› added 8 months ago

26

TIL as the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto mounted, the inhabitants knew they would not survive. A team of historians, writers, rabbis, and social workers created a secret cache of documents to record their way of life. 2/3 of the cache survived the war

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

6EwKW TIL: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, designed by the “Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons,” so isolated prisoners that many went insane. (The 1829 castle-like complex did have better comforts than period prisons --like dependable heat. Shut: 1971, ruin-park since '94.)
WkDw4 TIL about "The Cube", an all-plastic, fan-less, button-less computer revealed by Apple on July 19th, 2000. Steve Job's focus on aesthetics resulted in a computer that looked good but that consumers couldn't afford, and it was retracted less than a year later.
wLoao TIL: Mercury was required for felting fabrics, especially hats. Hatters in the 1800’s had chronic mercury toxicity that caused mental instability thus dubbing the term “mad hatters disease” or “mad as a hatter”- and was the primary plight that Louis Carroll developed the mad hatter character around.
ap4J TIL that Bose, known for its audio equipment, makes suspension that can make a car jump over obstacles
N7oy6 TIL of Griselda Balco, Colombian drug lord of the Medellín Cartel and pioneer in the Miami cocaine drug trade and underworld during the 1980s through the early 2000s. It has been estimated that she was responsible for up to 2000 murders while transporting cocaine. She was shot and killed in 2012.