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TIL: Fordlandia, a small town built by Henry Ford in the middle of the Amazon jungle meant to resemble Northern Michigan of the 1930s. It was a failed state meant to produce enough rubber for his growing car production.

by whatilearned May 12, 2022, 10:46 pm

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TIL the name “rubber” was coined by scientist Joseph Priestly when he noticed it would rub pencil marks off paper.

by whatilearned April 23, 2022, 1:22 pm

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TIL John Paul Scott is the only person to have escaped the infamous Alcatraz Penitentiary by fashioning water wings from rubber gloves. Scott made it to the San Francisco shore but suffered from hypothermia and exhaustion, and he was recaptured by military police the following morning.

by whatilearned March 14, 2022, 9:09 pm

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TIL The Rubber Room is a teacher jail in NY State where bad teachers who can’t be fired are sent to sit, do nothing, and still get paid.

by whatilearned February 9, 2022, 12:14 am

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I asked my physician why he hits people on the knee with that little rubber headed hammer

by cringeyjokesman February 3, 2022, 2:54 pm

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TIL that when King Leopold II of Belgium personally acquired the “Congo Free State” in 1885, it was 76 times the size of Belgium. He claimed the land at the 1884-1885 Berlin conference promising to improve the lives of the locals but ended up enslaving them to gather ivory and natural rubber.

by whatilearned October 23, 2021, 5:31 pm

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TIL about Rubber Duck debugging, a name for solving a problem by trying to explain it to someone else

by whatilearned October 20, 2021, 6:38 pm

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TIL of “scent branding” and how businesses pump custom scents into their buildings. Nike’s signature scent was reportedly inspired by the smell of a rubber basketball sneaker as it scrapes across the court and a soccer cleat in grass and dirt.

by whatilearned October 19, 2021, 1:31 pm

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TIL during WW2, the West African nation Liberia became of huge strategic importance to Allied forces. Liberia was the most significant source of rubber available to Allies – a key component of military vehicles.The fall of East Asian countries to the Axis had drastically reduced the global supply.

by whatilearned August 27, 2021, 5:00 pm

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TIL, in 1839, Charles Goodyear accidentally created Vulcanized Rubber when he dropped some rubber on a hot stove with sulfur, hardening it, making it much more durable.

by whatilearned August 13, 2021, 5:35 pm

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TIL that Scotchgard was discovered by accident. Patsy Sherman, a chemist at 3M, dropped a chemical substance on one of her shoes while she was trying to develop a rubber material that could stand up to jet fuel. Later, when her shoes got dirty, she noticed that one spot stayed clean

by whatilearned August 10, 2021, 10:23 pm

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I’ve designed an aeroplane made entirely from rubber, so if it crashed, it would bounce

by cringeyjokesman August 4, 2021, 8:25 am

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