W7eEN TIL about Major Money, who was born in Montreal weeks before Canada, moved with his family to England as an infant, fought in the Boer War and WW I, and returned to Canada to operate a hotel on Vancouver Island, where he hosted, among others, Bob Hope, Errol Flynn and Shirley Temple.
9wKkM TIL Thomas Cromwell led the persecution of Anne Boleyn based on a prophecy of "secret treason" against Henry VIII by "children of unbelief." Anne opposed Cromwell's harder line on the church but when a priest close to her attacked Cromwell in a sermon Cromwell became convinced the prophecy was true.
nW87o TIL that Fallout began life as an official adaptation of the GURPS table-top RPG system. They fell out over the amount of violence in the game, and GURPS' publisher withdrew the license, but it remained a huge influence on the skill system.
4koEg TIL that in 1986, a French woman invested several months of her time to gain the necessary qualifications to operate a helicopter. She then proceeded to rent one, fly it over a prison, and successfully extract her husband, a convicted bank robber, from the prison's roof.
x6Ae5 TIL That Amelia Earhart had a copilot when she disappeared, his name was Fred Noonan.
epWB6 TIL that until 1976, the US Army shared responsibility with the Marines for transporting the President by helicopter. When crewed by their personnel, the aircraft was known as "Army One".
VBVk0 TIL that behind Pluto there is a dwarf planet that is 27% bigger than Pluto, and we didn't know about it until 2005
X0POk TIL from 1971 to the 2000s, the MIT Blackjack Team, a team of students and alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and other colleges, beat casinos at blackjack worldwide through card counting and other methods
OG9Va TIL that despite being 69 years old at the time and a civilian John L. Burns fought for the Union at the battle of Battle of Gettysburg.
69oeQ TIL Jonas Salk, Who Invented the Polio Vaccine, Could Have Been the Richest Person in the World If He Had Patented It, but He Chose to Give It Away for Free
R5wMa TIL George III was the first British monarch to study the sciences as part of his education
woAYY TIL there's a war called "the War of Jenkin's Ear". A war in the 1700s triggered by the alleged cutting off of a Mr Jenkin's ear off the coast of Florida