HB1001 look like retro low-poly computer models is because they literally are. In 1974 when Denys Overholser leveraged 60s Soviet algorithms to calculate radar reflection, computers weren't powerful enough to reliably perform this function on curved surfaces
J1BdQ TIL that an F-117 Nighthawk crashed in Sequoia National Forest in 1986, two years before the plane was publicly announced. The US Air Force established a permitter around the crash site and secretly replaced the wreckage with a wrecked F-101A that had been stored in Area 51 for this purpose.
xVoBo TIL that a church in Italy, destroyed by an earthquake in 1976, was rebuilt using most of its original cataloged stones that were placed in the exact same positions they were in before it fell.