- In the War of 1812, the 93rd Highlanders regiment were halted within the range of the enemy. The commanding officer was killed and with no orders to advance or retreat, the column held fast and took concentrated American fire. This continued until another general ordered their withdrawal. – Source
- Henry Moseley, the scientist that pioneered the concept of the atomic number, volunteered for combat duty in World War I, and was killed by a Turkish sniper. As a result of his death, scientists were later prevented from enlisting in the military. – Source
- The Harvard University library collection has four books bound in human skin. – Source
- In 1957, 10 Sydney University students dressed as pirates boarded the aircraft carrier USS Bennington, reached the bridge, and announced over the PA that they had captured the ship. – Source
- There is an “Avocado of the Month Club” dedicated to California-grown avocados that will send you a box of freshly picked avocados every month throughout your subscription, whose contents vary from season to season. – Source
- The Lobsters we eat are generally really young and thus only a fraction of the size they grow to be in the wild. Older/Larger Lobsters are thought to be less tasty and are a species that mates more prolifically with each year, making killing a 100+ yo behemoth a conservation issue. – Source
- Flocks of native parakeets used to live in the U.S. as far north as Wisconsin. – Source
- When chess player Bobby Fischer beat soviet grandmaster Taimanov, Taimanov was thrown off the USSR team, forbidden to travel, banned from writing articles, and deprived of his monthly stipend. It virtually ended his career. – Source
- The “Pinky Promise” originally indicated that the person who breaks the promise, must cut off their pinky finger. – Source
- New Jersey has more engineers and scientists per square mile than anywhere else in the world. – Source
- Greg Packer is man whose full-time hobby is giving man-on-the-street interviews so he’ll be quoted in major publications. He’s so successful that Associated Press has banned their reporters from talking to him for stories. – Source
- The first foreigner to become a samurai was an African slave. – Source
- A Japanese submarine shelled California during WWII and the commander directed his gun to fire at a spot where he had an embarrassing fall before the war. – Source
- Every winter at a research station in the South Pole, 50 people are left totally isolated for 8 months. An annual tradition for the personnel is the back to back watching of 3 “The Thing” films after the last plane has left for the winter. – Source
- The Republic of Texas had its own embassy-like building in London. When it joined the rest of the United States in 1845, the officials skipped town without paying their rent. – Source
- The African continent had a native species of the bear “The Atlas Bear” which suffered great population’s declines due to the Roman empire’s demand for animals for gladiatorial events. The animal was hunted to extinction by the 1870s. – Source
- The company behind ITT Tech was once one of the biggest conglomerates on Earth. They grossed $8 Billion in 1970, were heavily involved in the Brazilian and Chilean coupes, and were recently fined $100 Million for violations of the Arms Export Control Act. – Source
- Because of the number of low-hanging power lines in San Francisco, the city’s fire department still uses handmade wooden ladders, made by on-staff master ladder makers. – Source
- An Australian guy named Bill Morgan was declared dead for 14 minutes and lived unscathed. To celebrate his survival, he bought a scratch card and won a $27,000 car. The news reporter asked him to reenact the scratch card moment to capture it on camera, so he bought another card and won a $250,000 jackpot in it. – Source
- The muscle that causes a rattlesnake to rattle fires 50 times a second for up to 3 hours or 520,000 rattles without stopping – Source
- There is only one wild monkey population in Europe and it’s growing – Barbary macaques of Gibraltar. – Source
- America already had a transcontinental highway by 1913, The Lincoln Highway, that ran from Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. – Source
- In China, a building is constructed with embedded wind turbines to provide its own power. – Source
- Hydraulic pressure resonance suppressors used in airplanes were developed by Bill Nye. – Source
- After large animals went extinct, such as the mammoth, avocados had no method of seed dispersal, which would have led to their extinction without early human farmers. – Source
- A single bat can eat 2,000 mosquitoes in one night. – Source
- 11/11, a Chinese holiday also known as “Single’s Day” and invented in the early 90s as a sort of opposition to Valentine’s Day, has become the “largest online shopping day in the world”. – Source
- When American troops were asking ‘American’ trivial questions to flush out German infiltrators in WWII, American brigadier general Bruce Clarke was held at gunpoint for five hours after he said the Chicago Cubs were in the American League. – Source
- During WW2 Peru deported its entire Japanese ethnic population to the US to live in the Camps. – Source
- Pope Paul VI spent the night of July 20 and 21 in 1969 watching the moon through a telescope of the Vatican Observatory during the first moon landing. Afterward, he praised the achievement by writing at length about the event. – Source
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