› added 3 years ago

109

TIL In the West the largest meal of the day has historically been eaten at midday. It was not until Napoleon's empire there was the "abominable habit of dining as late as seven in the evening" as British travelers reported. The British adopted later dinners by 1850 from changes in work schedules.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

P1DeL TIL about Velvalee Dickinson, a.k.a. the Doll Lady, an American doll-collector-turned-spy for imperial Japan during WW2. She sent coded letters about Navy ships, ostensibly about dolls, w/ the return addresses of other collectors with whom she'd previously had disagreements
rNdQy TIL the Cold War was partially prompted by an event in Ottawa when a Soviet cipher clerk working at the Soviet embassy to Canada defected & exposed the Soviet spy network in Canada, leading to allied countries discovering Soviet spies & informants within their own governments
4XnVJ TIL, although many possible reasons have been proposed, some researchers believe the removal of lead from petrol was a key factor initiating a 20 year long fall in crime rates.
8axAL TIL Teachers at a Florida elementary placed books inside the school vending machine. Students can buy books using tokens earned from doing good deeds or working hard in class
EMOx TIL Anthony Hopkins’s inspiration for Hannibal Lecter was a cat. “…I sort of modeled my walk on a cat’s. I like cats, and I love the way they pad around. I wanted to get that feel when Lecter is padding very quietly and stealthily in the shadows around the streets of Florence.”