› added 12 years ago

91

TIL that on August 15, 1943, American troops invaded an empty island, losing more than 200 soldiers.

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yZ5J TIL that when Ceausescu made abortion and contraception illegal in Romania in 1967, he created a baby boom whose members eventually became those most likely responsible for his fall from power and execution in 1989.
Z87DB TIL that electric cars are so quiet, they’re required by law to produce artificial noise that mimics conventional engines to avoid pedestrians from getting hurt.
44PR TIL that there’s an underground city beneath Beijing that covers 85 square kilometres. Built in the 70s in preparation for nuclear war it’s described as being “dark, damp, and genuinely eerie”
W45X TIL that some Cuban cigar factories employed a “Lector” who would read newspapers, political treatises and classical literature aloud to help break the monotony of the cigar-rollers’ work, thus even illiterate cigar-rollers would be well-informed and familiar with great literature.
wVW1 TIL A college student put a fake quote on Wikipedia soon after the death of the famous composer Maurice Jarre, and several journals put the fake quote in their articles about Maurice Jarre’s death. It went unnoticed until he said something about it.