› added 1 month ago

17

TIL Railway Post Office cars sorted and delivered mail on moving trains, using hooks to catch mailbags without stopping. The last service ended in 1977, but remnants still exist along decommissioned tracks. At its peak, 9,000 trains covered 200,000 miles of mail routes.

Read more youtu.be

via reddit.com

16pWW TIL that there's a museum in Japan that's dedicated to rocks that look like human faces!
OGQ6g TIL Habituating Mountain Gorillas to get used to humans is a complex process. Initially aggressive, they start to recognize familiar humans. To get gorillas to become comfortable around white tourists, African rangers wear paper masks so they eventually won't run away from white people
WvnX TIL that in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson had wrote,“We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” It was Benjamin Franklin who changed “sacred” to “self-evident” to champion rationality as opposed to religious providence
N7ZwE TIL: Black US troops were welcome in Britain in WW2, but the US military's attempt to initiate segregation led to a shootout.
epaNJ TIL “Avocado” is a modification of the Spanish word aguacate, which derives from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word āhuacatl, which means “testicle.”