› added 2 years ago

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TIL the Carrington Event was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, creating an Aurora so bright people in northern America could read a newspaper by the aurora's light, and damaging telecommunications equipment around the world

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D1KQe TIL about the Frenchman Philippe Petit. In 1971 he was 45 minutes on a wire that was stretched between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. At one point, he even lay down on the wire.
b9eA4 TIL that in trial accusing Judas Priest of subliminal messages in their songs that made two young men commit suicide, the band argued that if you play speech backwards some of it will seem to make sense, so they played their album backwards and heard ‘Give me a peppermint’ and ‘Help me keep a job’
xgPw TIL Winston Churchill, along with many of the Royal Navy’s highest ranking men, came very close to death after the ship they were on was fired at by a U-boat with 3 torpedoes. All three struck the hull of the ship, but all failed to explode.
VMKOk TIL after suffering a massive heart attack and thought to be on his death bed, an inmate in Nashville confessed to a decade-old murder as way to clear his conscious before he died. Instead, he made a full recovery. He was then indicted for murder, and later convicted
m1bdx TIL that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, ages 15 and 16 respectively, were paid a combined total of $4000 in royalties by record promoter Sid Prosen for their first song, a 1959 original that hit #49 on the charts and sold 100,000 copies. Prosen promoted the song in part by bribing DJs to play it.