TIL Harald Wartooth defeated all the rival Swedish & Danish kings at 15 years old. There was no king in Denmark or Sweden that did not pay him tribute. He later subjugated England and had them pay him tribute.
TIL Douglas Gene Williams, an American critic of polygraph tests, was convicted after becoming a target of a federal sting operation to teach agents how to conceal crime
TIL that the first non-stop UK to Canada flights were RAF Canberras carrying BBC recordings of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, so that Canadians were able to watch it the same day it happened.
TIL in 1879 it was estimated the Oxford English Dictionary to take 10 years for completion, but in five years they'd only reached the word "Ant". After crowdsourcing readers to help it was completed 44 years later. The publishers now estimate it would take a single person 120 years to just type it.