› added 4 years ago

56

TIL that Hallet's Cove, NY was renamed Astoria to persuade John Jacob Astor, then the wealthiest man in the United States, to invest in the neighborhood. He only invested $500.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

GYMjj TIL that Robert Oppenheimer, "the father of the atom bomb" and the head of the Manhattan Project, once tried to poison his advisor for making him do experimental work instead of theoretical physics.
4na6 TIL, there is a prisoner who has spent 10,220 Days in Extreme Solitary Confinement
WagB TIL of Chen Si: A Chinese man who since 2003 has dedicated every weekend to patrolling the Nanjing Bridge to help those about to commit suicide. He is credited with stopping over 300 suicides.
X06VR TIL starting in 1957 and through the next thirty years, Hanna-Barbera produced 249 individual cartoon series for television—totaling over 1,200 hours of original episodes.
QYJe TIL that despite increases in computer power, each Shrek movie has taken about twice as many hours to render as the one before it. Dreamworks calls this “Shrek’s Law”.