› added 5 years ago

90

TIL Ireland remained neutral during WWII, a period known as "The Emergency"

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

vPb04 TIL during WWII, the US military tested mustard gas on Japanese American, Puerto Rican, and African American soldiers. Rollin Edwards recalled: "It felt like you were on fire... Guys started screaming... It took all the skin off your hands."
yAMV TIL that Nikola Tesla supported the forced sterilization of those he considered “undesirable”- this included more than criminals and the mentally ill.
n7DB TIL Theodor Seuss Geisel was caught drinking gin with 9 friends in college during Prohibition and was asked to resign from all extracurricular activities. To continue working on his college’s humor magazine he used the pen name “Suess”, which later became “Dr. Suess”.
gMVBD TIL During the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, to help USA/USSR relations, astronauts and cosmonauts played smuggled audio recordings of glasses clinking, laughter, and many female voices. Houston radioed to ask what’s going on. "Oh nothing,” they said. “We finished work, just having a party up here."
n9VY TIL that many words used to be spelled phonetically (e.g. debt was ‘det’) until some scholars purposely added silent letters to make them look more like Greek or Latin words, sometimes erroneously.