› added 9 months ago

33

TIL messenger pigeons only fly home to where they were born and pampered. To keep them loyal, they were isolated in cages while traveling. Releasing them with a message meant they'd rush back to their luxury life. They acted as a speedy, one-way messaging service.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

Aomd TIL that after the launch of STS-70, NASA had installed plastic owls on and around the space shuttle to prevent woodpeckers from boring holes in the insulation of the external fuel tank.
R1Jw TIL that the torture perpetrated at the Kemna concentration camp, one of the first Nazi concentration camps, was so brutal that the Nazi themselves held hearings and investigated the reports of torture. However, no crimes were prosecuted, there were only warnings given.
OomYY TIL that Helen Keller learned how to talk through the work of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught her by placing one of Anne’s fingers over Sullivan’s throat, one over her mouth, and one on her nose so that she could feel the vibrations of all the different letters and replicate them herself
W7jOA TIL In Canada, all of Yukon, most of Saskatchewan, and parts of Nunavut, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec do not observe DST.
aGEA TIL in response to a Buenos Aires audience behaving terribly toward an all-female opening act, Nirvana decided to play a purposely-awful set including many unpopular songs. Cobain also started two songs with the riff from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” before stopping and playing something else.