› added 11 months ago

28

TIL in 1900 William Schmidt, a gold miner, began hand-digging a half-mile tunnel in the Mojave Desert to transport ore for processing. After 20 years the ore could easily be transported on a new road, but Schmidt spent another two decades years finishing the tunnel, which was never used.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

NDVQ TIL of French diplomat and spy to England a Russia Chevalier d'Éon. Once retired, he revealed that he had actually been a woman. She was henceforth made to wear gender appropriate clothing for the rest of her life. When she died, they found out she was actually a man. He was double crossdressing.
7weP TIL that American cheese is not technically cheese, but instead a processed Frankenstein of other cheeses and cheese products.
QJ8Kp TIL whenever Abraham Lincoln felt the urge to tell someone off, he would compose a “hot letter.” He’d pile all of his anger into a note, “put it aside until his emotions cooled down,” Doris Kearns Goodwin once explained on NPR, “and then write: ‘Never sent. Never signed.’
4k9ZJ TIL the fig is actually an inverted flower that needs a specific kind of wasp to pollinate.
WkJa4 TIL that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government was worried Japan would invade Hawaii and seize all the U.S. currency there. As a precaution, the U.S. burned $200 million in cash circulating on the islands, and replaced them with freshly printed bills with “Hawaii” stamped on them.