› added 5 years ago

118

TIL In 1967 a 13 year-old Ohio teen rode his single speed bicycle 530 miles to the World's Fair in Montreal, Canada.

Read more youtu.be

via reddit.com

pYLb TIL that gunnery sergeant R. Lee Ermey was originally meant to be the technical supervisor for Full Metal Jacket. He pretended to be gunnery sergeant Hartman while interviewing extras and had the interviews filmed. When Stanley Kubrick saw the video he gave Ermey the part.
wLZJM TIL in antartica, scientists recently found fossil fragments of 13 trees that are over 260 million years old, meaning that this forest was growing at the end of the Permian Period, before the first dinosaurs. At that time, Antarctica was still at the South pole
DQ4eY TIL The mathematician William Playfair (noted for inventing the line, area, bar, and pie charts) was also a spy. The Scottish Playfair counterfeited and distributed false assignats which drove down their value and put France into an economic crisis by 1795.
QxdL TIL In 2005, an inexperienced trader at a Japanese bank tried to sell 1 share of J-Com stock for ¥640,000. He accidentally sold 640,000 shares for ¥1 each; the equivalent of selling $3bil worth of shares for the price of $5,000.
MenJB TIL in 1938, Charles A. Lindbergh received the Service Cross of the German Eagle, presented to him by Hermann Goering on behalf of Adolf Hitler. The medal was partially for his feats of flying but also for being an ardent proponent of Nazi Germany's military superiority and American isolationism.