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TIL of Père Fouettard, the antithesis of Santa Claus (St. Nicholas) who would accompany Santa and dispense coal and beating to bad children while Santa gave presents to the good ones.

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WkVnL TIL the word mile originates from the measurement of one thousand paces of a Roman soldier (mille passus)
VBQPZ TIL an MIT professor evaluated Nikola Tesla’s “death ray” technology for the FBI. His lab director would later say “over a period of three decades, he would be approached by people of all sorts because he could make megavolt beams of ions and electrons – death rays.”
awBdJ TIL that Cambridge University was founded in 1221 by professors from Oxford who had been run out of town by hostile townspeople
yVQnw TIL in 1925 William Randolph Hearst purchased the cloisters of a Spanish monastery, had it dismantled brick by brick, and shipped it all to the US. The pieces sat in a Brooklyn, NY warehouse for 26 years until two entrepreneurs bought them and rebuilt the structure in North Miami, FL.
aD8M TIL that in 1990, Mobil Oil bought a BMW 3 series to test their new synthetic oil on. They drove it a million miles on a treadmill for four years.