› added 6 years ago

220

TIL in 1954, Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev could not get funding to pursue a space program, so he planted a fake new-story claiming Russia was going to launch a satellite. The US responded that they were also going to launch one, so the Soviets then agreed to fund the program.

Read more bbc.co.uk

via reddit.com

N7Z1J TIL that Kurt Cobain sat next to Duff McKagan of Guns N' Roses in a flight to Seattle right after escaping from rehab just days before his suicide in 1994, despite the animosity between both bands McKagan said that Cobain was very pleasant and "Seemed happy".
grYly TIL that the infamous MACV-SOG’s first casualty was Larry Thorne, a Finnish-born officer who served as a captain in the Finnish Army and the Waffen-SS. After WWII, he moved to the US and joined the Army, and died in a helicopter crash on SOG’s first mission. He was buried in Arlington in 2003.
WkQKo TIL that since American baby names' popularity started to be recorded in 1880, only one girls' name has remained around the top 25: Elizabeth. It reached a high of #3 in 1887, low of #26 in 1948, and was the 17th most popular girls' name in 2017.
d86Aj TIL the dissections of Da Vinci began an artistic style called écorché (flayed in French), which graphically depicts the body without skin. This musculoskeletal blueprint for postures and gestures aided Renaissance realism. In the Enlightenment, mass-produced sculptures standardized medical studies
pY9d8 TIL William Shatner and Adam West starred in a failed pilot called "Alexander the Great" which West called "one of the worst scripts I have ever read and it was one of the worst things I've ever done."