› added 12 years ago

75

TIL Jacklyn H. Lucas, who joined the Marines when he was 14, stormed Iwo Jima when he was 17, and is one of the few people in the world to have fallen on not one, but two grenades to save comrades, and survive.

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4XOAb TIL Sejong the Great (King of Korea), invented the Korean alphabet. While Korean was spoken, it used the Chinese alphabet which Koreans found confusing. This led to high illiteracy. King Sejong decided a new alphabet would fix the issue, so he invented one.
m1XDY TIL DST was conceptualized by Ben Franklin in a satire piece about saving money on candles, proposed in the 1890's by and entomologist wanting more daylight to bug-hunt, implimented in WWI as an energy saving measure, and is now used to provide workers with more daylight.
YZGZ TIL that when CS Lewis went to an elite English boarding school in 1913, he found that homosexual relationships among students were “not [frowned upon as seriously as] wearing one’s coat unbuttoned.”
0wRYN TIL In the Rolling Stones’ hit gimme shelter, Merry Clayton sung so forcefully you can hear her voice crack and Mick go ‘Woo!’ (3.02) Shortly after leaving the studio, Merry had a miscarriage and couldn’t listen to the song for years
p8RGN TIL that in an attempt to make his spy novels feel more authentic, author John Le Carré is credited with coining a number of terms for his fictional intelligence agency (terms like mole, honey trap, pavement artist, asset babysitter) which have become common terms used in real intelligence agencies.