› added 6 years ago

236

TIL about E.D. Morel, the shipping clerk who revealed Belgium's atrocities in the Congo. He noticed shipments of ammunition going to the Congo, and coming back with ivory and rubber. His superiors offered him a promotion in exchange for his silence. He refused, quit his job, and became a journalist.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

XEpjQ TIL Sweden was the first to find out about the censored Chernobyl accident when one of the workers at the Forsmark power plant set off evacuation alarms when he had walked through grass that had been contaminated from radioactive rain picked up from Chernobyl over 800 miles away.
5YAQP TIL: In 1982 Xerox management watched a film of people struggling to use their new copier and laughed that they must have been grabbed off a loading dock. The people struggling were Ron Kaplan, a computational linguist, and Allen Newell, a founding father of artificial intelligence.
W7RX4 TIL when George R.R. Martin was writing A Storm of Swords he skipped over the chapter with the Red Wedding in it & finished the rest of the book before making himself go back to write it. It was very hard & painful for him to kill off the characters in that scene that he'd lived with for so long.
RXd9 TIL Cuba has an illegal underground network of computers mimicking the internet essentially making it the worlds largest LAN party
7LPL TIL: A personal trainer wanted to prove to the doubters that it’s possible to get back in shape even if you become really overweight, so he gained 70 lbs (32 kg) of fat over a 6 month period. In 29 weeks he was back in shape.