› added 4 months ago

22

TIL Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is credited as the first modern detective story, inspiring characters like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot

rRWx0 TIL despite being worth €37.3 billion the founder of IKEA drove an old Volvo, travelled by economy class, brought a lunch box to work, visited vegetable street markets right before they closed for the day, hoping to get better prices and shopped for clothes at the local flea markets.
JYjVV TIL TV dinners have Thanksgiving to thank. In 1953, a Swanson worker misjudged the number of frozen turkeys it would sell that Thanksgiving by 26 TONS! Somebody then came up with a plan: Why not slice the meat and repackage with some trimmings on the side? Thus, the first TV dinner was born!
pLVZ TIL that the phrase blood is thinker than water, a phrase that promotes family ties over friendships, originally meant the opposite. The full phrase is “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” Meaning blood shed in battle bonds soldiers more strongly than genetics.
kOK1 TIL J.P. Morgan’s big break started in the Civil War by buying 5,000 defective rifles (shot off troops thumbs) from the US Army Arsenal for $3.50 ea. and then selling them back to a general in the field for $22 ea. He then escaped service from the war by paying $300 for a substitute.
9P6D TIL For centuries the main source of metal to Greenland’s Inuits was from fragments of a 58-ton Iron Meteorite