› added 7 years ago

177

TIL the first Australian ship to go to Japan was a boat full of convicts who mutinied against their masters in in 1829. After escaping to China the sailing master wrote an account of their journey, but until 2017 when an amateur historian found Japanese paintings of the ship no one believed him.

Read more wikipedia.org

via ift.tt

P1klG TIL China made a magnet that produces a magnetic field 800k times stronger than Earth's magnetic field.
OokpY TIL that 'normalcy' was purely a mathematical term describing 'the condition of being at right angles' before US President Warren G Harding incorrectly used it in his 1920 campaign slogan 'Return to Normalcy'. Since then it has become a substitute for 'normality', mainly used in the United States.
YOEr TIL tomatoes are from America and weren’t introduced in Italy until the 1540s.
kJOgB TIL the oldest surviving wooden structure was built in 607 AD.
0lpA TIL that the word “man” was originally gender neutral and “wer” and “wif” were used to describe males and females respectively. This is where the words like “wife” and “werewolf” are derived from.