› added 4 years ago

99

TIL that while Issac Newton was essentially quarantined at his home when Cambridge was closed in 1665 due to the Plague, he discovered the groundwork for his theories of calculus and the laws of motion.

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5V98r TIL During the shooting event of the 1965 World Pentathlon Championships, Herbert Polzhuber drank 10 glasses of beer and a bottle of cognac, stepped onto the shooting platform, shot all his bullets directly into the ground and passed out. Alcohol would be banned from shooting events shortly after.
01rN TIL of a machine weighing 200 tons that could stream music…over a century ago
WkXkY TIL that "Cracklin Rosie" is actually a bottle of wine. Neil Diamond got the idea for the song from an old folk story about an Indian tribe with more men than women. The guys who didn't have girls would spend time with the bottle.
0XoL TIL that when no trees were available, whalers would burn penguins to boil down whale blubber into oil.
XyNR TIL that a man flew three times on the Space Shuttle without being an astronaut. Charles Walker got turned down by NASA but found a space-related job at McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell Douglas paid NASA $40,000 per flight for Walker to operate its experiments on the shuttle as a payload specialist.