› added 5 years ago

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TIL about Radithor, radioactive water sold as medicine. It was owned and produced by a college dropout, who marketed it as "A Cure for the Living Dead" and "Perpetual Sunshine". It notably killed a man in 1932, who was buried in a lead coffin, and was still highly radioactive when exhumed in 1965.

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8O84 TIL that in 2008 there was a music festival called ‘Festival of the fuck bands’ where bands such as Fucked Up, Holy Fuck and Fuck buttons performed live. It was held in Fucking, Austria.
lgm7 TIL in 1925, Henry Ford told the NYT that ethyl alcohol is “the fuel of the future”. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.“
4Xo4R TIL in WW1, glow worms were gathered and used in lamps to light the trenches. Also, due to their extreme ability to detect particles in the air, slugs were used to detect gas attacks. If the slugs closed their breathing spires and contracted, troops would know to put on their gas masks
BBpd TIL after 9/11 there was a proposal to “to consider taking Saudi out of Arabia by forcibly seizing control of the oil fields, giving the Hijaz back to the Hashemites, and delegating control of Medina and Mecca to a multinational committee of moderate, non-Wahhabi Muslims”
OGPd6 TIL that after the video game crash of 1983, it was rumored Atari dumped hundreds of thousands of games, including E.T., at a landfill, leading to a 30-year-long urban legend until their discovery in 2014