› added 8 months ago

23

TIL Albert Lexie was a shoeshiner who worked at the Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh beginning in the early 1980s. Over the course of his roughly 30-year career he donated $200,000 to the Free Care Fund, more than a third of his lifetime salary.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

wL80P TIL about Oberammergau, a German village that vowed to put on a passion play every ten years if they were spared from bubonic plague. They were, and have put on this play since the 1600s, with the next being in 2020.
Ookgg TIL during the Revolutionary War the smallpox epidemic threatened the troops of G. Washington so badly he forbade inoculating troops fearing that doing so would make too many sick and leave the army without sufficient strength. Washington himself had been exposed when young making him immune.
4XnZg TIL pistol shrimp produce a snapping sound that is so loud, US submarines would hover above colonies of them because the sound kept them from being detected by Japanese sonar.
Reg1 TIL that nearly a third of all the city Aldermen elected in Chicago between 1972 and 2012 have been convicted on corruption charges at one time or another.
jywM TIL of SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who investigated corruption and murder - in Nazi concentration camps. He investigated more than 800 people for criminal activity in the camps, over a period of two years. He prosecuted so many people that Heinrich Himmler had to directly order him to stop.