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TIL Sam Houston was left for dead by army surgeons during battle led by Andrew Jackson against Creek Indians. Not only did Houston survive, but years later he got into a fistfight with a Congressman who held a gun to Houston’s chest, pulled the trigger and misfired. Houston was left unharmed.

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nWn19 TIL that in WWI, the Swiss built extensive bunkers and observation posts at "Kilometre Zero", where the Western Front's trenches ended right at their border. In 1914, fighting between French and German forces took place only metres away from neutral Swiss soil and observers.
4W7w TIL that the founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, is also the founder of Chuck E Cheese.
AD5rg TIL the setting of the Chronicles of Narnia was based on a real Italian town now called Narni; C.S. Lewis got the idea for the place name after looking at an early 20th century atlas
W6b4 TIL In the early 1970s, a schoolteacher England assigned a class science project in which his students were to find out the blood types of their parents to deduce their own blood types. Instead, 30 per cent of the students discovered their dads were not their biological fathers.
Wk8Jo TIL automaker AMC and pants-maker Levi's collaborated on a 1974 Gremlin. The Gremlin's upholstery was made from synthetic materials that looked like real denim (cotton is too flammable for use in car interiors), complete with stitching, Levi's tags, and copper rivets.