In 1951 Thelma Howard was hired as a maid for Walt & Lillian Disney. Walt would gift her shares of Disney stock every X-mas for the next 30 yrs. She died in 1994 that’s when it was discovered she still had all 192,000 shares valued at $9,000,000. It went to disadvantaged kids & her disabled […]
Orestes Lorenzo, a Cuban fighter…
Orestes Lorenzo, a Cuban fighter pilot, defected to the US. He flew to Florida in a MiG-23 and requested his family join him, when his family were banned from leaving Cuba he raised money to buy a plane. He then flew back to Cuba, landed on a highway an bought his family back himself.
All of UK’s pubs marked on Google maps.
Romanian sewer workers accidentally…
Romanian sewer workers accidentally discovered a cave which was sealed for 5.5 million years. Movile Cave is filled with evolutionary distinct exotic creatures (albino crabs, worms) which feed off sulfur-producing bacteria. Here are more details about the ecosystem and insects.
Before McDonald’s switched…
Before McDonald’s switched from cooking its fries in beef tallow to vegetable oil, the fries had more saturated beef fat than their hamburgers.
In the 1950s the US Government…
In the 1950s the US Government investigated a person named Robert Dorr because he kept writing to Boeing and asking for pictures of their planes. They discovered Dorr was a just teenager who loved planes, an “average and loyal American boy.” He grew up to be a diplomat, author, and TV pundit.
Henry “Box” Brown escaped slavery…
Henry “Box” Brown escaped slavery in the American south by mailing himself to freedom. He had friends pack him into a small box, and ship him as cargo from Richmond to Philadelphia. He survived, and went on to work as a magician.
In 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote…
In 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote a novel about an ocean liner sinking in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg. That is 14 years before the Titanic sunk in the same place and in the same way. And if this was not enough, the novel was titled: “The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility”. The […]
26 years before Titanic…
26 years before Titanic, William Thomas Stead wrote a story called “How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid Atlantic by a Survivor.” The title’s pretty descriptive, with the concern of the story being a lack of adequate safety precautions, specifically lifeboats. Stead himself would die on Titanic.
Parachuting beavers were a real thing in the US following World War 2
Idaho Department of Fish and Game officials struggling to manage a growing beaver population in the 1940s and 1950s struck on an unusual solution. The rangers took advantage of a surplus of parachutes following World War II to launch a program to trap and air drop beavers into the remote the Frank Church-River of No […]