10 Things You’ve Never Known Until Now

 

January 13, 2015Brandon

Unlike the countless facts you’ve read on plenty of other sites, you’ve probably never heard of these random ones. If you enjoy them, be sure to share with your friends!

1. In 1201, Genghis Khan was shot in the neck during a battle, and asked the defeated army who had shot “his horse”, trying to downplay the injury. The archer voluntarily confessed to shooting Genghis Khan and refused to beg for mercy, so the Khan spared him, turning him into a great general.
2. An indoor vegetable factory in Japan produces up to 10,000 heads of lettuce per day and uses just 1% of the amount of water needed for outdoor fields.
3.  One of the Popes was a 100% accident. In the Middle Ages, cardinals would often vote for a random candidate on the first papal ballot in order to see how the other cardinals were leaning, but in 1334 this backfired when they all voted for the same person: the very surprised Pope Benedict XII.
4. The Pentagon is developing a “combat chewing gum” to help soldiers maintain dental hygiene in the field. It is expected to save the Army $100 million per year in dental services.
5. Utah has been giving free homes to homeless people since 2005 which since then made it more cost efficient to help the homeless and cut the chronic homelessness in Utah by 74%.
6. Polish doctor Eugene Lazowski saved 8,000 Jews during the Holocaust by injecting dead typhus cells into them, allowing them to test positive for typhus despite being healthy. Germans were afraid of the highly contagious disease and refused to deport them to concentration camps.
7. Bob Ross never received any money for his show, The Joy of Painting. His company, Bob Ross Inc., sold art supplies, how-to videos, and he gave art lessons.
8. David Trang, the creator of “Sriracha” named his company “Huy Fong Foods” in honor of the ship that helped him escape Vietnam in 1978.
9. Human fingers can feel objects as small as 13 nanometers. “This means that, if your finger was the size of the Earth, you could feel the difference between houses from cars.”
10. Play-Doh was originally used to clean wallpaper. In the 1930s, people burned coal to heat their homes, and rolled the dough across the walls to lift up the soot. The product became obsolete when vinyl wallpaper and new heating methods evolved, so they sold it as a toy.