› added 11 years ago

67

TIL in 1858 a sweets seller in Bradford, England known as Humbug Billy accidentally produced peppermint humbugs containing lethal doses of arsenic killing approximately 20 people.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

awB1A TIL of the micromort, a unit of risk defined as one one-in-a-million chance of death. Travelling 10km on a bike, 400km in a car, and 10,000km via jet all expose you to 1 μmt of risk. Simply existing at age 90 exposes you to 300 μmt a day.
ne6r TIL people in the American colonies went to bed on September 2, 1752, and they woke up on September 14, 1752. The intervening 11 days never happened.
aE6L TIL in the desert in Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, there are series of thousands ancient huge, wheel-shaped structures which can only be viewed from space, similar to Nazca lines in Peru
8eJGP TIL Britain used an estimated 22,000 servicemen as ‘guinea pigs’ in their nuclear bomb drops in the 50s & 60s
b66AE TIL Astronomer Rudolf Wolf tried to estimate pi using a needle experiment. He conducted experiments throwing the needle 5000 times, obtaining a value of 3.1596