l7ePG TIL that snowballs helped extinguish a train fire. After a collision in January 1882, rescuers ran out of water. They formed giant snowballs and rolled them onto the burning cars to extinguish the flames. Among the dead was Webster Wagner, crushed between two sleepings cars his company had built.
8eKQL TIL that Bernie Madoff was treated as a hero in prison. The swindler wrote in a letter to family, "I am quite the celebrity, and am treated like a Mafia don. I can't walk anywhere without someone shouting their greetings and encouragement, to keep my spirit up".
P1WxJ TIL in 1969, on Christmas Eve, the president of Equatorial Guinea Francisco Macias Nguema had 150 suspected dissidents executed in the national football stadium in Malabo with the executioners dressed as Santa Claus, while the amplifiers played Mary Hopkin's song "Those Were the Days".
epWDE TIL that when Blake Lively was offered a role on CW show 'Gossip Girl', she only agreed after being told that she could go to college part-time. Lively later said "This is advice to anyone: when they say, 'We promise, but we can't put it in writing,' there's a reason they can't put it in writing".
VBVwm TIL Emmy-winning actors Bonnie Bartlett Daniels and William Daniels, married for 72 years, initially had an open marriage.
X0P4P TIL that the U.S town of Point Roberts, Washington is actually located in Canada
OG9M4 TIL that there is a specific type for ink suitable for sublimation.
69oQ8 TIL Jim Davis' (aka the creator of the Garfield comic strip) first wife was allergic to cats
woAKP TIL that Gucci's iconic cane handles and use of materials like hemp and jute were thanks to the trade embargo placed on Italy by the League of Nations under Mussolini's rule. This was a way to circumvent the limited access to materials like leather.
R5wn4 TIL even when adjusted for inflation, the budgets of the three original Indiana Jones films combined is still less compared to 2023's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
W7exN TIL that Charles Hernu, the French defence minister who ordered the bombing of the Greenpeach ship 'Rainbow Warrior' in 1985, was a KGB agent.
9wKQM TIL about the Lost Apple Project, a nonprofit organization that searches abandoned farms in the Pacific Northwest to locate old apple varieties that have been thought to be lost or extinct. There were approximately 17k varieties of apples in the US, but only about 4.5k are known to exist today