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TIL that dried peas blown out of a pea shooter served as alarm clocks to workers in industrial Britain. It was so common that Dickens made reference to it in Great Expectations.

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6EWJW Today I learned humans have been sailing for 8,000 years, about 1500 years longer than we have been using wheels.
GAv0G TIL that in ancient Rome plebeians would leave the cities during the "secession of the plebeians." This left the elites to fend for themselves.
KYwb4 TIL that Santorio Santorio, an Italian Professor, Physician, qnd Physiologist weighed everything he consumed and excreted over a period of 30yrs in the study of Insensible Perspiration or what we know today as metabolism.
v1Ax4 TIL astronomer Harlow Shapley firmly believed that there was only one galaxy in the universe but when he was presented with an evidence that disproved his view, he said "it destroyed his universe." Then he completely changed his view and devoted his subsequent career in mapping 76,000 galaxies.
WkRdA TIL that there is a replica of ark of covenant in Ethiopia at Saint George in Lalibela.