› added 5 years ago

188

TIL Helen Keller took over the controls of a Douglas Skymaster airplane for 20 minutes while flying over the Mediterranean during a trip from Rome to Paris. The instructions were relayed from the pilot to Polly Thompson, and then to Helen through fingerspelling.

Read more afb.org

via reddit.com

7rdKM TIL "Mad" Mike Hughes died after crashing in his homemade steam powered rocket. He launched from the California desert and hoped to reach the Kármán Line, where Earth's atmosphere meets outer space 62 miles above the ground to prove that the Earth is a flat disk and not a sphere.
VM0NB TIL that the world record for most perfect games of Wii Sports Bowling played is held by John Bates, an 85 year old who played 20,000 games perfectly over a period of seven years.
e0loE TIL that John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, spotted a cloud of strange glowing “fireflies” on his second orbit. Later NASA confirmed that the fireflies were simply droplets of his own urine that had been expelled from his craft during his previous orbit.
VNjQ TIL the assassin of President Garfield, Charles Guiteau, shot the President with a gun that had ivory grips because he wanted it to look good as a museum exhibit after the assassination.
4XYJR Fifty years ago today, air stewardess Vesna Vulovic plunged more than 33,000 feet from an exploding airliner, landed in a Czechoslovak mountain range, and survived. Subsequently, it was determined that Vulovic’s fall was the highest that a human has ever sustained without a parachute.