› added 5 years ago

70

TIL the Pyramids are so well built that when a Sultan's workers tried to destroy a small Pyramid 3000 years after its construction, they could only move 1-2 stones a day and gave up after creating only a gash after eight months

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

D1ooV TIL about Abram Petrovich Gannibal, an African child kidnapped to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great. The tsar freed him and raised him as his godson. Gannibal became a Major-General and the Governor of Reval. He is the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, considered the greatest Russian poet.
e0P7n TIL of a very succcesful 18th century race horse named Potoooooooo. Horse breeder originally called him 'Potatoe' and instructed the stable boy to write the name on feed bin. Stable boy thought he had meant 'Pot-8-o's'. Breeder was so amused that the name stuck.
gMe49 TIL that in the 1950s a man said to his lover that no woman could write erotica like the Marquis de Sade. In response, Anne Desclos wrote a novel that was so obscene that the French authorities tried to take the publisher to court, and Desclos kept her name secret for forty years.
4k4bw TIL James Salisbury, inventor of the Salisbury steak, was a physician during the American Civil War. He was convinced that vegetables were responsible for heart disease and mental illness, and that Salisbury steak should be eaten three times a day for bodily defense and weight loss.
4kP4b TIL the office of Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem has been around since 1099, having been established in the wake of the First Crusade.